"Gutta-percha" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... want of resource exhibited by the authorities that these peculiar utensils were not sent out as regimental stew-pans, as there was a dearth of cooking-pots, and the warming-pans might have added materially to the comforts of the insides, instead of the outsides of the men, by reducing the gutta-percha-like texture of Cyprian bullocks into a savoury stew. Another comfort thoughtfully supplied by some more than usually insane authority, who no doubt had passed a severe competitive examination, was exhibited in countless coal-boxes of cast-iron! ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... patron's ball is deep in a "bunker," or sand-pit, where the wretch stands digging at it with an iron, hot, helpless, and wrathful. And yet golf is a sport not learned in a day, and caddies might be more considerate. The object of the game is to strike a small gutta-percha ball into a hole about five inches wide, distant from the striker about three hundred yards, and separated from him by rough grass and smooth sand-pits, furze bushes, and perhaps a road or a brook. He who, of two players, gets his ball into ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... of this land can make a fortune turning artesian wells inside out and peddling them for telegraph poles. You can't do it, son. Religion is the backbone of the body social. Sometimes it's unbending as a boarding-house biscuit, and sometimes it's a bad quality of gutta-percha; but we couldn't get far without it. Most youths have to pass thro' a period of doubt and denial—catch the infidel humor just as they do the measles and mumps, but they eventually learn that the fear of God is the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and the memorable part of this one was that much of the fruit that had been left hanging on it was now metamorphosed into something much more gorgeous—oranges had become eggs full of sugar-plums, gutta-percha monkeys grinned on the branches, golden flowers had sprung to life on the ends of the twigs, a lovely jewel-like lantern crowned the whole, and as to sweets, everybody- servants and all—had some delightful devices containing ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contrive vulcanized gutta-percha or other resistant steamers which can neither be billed nor gaffed, shot nor slashed into sinking—vessels beyond all capacity for bathos, and no more to be persuaded into going under than was the black Baptist convert of David Crockett's story. What would ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the most unstable of minds, and yet by the power of religion he has become a coherent personality of almost rigid singleness of purpose. In conversation with him one cannot help feeling that he is jumpy and excitable; every movement of his extremely mobile face suggests a soul of gutta-percha stretched in all directions by the movements of his brain, and twitching with every thought that crosses his mind; but at the same time one is aware in him of a power which is never deflected by a hair's breadth from the path of a single purpose, and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... with a cockade. Well-fed horses in saddle-cloths fly through the frost at the rate of twenty versts an hour; in the carriages sit ladies muffled in round cloaks, and carefully tending their flowers and head-dresses. Every thing from the horse-trappings, the carriages, the gutta-percha wheels, the cloth of the coachman's coat, to the stockings, shoes, flowers, velvet, gloves, and perfumes,—every thing is made by those people, some of whom often roll drunk into their dens or sleeping- rooms, and some stay with disreputable women in the night-lodging houses, while still others ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... lessened. The hot-water bath is very hot, and the joint should be very red on taking it out. Immediately following the bath the injured joint is wrapped in a very cold wet compress, which is next completely covered by silk, gutta-percha, mackintosh, or many thicknesses of newspaper—anything that will hold all the heat in—as the cold compress is quickly heated up. Lastly, a bandage of heavy flannel completely covers ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... to blow up the Liverpool Customs—all that was strange, not to say fearful, without mentioning rockets, signals, powder-chests, and beacons of a thousand different sorts. The numerous spectators on the wharfs of Prince's Docks admired likewise a long mahogany whaler, a tin pirogue covered with gutta-percha, and a certain quantity of halkett-boats, a sort of indiarubber cloaks that can be transformed into canoes by blowing in their lining. Expectation was on the qui vive, for the Forward was going ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to him that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so often remembers this, that it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience. But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Americans, however, were not discouraged. Cyrus Field, the bold promoter of the enterprise, as he had sunk all his own fortune, set a new subscription on foot, which was at once answered, and another cable was constructed on better principles. The bundles of conducting wires were each enveloped in gutta-percha, and protected by a wadding of hemp, contained in a metallic covering. The Great Eastern sailed on the 13th of July, 1866. The operation worked well. But one incident occurred. Several times in unrolling the cable they observed ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... but do take care, Francis. And here are the two bits of gutta-percha tubing to make into syphons. You must put them into hot water for a minute before you ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... so tactlessly, needlessly candid," I expostulated. "Why didn't you say boldly that the Brooklyn Bridge is a wooden cantilever, with gutta-percha braces? He didn't know, or he wouldn't have asked you. He couldn't find out until he reached home, and you would never have seen him again; and if you had, and he had taunted you, you could have laughed vivaciously and said you were chaffing. That is my method, and it is the only way to preserve ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to be an ideal rider, man wants but little here below, nor is it at all likely he will want that little long. He wants—or rather, needs— a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better. Figuratively speaking, he should have no brains at all; his thinking faculties should be so placed as to be in direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely, the saddle. Yet his heart ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... this castellated baron, you have of course been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your self-respect swells with a sense of having escaped positive insult; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its gutta-percha number, and you walk up and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned, two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristocratic gloom of the yellow ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... these purposes. In a similar way, the limestone of the Solenhofen quarries has become goods, of considerable importance, only since the invention of lithography; decaying bones, only since that of bone-dust manure; caoutchouc since about 1825, and gutta-percha, only since 1844. On the other hand, charms,(59) philters, and even relics, since the decay of faith in their efficacy, have lost the quality of goods. If the aggregate income of all mankind were, by some sudden revolution, to be equally divided among all, diamonds, for instance, would ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... used as a substitute for gutta-percha, being at once ductile and elastic; goes under the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sentence or two, to the effect that he had read his speech, that it was a libel upon his absent relative, and that he had come to punish him for it, Brooks began striking him on the head with a gutta-percha walking-cane, of the ordinary length and about an ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... tamarinds and mimosa add the grace of their feathery foliage; the banana unfolds its gigantic fronds above its golden fruitage; clumps of the betel or areca palms, with their slender and absolutely straight shafts, make the cocoa-palms look like clumsy giants; the gutta-percha, india rubber, and other varieties of ficus, increase the forest gloom by the brown velvety undersides of their shining dark-green leafage; then comes the cashew-nut tree, with its immense spread of branches, and its fruit an apple with a nut below; and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop) |
