"Trowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the value or valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... were two motor rugs, two holland coats, one white, one brown. There were two sets of motor goggles. There was a package of revolver cartridges, from which six had been extracted, a leather revolver holster, a small garden trowel, and one or two ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... the brick walk leading to the stables; but Holmes's long legs were too much for them, and in a trice he had captured Louis and disarmed him, while Ivan hid behind a tree. Blumenroth, the gardener, digging up a flower-bed with a trowel nearby, put down his implement, and stared ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... was at the top of his house, with a high north window and roughly plastered walls of uncolored sand, left as Bertrand himself had put the plaster on, with his trowel marks over the surface as they happened to come, and the angles and projections thereof ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... fire that swept her, On the first evening in April, Gathers in the northwest corner; And this row of ancient houses, Numbered with the things of yore, Soon will rise again to greet us, Soon resound with plane and trowel. All the city's luckless harbors Shall revive with added grandeur;[11] Now her handsome jail and court-house, Her new halls and spacious churches, Her improved suburban dwellings, And her central, model buildings, All betray the stride of fortune, All betray the march of knowledge; And the crumbling ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... behind a grassy point. There he stayed, now and then striking the water with his tail as a signal that the danger was not yet over. It isn't every animal that can use his caudal appendage as a stool, as a rudder, as a third hind leg, as a trowel for smoothing the floor of his house, and as a ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... bedding plants. Mr. Brown had to get down on his hands and knees, with gardener's shears, to clip the turfed borders and banks, and take a sickle to the hummocks. Thus he could dig out a root of dandelion with the trowel kept ever in his belt, consider the spreading crocuses and valley lilies, whether to spare them, give a country violet its blossoming time, and leave a screening burdock undisturbed until fledglings were out of their nests in ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... appears, but in its place the rude scratching of a palm-branch upon the rock or the plaster. It was the sign of victory, and he who lay within had conquered. The great rudeness in the drawing of the palm, often as if, while the mortar was still wet, the mason had made the lines upon it with his trowel, is a striking indication of the state of feeling at the time when the grave was made. There was no pomp or parade; possibly the burial of him or of her who had died for the faith was in secret; those who carried the corpse of their beloved to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... a little afraid of the responsibility of treasure- trove, but he was overruled by a chorus of eager voices, and dispossessed of the trowel, which he had brought to dig up some down- gentians for the garden. While Norman set to work as pioneer, some skipped about in wild ecstasy, and Ethel knelt down ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent tavern while the carcases were yet unfinished. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... window-boxes. Flowers closely resemble Odontoglossum. Much in demand for Mayfair mansions. Dainty electro-plated trowel given away with every order ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... that now towers aloft in my friend's library. It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious. Southey lent it, when he possessed the magnifico, to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged. The editor of this magazine would hardly thank me, if I filled ten ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... purposely exaggerated, to which the foreigner could reasonably object. The foreigner felt perhaps slightly uncomfortable when the same statesman, departing for a moment from his usual objective standpoint, spoke of the German "traversing the world with a sword in one hand and a spade and trowel in the other"; but otherwise no act of Germany's world-policy need have inspired alarm, or need inspire alarm at the present time, in sensible foreign minds. The rapidity of its action probably helped ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... to deposit his trowel of cement on the surface of the lower stone, to seal it to the stone held suspended by the crane when that ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... study at the University of Cambridge. In his seventeenth or eighteenth year, probably from a want of means, he had to give up the career of learning, in order to follow the simple calling of his stepfather. It may be easily understood that Ben was little pleased with the use of the trowel; he fled to the Netherlands, became a soldier, and took part in a campaign. After a year, the youthful adventurer, then only nineteen years old, came back to London. He talks of a heroic deed; but the truthfulness of his account may well be doubted. He pretends having killed an enemy, in the face ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... from the magazine, delighted with what they had found, and loaded with work-tools. Those of the masons,—the chisel, the short hammer, and the trowel, were not to be found, and rarely are taken out to sea; but they had collected a great number of carpenters' tools,—saws, planes, rules, &c. And now that Fritz was a smith, he had no difficulty in making any tool he wanted. He was loaded ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... here to see if I couldn't find some clams," added Laud, as he held up a clam-digger he carried in his hand—a kind of trowel fixed ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... wasn't a trick in brick or stone That this young man hadn't seen or known; Nor there wasn't a tool from trowel to maul But this young man could use 'em all! Then up and spoke the plumbyers bold, Which was laying the pipes for the hot and cold: 'Since you with us have made so free, Will you kindly say ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... charcoal, and one fifth of quicklime, well mixed together, and infused in boiling pitch or tar, will also form a useful cement for this purpose. It requires to be of the consistence of thin mortar, and applied hot with a trowel. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... abounded, gold poured from the most distant dioceses, a rain of gold destined to increase and never end. Then came his happy years: he was to be met among the workmen at all hours, instilling activity into them like the jovial, good-natured fellow he was, constantly on the point of taking a pick or trowel in hand himself, such was his eagerness to behold the realisation of his dream. But days of trial were in store for him: he fell ill, and lay in danger of death on the fourth of April, 1864, when the first procession started from his parish church to the Grotto, a procession ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the beaver, thus to make a door by which his enemy, the wolverene, could easily get in and destroy him. The houses were all plastered over with mud, which, by the flapping of the tails and the constant paddling of the broad web-feet, had become as smooth as if the mud had been laid on with a trowel. We knew that they were also plastered inside, so as to render them ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... blue plush frame, Persis passed through the house to the woodshed, found a trowel among the garden tools, and then made her way into the night. The sky was overcast, hiding the stars, but the flitting fire-flies outlined strange constellations against the velvety darkness. Persis groped her ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... glittering and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff, and legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble part of laborers looking for a job; that they should carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing a pick and, at the day's end, be glad of a humble supper and a night's rest; that they should work, in short, as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past; that there should be about ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... used when the furnace needed repairing. He raised one of the slabs with difficulty, turned it over, propped it with a billet of beech wood, and began to scoop out a hole in the hard earth, using a mason's trowel. Beroviero watched him, holding the box ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... took with her what has been her inalienable possession ever since and will be, "Till death us do part." My courtship was rather "at long range;" for Newark, Ohio, was several hundred miles away, and I have always found that a man who would build up a strong church must be constantly at it, trowel in hand. On the 17th of March, 1853, the venerable Dr. Wylie conducted for us a very simple and solemn service of holy wedlock, closing with his fatherly benediction, one of the best acts of his long and useful life. The invalid mother of my bride (for Colonel Mathiot ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... sophists and declaimers, he thought very much as old Cato did about them. The Greeks were a very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much of their calamus or stylus, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but subvert received principles without substituting any others? And then they were so likely to take some odd turn themselves; ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... throughout his varied experience of life, he had found flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners of Lord Beaconsfield's famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate woman, "plain as a pike-staff," who had become his benefactress, in consequence of a discreet allusion to the "power of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... great discoverer in the fore-ground on bended knees with a trowel in his hand, laying the corner-stone. On the right, sits an ideal female figure, representing Mother Church, fostering a little Indian child, and pointing with uplifted hand to the cross, the emblem of man's salvation. Crouching Indians are at her feet, listening with astonishment to ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... to goodness!" laughed Aunt Jane, as she laid down her trowel and pushed back her calico sunbonnet, "if I never heard anything funny again in this world, I could keep on laughin' till I died jest over things I ricollect. The trouble is there ain't always anybody around to laugh with me. Sam Amos ain't nothin' but a name to you, child, but to me he's ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... visitor, for the Egyptians might almost have been said to make a point of doing everything differently from other nation's. The baker, seen at the kneading-trough inside his shop, worked the dough with his foot; on the other hand, the mason used no trowel in applying his mortar, and the poorer classes scraped up handfuls of mud mixed with dung when they had occasion to repair the walls of their hovels. In Greece, even the very poorest retired to their houses and ate with closed doors; the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... fin where should be paw, And beaver-trowel tail, And snout of beast equip'd with teeth ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like the Colonial or "barn" pointing already referred to,—the wide open joints being filled with mortar brought well to the surface of the stones and smoothed off by the flat of the trowel with little regard to definiteness of line, after which about one-fourth of the width of the pointing is cut sharply away at the bottom so as to leave a sloping weathered edge considerably below the center of the joint. This is sometimes left as cut, in order to preserve ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... there any other greater, more satisfying, more majestic thought of life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... sample, taken out on a wooden trowel, consists of distinct grains of soap and a liquid portion, which will easily separate, sufficient salt or brine has been added; the boiling is stopped and the spent lye allowed to settle out, whilst the soap remains on the surface as a ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... cause a broil, Unless 'tis built on British soil! And there, too, Joseph Coombs was found, With solemn step his march around Among the patients, pacing slowly— Disciple of the meek and lowly, Who afterwards oft turned the key On many a goodly company. In that strong work of mason's trowel, Ruled now by Alexander Powell. And William Addison, no more— As trim a soldier as e'er wore The uniform, or bravely bore His head erect, with step as light As wings that touch the air in flight. Well had he won and kept from harm The honor'd ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... Splay, who would have matched you with some dull, tiresome squire accustomed to sleep over his port after dinner, the sort of man you are drawing so brilliantly in your wonderful book." A movement of impatience on Joan's part perplexed him. Authors! You can generally lay your praise on with a trowel. What in the world was the matter with Joan? He hurried on. "I understood that I was making enemies. I understood, too, why I was no longer invited to Rackham Park. I was a foreigner. I would as soon visit a picture gallery as shoot a pheasant. I would as soon appreciate ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... in astonishment to make sure that it really was Mr. Skillcorn proceeding along the garden path in that quarter, and turning jumped up and dropped her trowel and fork, to have her hands otherwise occupied. Mr. Skillcorn walked off leisurely towards the potato ground, singing to himself in a kind of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... expanse, that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restful mechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying patterns, with his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master, the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing, and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same. But if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to differ, there ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... detachment, often found among superior minds, which we honour for its disinterestedness, even while we lament its impotence in result. The track in which he moved, the instruments that he employed, were the track and the instruments, the sword and the trowel, of political action; and what is called the Gladstonian era ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... afternoon Uncle William mounted the roof again. His face, under its vast calm, wore a look of resolve. He looked thoughtfully down the chimney hole. Then he sat down on the platform and took up his trowel. He balanced it on his palm and looked at the pile of bricks. His gaze wandered to the sky. It swept the bay and came back across the moors. A look of soft happiness filled it; the thin edges of resolve melted before it. "Best kind of weather," murmured Uncle William, "best kind—" His eye fell on ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... frequently. This is demonstrated by the practice of the most successful cultivators. In Zilla, N. Mooradabad, in April, about six weeks after planting, the earth on each side of the cane-rows is loosened by a sharp-pointed hoe, shaped somewhat like a bricklayer's trowel. This is repeated six times before the field is laid out in beds and channels for irrigation. There, likewise, if the season is unusually dry, the fields in the low ground are watered in May and June. This supposes there are either nullahs, or ancient ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... matchsafe. She began to utter long cries and lamentations like a hen in distress, raising her hands to heaven. All at once they heard some one rushing up the stairs. It was the butler, in his shirt-sleeves and his enormous apron of ticking, still carrying his trowel in his hand. He was bewildered, his eyes protruding, while all about him he spread the smell of fresh earth. At ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... but Rosalie had never found money in a bank though she had looked; yet banks—of all extraordinary places—were where men chose to put their money! Mysterious men! And Harold could find these banks and find this money though he never took a trowel or a spade and was always shiningly clean with a very high collar and very ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... should have seen how eagerly the ducks carried bricks. To complete the tale, the swallows came flying to the work, their beaks full of mortar and their trowel on their back, just the way ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... said, sharply, rising from her knees and shaking her trowel at the intruder. "I don't want no apples to-day, an' I don't care how cheap ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... picture she was amidst this quietude, - she who had lived through the Reign of Terror: her mob cap, garden apron, and big gloves; a trowel in one hand, a watering-pot in the other; potting and unpotting; so busy, seemingly so happy. She loved to have me with her, and let me do the watering. What a pleasure that was! The scores of little jets from the perforated rose, the gushing sound, the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... during the month of May last, this solitude and silence were completely destroyed, by thousands of persons plying every kind of instrument upon them, from the ponderous crowbar and pickaxe, to the easily-wielded trowel and hammer, in search of gold, which they believed to be hidden in their recesses. The information on which they acted seemed to them to come from an authentic source, and to be confirmed by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... polecats, ichneumons, and all such vermin, a design exhibiting either wonderful instinct or sagacity, is carried into execution by the male. As soon as his mate has squatted upon her eggs, he goes to work at the masonic art; and using his great horned mandibles, first as a hod, and afterwards as a trowel, he walls up the entrance to the nest—leaving an aperture just large enough to be filled up by the beak of the female. The material employed by him for this purpose is a kind of agglutinated mud, which he procures from the neighbouring watercourse or quagmire, and somewhat ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... wearing soft, round, visorless caps, were removing the debris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their officers might enjoy immunity from rain and wind and ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... his mother, 1610." Four medals, bearing the same inscription, two of gold, and two of silver gilt, having been placed at the corners of the stone, which was then lowered, the Due de Sully presented the silver trowel, while two of the attendant nobles alternately offered the hammer and the silver trough ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... building of an empire there are two processes—the building up, and the tearing down. The plow is no less essential than the trowel. The period after Boris had been for Russia the period of the wholesome plow. The harvest was far off. But the name Romanoff was going to stand for another Russia, not like the old Russia of Kief, nor ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... be formed at 12-15 precisely, in the following order: Two Tylers, with drawn Swords. Visiting Brethren. The Lodges of the Province, according to their numbers, Juniors going first. The W. Masters of the Olive Union and Shakspeare Lodges, with Trowel and Gavel. ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... steep bank down to the water. Well, my young Lord was very keen about building a kind of steps there in the summer, and he and I settled the stones, and I was to cement 'em. By comes Mr. Frost, and finds faults, what I thought he'd no call to; so I flings down my trowel, and wouldn't go on for he! I was so mortal angry, I would not go back to the work; and I believe my Lord forgot it—and then he went back to college; and Frampton and Gervas, they put on me, and you know how 'twas I come away from Ormersfield. I was not going to say a word to one ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gave him the bricks and mortar, and a little trowel as well, and the little pig built himself a nice strong little house. As soon as it was finished the wolf came to call, just as he had done to the other little pigs, and said: "Little pig, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... idea. Helping himself to the shoulder-blade of some deceased hero, Harold, using it as a trowel, began to scoop away the soft sand upon which the stone chest stood. He scooped and scooped manfully, but he could not come to the ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... fire, please,' whispered Rogers, something between joy and sadness in his heart, 'for there are hills of leaves that I would burn up quickly—' but the man hurried on, tossing his trowel over the Guard's head, and nearly hitting another passenger who followed too close. This was the Woman of the Haystack, an enormous, spreading traveller who utterly refused to be hurried, and only squeezed through the door because Rogers, the Guard, and several ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... the same," one of them informed her; "so you are too! Everybody's looking." And they crowded round to examine the objects in her hand—a dirty earth-stained trowel and a fern. They knew she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously beautiful. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... Osmia is measuring; and her measure is her body. Has she quite done, this time? Oh dear no! Ten times, twenty times, at every moment, for the least particle of mortar which she lays, she repeats her mensuration, never being quite certain that her trowel is going just where ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of yours is a duffer," she said sharply, pointing a very earthy trowel at the unconscious figure of the gardener, who was busy in the middle distance digging potatoes. "A man," she continued, "who calls a plain, every-day squash a vegetable marrow isn't fit to run a well-ordered truck-patch; though it's no more than might be expected ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... the other chickens, and her dolls,—for Eyebright still played with dolls by fits and starts, and her grand plan for making "a cave" in the garden, in which to keep label-sticks and bits of string and her cherished trowel. ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a traveller may occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country. The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches, so as to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... couldn't remember why I was placed in that chair, and Ardelia couldn't remember. So it occurred to me that I had forgotten my trowel," he said. He put the trowel, absent-mindedly, in the tea basket, and took the ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... machine, a cargo of wooden-ware, a shop full of knick-knacks, an age of inventions. Boys need not be kept back to the hand-craft of the knife. For in-doors there are the type case and printing press, the paint box, the tool box, the lathe; and for out doors, the trowel, the spade, the grafting knife. It matters not how many of the minor arts the youth acquires. The more the merrier. Let each one gain the most he can in all such ways; for arts like these bring no harm in their train; quite otherwise, they lure good ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... the Humble bee in having no pollen-basket, showing that its larvae must feed on the food stored up by their host, as it does not itself collect it. The mandibles also are not, like those of Bombus, trowel-shaped for architectural purposes, but acutely triangular, and are probably not ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... fed her chickens, she went up to Kilmore to watch the workmen. She was there when the first spadeful of earth was thrown up, and as soon as the walls showed above the ground she began to ask the workmen how long it would take them to reach the windows, and if a workman put down his trowel and wandered from his work she would tell him it was God he was cheating; and later on, when the priest's money began to come to an end he could not pay the workmen full wages, she told them they were working for God's Own House, and ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... such as a compass, matches, a pocket filter, tobacco, a trowel, a bottle of brandy, and ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... large lumps; the other end is used as a shovel to throw up the dirt. When used in this fashion the wooden handle is laid aside, the pick end becomes a handle, and the intrenching-tool is used in the same manner as a trowel. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... new Rectory House at Foston was building, the Rector was wholly engrossed in the work. "I live," he wrote, "trowel in hand. My whole soul is filled up by lath and plaster." He laid the foundation-stone in June 1813, and took possession of the completed edifice in March 1814. "My house was considered the ugliest in the county, but all admitted that it was ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... you killed of 'em yesterday," he declared, pointing towards the Empty House with a bit of broken flower-pot, "or else it's the ones you killed last week, and who was always astealin' of my strorbriz." He looked very wise as he said this, and his wand of office—a dirty trowel—which he held in his ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... the act of helpin' herself to the jelly omelet, usin' a swell silver servin' shovel about half the size of a brick layer's trowel. She's so stirred up that she absentmindedly scoops up a double portion, and just as Bob springs his remark what does she do but up and let fly at him, right across the table. Maybe she'd have winged him too,—and served him right for saying what no gentleman should to a lady, ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... a brick from the pile, with his left hand, and he generally tossed the brick up a little way in the air, and it turned over before he caught it again, so that he saw all sides of it; and, with the flat trowel which he held in his right hand, he ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... out of the house with a garden hat tied over her white hair, and big garden gloves on her hands. At sight of the girl she uttered a joyful shriek, flung scissors and trowel and basket aside, and rushed forward. With catlike quickness the girl leaped to her feet and the two met and fell into each other's arms. I wished when I saw the little woman's arms close so about the girl, and the look that flashed into her face, that ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... the lower end of the pond, when, to my horror, I perceived a boy groping on the grass on all fours, apparently digging up the ground with a trowel. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... air of icy indifference, turning her back upon the soldier, and digging her trowel into a little heap of soil. "I do not take any interest in merchant ships, and do not want the letter." When she glanced round again she was just in time to see Sergeant Burt standing in the roadway with a lot of tiny pieces of ...
— Foster's Letter Of Marque - A Tale Of Old Sydney - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the best place to dump his hodful, he went to work. He opened his beak and, in the most matter-of-fact way, pushed out his lump of plaster with his tongue, on top of the nest wall. Then he braced his body firmly in the nest and began to use his trowel, which was his upper beak, pushing the fresh lump all smooth on the inside of ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258] but different from all these. Not possible will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... all our commercial catastrophes, stripped of those local and incidental circumstances which vary from time to time: over-issues of money,—speculative prosperity,—all the world getting rich in the most agreeable manner,—fairy palaces rising on all sides, without the sound of trowel or hammer; then,—the day of adjustment,—the rapid contraction of the currency,—all the world getting poor in the most drastic and disagreeable manner,—and those fairy palaces, which rose under our very eyelids over-night, vanishing, like the palace of Aladdin from the vision of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... wasp, oh, STANLEY! mark its nest of paper.—(it is said, on wasp's paper you are wont to write your thoughts on Ireland)—and resolutely seize a trowel! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... had acquired a fat bay horse and a double buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... affairs turns to the last market reports for guidance in his day's transactions; and all have used books, have studied literature. The hammer and the poem, the hoe and the dictionary, the engine and the encyclopedia, the trowel and the treatise on philosophy—these are tools. One and all, they are expressions of the life of the race. But they are not, for that reason, to be reverenced. They are proper for man's service, not man for theirs. Approach books, then, as you would a sewing machine, ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... and how smoothly it makes the marital wheels go round. I don't mean false, blatant, absurd flattery, such as men often bestow on us when desirous to please, not realising that compliments laid on with a trowel are an insult to one's intelligence. Nothing of that kind, of course, but delicate, subtle, loving flattery. An attitude of gentle admiration toward your Perseus, subdued a little possibly for public use, but none the less markedly appreciative, will not ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... teeth, tail, and webbed feet the beaver accomplishes much. The tail of a beaver is a useful and much-used appendage; it serves as a rudder, a stool, and a ramming or signal club. The beaver may use his tail for a trowel, but I have never seen him so use it. His four front teeth are excellent edge-tools for his logging and woodwork; his webbed feet are most useful in his deep-waterway transportation, and his hands in house-building and especially in dam-building. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... Laurier, Foster, Sir John Macdonald—each began as a poor man. Sifton began life as a penniless lawyer. Van Horne got his foot on the first rung of the ladder hustling cars for troops in the Civil War. MacKenzie of Canada Northern fame began with a trowel; Dan Mann with an ax in the lumber woods at a period when wages were a dollar and twenty-five cents a day; Laurier with a lawyer's parchment and not a thing else in the world. Foster, the wizard of finance, taught his first finance in a schoolroom. And so one might go on down ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... paper being off, Joe washed down the walls with water, and having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he mixed with a small trowel some cement on a small board and proceeded to stop up the cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling. After a while, feeling very tired, it occurred to him that he deserved a spell and a smoke for five minutes. He closed the door and placed a pair of steps against it. There were ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... corsets,' 'Petersham trousers,' 'Brummel cravats,' 'Osbaldistone ties,' and 'Exquisite crops,' should be only sketchily rendered in paint. Of course, Mr. Opie, who affected thorough John Bullism in art, who laid on his pigments steadily with a trowel, and produced portraits of ladies like washerwomen, and gentlemen liking Wapping publicans—of course, unsentimental, unfashionable Mr. Opie denounced the degeneracy of his competitor's style. 'Lawrence makes coxcombs of his sitters, and they ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... at the Reist farmhouse she found Amanda ready with basket and trowel for the lady-slipper hunt. Amanda had put on a simple white dress and green-and-white sun hat. She looked with bewilderment at the city girl's attire, but said nothing just then. They stopped long enough for Isabel to meet the mistress of ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... to make the most of it in a pecuniary point of view, 346 was encroached upon by three uncurtained beds, of most impoverished appearance,—while, exhibiting the ravages of time in divers fractures, the dingy walls and ceiling, retouched by the trowel in many places with a lighter shade of repairing material, bore no unapt resemblance to the Pye-bald Horse in Chiswell-street! Calculating on its utility and probable future use, the builder of the mansion had given to this room the appendage of a chimney, but evidently ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... financial allotments—to wrest from the soil of Jamestown the physical evidence of 17th-century life. The job is not yet complete. Only 24 out of 60 acres estimated to comprise "James Citty" have been explored; yet a significant amount of information has been revealed by trowel and whiskbroom and ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... I established myself at the Hotel l'Europe and with prospecting spade, botanical trowel and butterfly net, I sallied forth around the hills of Port Arthur. The first thing which struck me was the enormous number of Chinese and Chunshuses (bad Coolies) employed everywhere. I came to know that they were not all Chinese Coolies and that almost every tenth man was a disguised Japanese. ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... having compared them with the large, coarse, mindless pictures in—what may be called another annual—the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, then say, whether you do not prefer the distinct delicate touches of a well-directed burin, to the broad, trowel-like splashings of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... events, the money is not laid on with a trowel," she thought. And then she became aware of a curious sensuous longing as she looked again at the dim rich beauty about her, the smothered windows, the suggested power of withdrawal from every vulgar or annoying contact ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... whose tail I am convinced is a trowel. I know of no naturalist who has mentioned this, but such negative evidence is of little weight. The beaver, as everybody knows, is a builder, who cuts down trees and piles log upon log until he has raised a solid, domed ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... was to bury the poor animal where he fell, and say nothing about it. With some vague idea of precaution, I first took off the silver collar he wore, and then hastily interred him with a garden-trowel, and succeeded in removing all traces ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... chiefly to keep in and contain their Water, which by the help of these Banks they overflow their Grounds with. These Banks they make as smooth with the backside of their Houghs, as a Bricklayer can smooth a Wall with his Trowel. For in this they are very neat. These Banks are usually not above ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... precisely such a shout in just such sandy gullies, but Sile felt as if he were the first being on earth to whom such an experience had ever happened. He at once began to dig and sift among the gravel fiercely. He took out his hunting-knife and plied it as a trowel. Little bits of dull yellow metal rewarded him every now and then until he worked along to where a ledge (or the edge of one) of quartz came nearly to the surface. On the upper side of that, and lying closely against it, he pried out something that made him shout ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is there, faint as ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... first, and to the most elegant Tid-Bit; and when you drink together, offer him always the Place of Toast-maker; whether he be your Inferiour or your Equal, let him always choose before you, and be not ashamed to trowel him well ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... the needy. He was industrious; not a moment of his day was lost. For many years, he was one of the only two priests in the State; but when his parochial duties left him a little leisure, he was seen to handle the trowel and use the broom. He paid cash for everything he bought, and whoever worked for him received full pay on the day and hour agreed upon: no cutting down of rates. If they wished to give to the church, very well; but they must take their pay from him to the last ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... prevents their common enemy, the wolverene, disturbing them during the winter. From the beaver being seen to flap its tail when moving over its work, but especially when about to plunge into the water, has arisen the idea that it uses this member as a trowel. This custom it preserves even when it becomes tame and domesticated, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... directing in high, Ellen and I made shift to paint the little picket-fence until it was white as new snow. At odd times Braddish himself painted the little house (it was all of old-fashioned, long shingles) inside and out, and a friend of his got up on the roof with mortar and a trowel, and pointed-up the brick chimney; and my father and Mr. Sturtevant contributed a load of beautiful, sleek, rich pasture sod and the labor to lay it; so that by midsummer the little domain was the spickest, spannest little dream of a ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... at Glendive Creek we found that Colonel Rice and his company of the Fifth Infantry, who had been sent there by General Mills, had built quite a good little fort with their trowel-bayonets—a weapon which Colonel Rice was the inventor of, and which is, by the way, a very useful implement of war, as it can be used for a shovel in throwing up intrenchments and can be profitably utilized in several other ways. On the ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... this wrangling would have continued it is impossible to say, for at that moment the gentleman returned with a trowel, spade, and basket, and proceeded to remove her from her native soil. In justice to her, it must be confessed that, when the moment came to part for ever from all her old friends, and the surroundings ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... appointed to the See of Ripon, he once married a young couple with the assurance that he was not only a Carpenter but a Joiner. Only a few months ago he was about to lay the foundation stone of a new vicarage. The architect handed him the trowel, etc., inviting him to become "an operative mason for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... municipality. Others take to hunting or fishing and torment their farmers or tenants; others again become usurers or stock-jobbers. As for the scheme of the Rogrons, brother and sister, we know what that was; they had to satisfy an imperious desire to handle the trowel and remodel their old house into a ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hates; Talks whate'er comes in his head; Wishes it were all unsaid. Let me now the vices trace, From the father's scoundrel race. Who could give the looby such airs? Were they masons, were they butchers? Herald, lend the Muse an answer From his atavus and grandsire:[1] This was dexterous at his trowel, That was bred to kill a cow well: Hence the greasy clumsy mien In his dress and figure seen; Hence the mean and sordid soul, Like his body, rank and foul; Hence that wild suspicious peep, Like a rogue that steals a sheep; Hence he learnt the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... this for a froth-house builder who is compelled to work behind her back—mortar-feeder, trowel, darby, compass, and level all in one! Beginning with the first touch of the cement, the flowing point describes a very small half-circle to the right, again meeting the bark. It is now carried inward and upward, describing a very close circle with scarcely any space intervening, a similar ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... listened to; the ambassadors of the Catholic powers utter their official exhortations to harmony and a single eye to the good of the Church; and when they withdraw, the mason of the conclave steps gravely forth, trowel in hand, to build up a solid wall of brick and mortar betwixt the electors and that world which still looks forward with curious interest, although with diminished faith, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... whole length of the path, and dig over the moist brown earth beneath. "I would do the other side too," she said, generously, when she displayed her handiwork, "only I really believe my eyes would drop out if I stooped any more. You see I'd only the trowel ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... You are quite right, Philip. [PHILIP goes up.] The fact is, seeing Mr. Karslake again [Laying on her indifference with a trowel.] he seems to me as much a stranger as if I were meeting him for the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell |
