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Mortar   Listen
noun
Mortar  n.  A chamber lamp or light. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books



... Ulysses did to [417]Elpenor and Gryllus, and the rest of his companions "those swinish men," he is irrefragable in his humour, he will be a hog still; bray him in a mortar, he will be the same. If he be in an heresy, or some perverse opinion, settled as some of our ignorant Papists are, convince his understanding, show him the several follies and absurd fopperies of that sect, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... preponderance of local opinion was in favour of the action of the Dean and Chapter. When it came to moving the stones, after all the rubbish was removed, it was found that the mortar had crumbled into mere dust, and could be swept away; and that the stones themselves could be lifted from their positions, without the use of any tool. What has actually been done is this: the north gable has been taken down with the outer orders of the archivolt for a depth of some feet, and ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting

... up his leg, and rising fast. Their danger was but beginning. Would the old walls, in greater part built without mortar, stand the rush? If a tree should strike them, they hardly would! If the flood came from a waterspout, it would soon be over—only how high it might first rise, who could tell! Such were his thoughts as they struggled to the ruin, and stood up ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... grievous manner. "He set over them task-masters, to afflict them with their burdens, and they built for Pharaoh treasure-cities,(415) Pithom and Raamses—and the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field; all their service wherein they made them serve, was with rigour."(416) This king had two sons, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... of vanished generations—the heavy boot of the conquistador; the sandaled foot of the old padre; the high heel of a dainty Spanish-born lady; the bare, horny sole of the Indian convert—each of them taking its tiny toll out of stone and mortar—each of them wearing away its infinitesimal mite—until through years and years the firm stone was scored away and channeled out and left at it is now, with curves in it ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... solar cedar jugular scholar calendar secular dollar grammar tabular poplar pillar sugar jocular globular mortar lunar vulgar popular insular Templar ocular muscular nectar similar tubular altar ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... duly roasted, and well cleansed, they put them into a large Mortar to reduce them into a gross Powder, which they afterwards grind upon a Stone till it is very fine, which requires ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus

... built of bricks or concrete blocks, set in mortar, in the "best" corner of your basement (the corner that is most below ground level). It can be converted quickly into a fallout shelter by lowering a strong, hinged "false ceiling" so that it rests on ...
— In Time Of Emergency - A Citizen's Handbook On Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters (1968) • Department of Defense

... halt before a pile of bricks and mortar. Above them loomed a huge unfinished apartment house, from which were tramping forth the home-going laborers. The smell of the wet lime as they tracked across the rather narrow street was over-powering. The chauffeur opened the door and spoke ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... take it from the mortar; Some sift it; some tread it. It is rattling in the dishes; It is distilled, and the steam floats about. We consult[1]; we observe the rites of purification; We take southernwood and offer it with the fat; We sacrifice a ram to the spirit ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... the handle and pulled. It was heavier than he thought it would be, but he pulled it over to the box of mortar. It was ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... preparatory school. Further on was the gateway that led into King's School, and he stood in the quadrangle round which were the various buildings. It was just four and the boys were hurrying out of school. He saw the masters in their gowns and mortar-boards, and they were strange to him. It was more than ten years since he had left and many changes had taken place. He saw the headmaster; he walked slowly down from the schoolhouse to his own, talking to a big boy who Philip supposed was in the sixth; ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... went about the city, personally superintending the building of his little houses and cheap flats, sitting on saw-horses and piles of lumber, watching the carpenters at work. In the evening he came home to a late supper, completely fagged, bringing with him the smell of mortar and of ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... being a memorial of the pascal lamb, and the egg of the other sacrifices brought during the festival in ancient times, while the horseradish and the salt water represented the bitter work that the Sons of Israel had to do for Pharaoh, and the mush the lime and mortar from which they made brick for him. A small book lay in front of each seat. That was the Story of the Deliverance, in the ancient Hebrew text, accompanied ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... round sandwich and one crescent, provided the cutting is done economically. Meat used for sandwiches should be chopped very fine and slightly moistened with cream, melted butter, olive oil or mayonnaise dressing well seasoned. Fish should be rubbed or pounded in a mortar; add enough sauce tartare to make it ...
— Sandwiches • Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer

... countless inhabitants of that earlier world are watching me, and that not far away the waters of Neva are gathering, gathering, gathering their mighty momentum for some instant, when, with a great heave and swell, they will toss the whole fabric of brick and mortar from their shoulders, flood the streets and squares, and then sink tranquilly back into great sheets of unruffled waters marked only with reeds and the sharp cry ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... "mortar-boards" displayed in its window seemed like a temple crowded with shrines; and a confectioner's shop, in which two young gentlemen in gowns sat and refreshed themselves, was like a distant glimpse of ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... months. As we have said, it can be made at home, but the process, though not difficult, is troublesome. It is made as follows:—A quantity of spinach has, after being thoroughly washed, to be pounded in a mortar until it becomes a pulp. This pulp is then placed in a very strong, coarse cloth, and the cloth is twisted till the juice of the spinach is squeezed out through the cloth. The amount of force required is very considerable and is almost beyond ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne

... Arles was of an oval form, composed of three stages; each stage containing sixty arches; the whole was built of hewn stone of an immense size, without mortar, and of a prodigious thickness: the circumference above, exclusive of the projection of the architecture, was 194 toises three feet, the frontispiece 17 toises high and the area 71 toises long and 52 wide; the walls were 17 toises thick, which were pierced round and round with a gallery, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... Palestine. Where we stopped to pay the government tax that was always collected from travelers, I saw a man and woman building a stone wall. The only thing the man did was to sit on the wall while the woman mixed the mortar and carried both it and the stone to him. She even had to lift the stone up on the wall without any assistance from him, but he did manage to ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... was the most miserable place conceivable. There was a total absence of all ideas of comfort or arrangement. The houses were for the most part built of such unsubstantial materials as stick and mud plastered over with mortar—pretty enough in exterior, but rotten in ten or twelve years. The only really good residence was a fine stone building erected by Sir Edward Barnes when governor of Ceylon. To him alone indeed are we ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... the wrecked doorway into the mortar-strewn ruin, and, stumbling over masses of dbris, came to the stone steps that led to the cellar below. Louis drew back with a groan. He had spent centuries in that ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... formed on the sides of the cliffs, and these shelves, or the deep recesses between them, were utilized, so that here is a village of cliff dwellings. There are several hundred rooms altogether. The rooms are of sandstone, pretty carefully worked and laid in mortar, and the interior of the rooms was plastered. The opening for the chimney was usually by the side of the entrance, and the ceilings of the rooms are still blackened with soot and smoke. Around this village, on the terrace of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... Sanger, showing in detail the measures taken to perfect, so far as possible in advance, the instruction of the artillery of the army in the service of the modern high-power armament, so that every new gun and mortar should have, the moment it was finished and placed in position, thoroughly qualified officers and men ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... strange places." He had walked along the roads to many far towns. Then he had struck his friend, the building contractor. He had been a useful worker about a building house. At first he had carried hods of mortar and cement up ladders to the masons. The business of the masons he had mastered quickly. But he had always had a longing to hold a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other at work upon stone. He had drifted into a quarry, thence to a ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... Cooper came into vestry, and agreed to do the brick work of the steeple, with good and well burnt bricks and mortar of lime, at least fifteen bushels of lime to every thousand bricks so laid. The said Cooper to find all materials necessary for building the said steeple, and all expenses what kind soever at his own proper cost. The said Cooper to give bond for the performance, agreeable to a resolve ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... 1862, flag officer Farragut, coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans, had demanded the surrender of the city and been refused. In the latter part of June he returned with flag officer Porter's mortar flotilla and bombarded the city for four weeks without gaining his end. In November, 1862, General Grant started with an army from Grand Junction, intending to approach Vicksburg by the way of the Yazoo River and ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... in a few from her box. They were longer and finer than O-Kin's, and as they unfolded, the children screamed with delight. A man in a boat, with a pole and line, was catching a fish; a rice mortar floated alongside a wine-cup; the Mikado's crest bumped the Tycoon's; a tortoise swam; a stork unfolded its wings; a candle, a fan, a gourd, an axe, a frog, a rat, a sprig of bamboo, and pots full of many-colored flowers sprung open before their eyes. By this time the water was tinged with several ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... been discovered to have great value as an addition to mortar, as it has a solvent action on lime. An English builder wrote an important letter to the authorities of Charleston, S. C., on this subject, after that city ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... catapult with a modern trench mortar seems absurd. Yet the only basic difference is the kind of energy that sends the projectile on ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy

... in diameter, solidly attached to a mass of concrete at one end, in which is embedded a cannon from which to discharge the explosive under test, and open at the other end, and otherwise so constructed as to simulate a small section of a mine gallery (Fig. 2, Plate VI). The heavy mortar pendulum, for the pendulum test for determining the force produced by an explosive, is near by, as is also an armored pit in which large quantities of explosive may be detonated, with a view to studying the effects of magazine explosions, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson

... Thos. Boulden Thomson, which joined on the day before the attack. There were three frigates:—1. Seahorse (38), Captain Thos. Francis Fremantle; 2. Emerald (36), Captain John Waller; and 3. Terpsichore (32), Captain Richard Bowen; also the Fox (cutter), Lieut. Commander John Gibson, and a mortar-boat or a bomb-ketch, probably a ship's launch with a shell-gun.] of Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson, K.B., composed of nine ships, and carrying a total of 393 guns, appeared off Santa Cruz, the port of Tenerife, Canarian archipelago. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... of a low 'chancel wall' with iron gates for the rood screen with the loft and rood. But this, it might plausibly be contended, was merely an adaptation of the old idea to modern requirements, and it would have been quite difficult to explain why the whole building, from the mere mortar setting between the stones to the Gothic gas standards, was a mysterious and elaborate blasphemy. The canticles were sung to Joll in B flat, the chants were 'Anglican,' and the sermon was the gospel for the day, amplified and rendered into the more modern and graceful English of the preacher. ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... passed into the house they saw two slave-girls pounding rice in a large wooden mortar, with two enormous wooden pestles, while the savoury steam that arose from some invisible kitchen served to put a finer edge ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... caretaker could see her from the windows led her at once to slacken her pace, and stroll through the flower-beds coolly. A house unblinded is a possible spy, and must be treated accordingly; a house with the shutters together is an insensate heap of stone and mortar, ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy

... GARCINIA PICTORIA.—A fatty matter known as gamboge butter is procured from the seeds of this tree in Mysore. They are pounded in a stone mortar, then boiled till the butter or oil rises to the surface. It is used as a lamp oil, and ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders

... who has been going about telling a pitiful story of being wounded by a trench-mortar during the Jutland battle is now regarded by the police ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various

... necessity, at all times and at all costs, to mean something. The boon of the recurring monotonous 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 ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... general, that you will not find it quite so hot as we found it in Egypt. What do you think of nineteen of my men being killed by the concentrated rays of light falling on the barrels of the sentinels' bright muskets, and setting fire to the powder? I commanded a mortar battery at Acre, and I did the French infernal mischief with the shells. I used to pitch in among them when they had sat down to dinner; but how do you think the scoundrels weathered on me at last? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various

... machine-gunner, rushed up and erected his tripod and lethal toy. No man was more popular than Service in normal times. But to-day he and all his tribe stirred the bitter enmity that Ian Hay tells us the trench-mortar people aroused in France. 'Go away, Service,' his friends entreated. But Service stayed, a fact which precipitated G.A.'s next ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... lump of quick-lime from the kiln, where they burned quantities of it to scatter over the clay-soil, and first wetting it with water till it fell into powder, and then mixing it with sand which he riddled from the gravel he dug from the garden, he made it into good strong mortar. When its bed was at length made for it, he took the wheel and put in a longer axis, to project on one side beyond the gudgeon-block, or hollow in which it turned; and upon this projecting piece he ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald

... cacao into chocolate is this: They have a mill made in the form of some kind of malt-mills, whose stones are firm and hard, which work by turning, and upon this mill are ground the cacaos grossly, and then between other stones they work that which is ground yet smaller, or else by beating it up in a mortar bring it into ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head

... as he drives about, rarely sees houses at all, especially wooden houses, and for all modern stucco and cement work he entertains a kind of lofty contempt. Sham work of a hasty and unskilled age! He never, I think, put in a shovelful of cement except in the place where it belongs, as a mortar for good walls, and never will do so as long as he lives. So long as he lives the standards of high art ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... stroked him gently, and talked lovingly to him, calling him "Poor doggy!" and "Dear Skye," while the doctor made the splints, and pressed the broken bones back into their place. Then the doctor sent for some plaster of Paris, and made a soft mortar of it, and put it all around the mended leg, and let it harden into a little case, so that the bones would have to stay just as he put them ...
— The Nursery, September 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 3 • Various

... was a long, low, old-fashioned one, covered externally with dark blue mortar in French provincial style, and internally presenting every appearance of hospitality and comfort. The parlours in which Germain was shown into the presence of the owner were hung about with mellowed tapestry, and their doors and windows were open, leading out upon ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall

... after this, the huntsman found a gold mortar, and wished to present it to the prince. But his daughter said: "You will be laughed at for this present. You will see that the prince will say to you: 'The mortar is fine and good, but, peasant, where is the pestle?'" The father ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane

... came but a few at a time and only as huts were ready and fully equipped to receive them. Each hut contained a combination kitchen and living-room, with a single bedchamber. A substantial fireplace, built of stone and mortar, with a tall chimney at the back, was a feature in every house. The cracks between the logs, and all chinks, were sealed with thick layers of mortar; the ceilings, made of stout saplings, were treated in a similar ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... how a house is built upon the bare ground?" he said. "The mason lays down one stone, and then another on that; and if he cannot have his choice of stones he takes just what come to hand—little and big, putting in plenty of mortar to bind all together. Now that's the way you must build up a happy year for yourself,—and in that way every one can." The words were spoken very brightly, without a ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... got another. It was not till they were getting to the end of their last beat that Harold found a chance of letting off his gun. Suddenly, however, a brace of old birds sprang up out of the turnips in front of him at about thirty yards as swiftly as though they had been ejected from a mortar, and made off, one to the right and one to the left, both of them rising shots. He got the right-hand bird, and then turning killed the other also, when it was ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard

... enlightened; for they can construct works which stop the ravages of swollen torrents and make communication possible from bank to bank. The structures are safe and lasting, being founded upon wood over which is laid a bed of mortar. The beavers are the engineers. Each one works. The task is common to all, and the old ones see that the young ones do not shirk their labour. There are many taskmasters ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine

... sentimentalist mark this. If you transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes fit for brutes and for brutes alone. Bricks and mortar and whitewash will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats that squirm under the foundations of the city. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... after such a lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old threads; where for a moment one can abandon one's self to the illusion that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... And so the work goes on, cell upon cell, each supplying the materials for the partition separating it from the one below. On reaching the end of the cylinder, the Osmia closes up the case with a thick layer of the same mortar. Then that bramble-stump is done with; the Bee will not return to it. If her ovaries are not yet exhausted, other dry stems will be exploited in ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... those of Egypt and will probably always be so. There being practically no stone in the country and wood being very scarce, buildings were constructed entirely of bricks, some of them merely sun-dried, others kiln-baked. The natural wells of bitumen supplied a tenacious mortar. [Footnote: Compare Genesis XI 3: "And they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar."] The ruins that have been explored at Tello, Nippur, and elsewhere, belong to city walls, houses, and temples. The most ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... residents of Essen knew about the new mortar which the firm of Friedrich Krupp manufactured at its own expense and which later, because its shell rapidly smashed the strongest fortifications of reinforced concrete, our military authorities promptly acquired. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... chair and a bit of flannel better than to kneel before her Grace. You know, she allows him to sit when he confers with her. But then, she is ever prone to show mercy to bearded persons.... Ah! there is dear Sidney; that is a sweet soul. But what does he do here among the stones and mortar when he has the beeches of Penshurst to walk beneath. He is not so wise as I thought him.... But I must say I grow weary of his nymphs and his airs of Olympus. And for myself, I do not see that Flora and Phoebus and Maia and the rest ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... the corner of the room like a shell from a mortar, but in a moment he was seated at his place at the table again, with a broad grin on his face. "Is it down William?" shouted the old man. "Yes, Mr. Haynes, the durned thing's gone,—please ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... her building operations. It was in 1607 that her end came when her masons could not continue their labours owing to a severe frost, although the urgency of the task was such that they tried to mix their mortar with hot ale. It was a fight with the spectre of death and the spectre won ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard

... over at the new schoolhouse. Mr. Todd and the men worked miracles with their stone and mortar and wood and iron when he was standing by or lending a hand. The school was built partly of stone like the chapel and partly of old purple-pink brick like Mother Spurlock's Little House, and it was beamed ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... officer of the Trench Mortars, as passenger, he was brought down by a direct hit from the enemy's anti-aircraft guns. He had been showing Captain Gale some of the objectives on which the trench mortar fire had been directed during the week, and was killed in action while he was carrying out the duties of that artillery observation which he had done so much ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... the destruction is much more rapid than in a building lighted by other means. Gas-stoves, also, from the great heat given out, sometimes cause serious accidents; in one instance, a gas-stove set fire to a beam through a two-and-half inch York landing, well bedded in mortar, although the lights were five or six inches above the stone. This is mentioned to show that gas-stoves require quite as much care as ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood

... shiftless chap in the contracting business. He drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men who did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contracting business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends. When he died (she was nineteen) they say ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber

... upon the mainland, across a wide and swift-flowing channel in the marsh, called the "Thoroughfare." To reach them was of the most vital importance, for their hands only could drag out and man the heavy surf-boat, or fire the mortar, and ...
— Harper's Young People, September 7, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... bear's grease, or raccoon's oil served for shortening, and the leaves of the wild raspberry for tea. Our neighbors went to mill at Canton—a journey of five days, going and coming, with an ox-team, and beset with many difficulties. Then one of them hollowed the top of a stump for his mortar and tied his pestle to the bough of a tree. With a rope he drew the bough down, which, as it sprang back, lifted the pestle that ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller

... Kentucky. It was named after old Colonel Whitney, the man who built the first brick house in Kentucky. It was in the fall of the year, and the mortar was freezing, and they mixed whiskey with their mortar ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... the list for the next distribution of the cross of the Legion of Honor, but, owing to the shameful negligence of some one, the name of this man of talent was overlooked. The port of Boulogne contained about seventeen hundred vessels, such as flatboats, sloops, turkish boats, gunboats, prairies, mortar-boats, etc.; and the entrance to the port was defended by an enormous chain, and by four forts, two on the right, and two on ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... folds at the elbows and shoulders as unvarying in their arrangement as those in a pair of bellows: the ridges and the projecting parts of the coat collectively exhibiting a shade different from that of the hollows, which were lined with small ditch-like accumulations of stone and mortar-dust. The extremely large side-pockets, sheltered beneath wide flaps, bulged out convexly whether empty or full; and as he was often engaged to work at buildings far away—his breakfasts and dinners being eaten in a strange chimney-corner, by a garden ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy

... mishap. A few hundred yards farther, was the long street of the little old town, where hospitality might have been found under the great swinging ensigns of a couple of tuns, and medical relief was to be had, as a blazing gilt pestle and mortar indicated. But what surgeon could have ministered more cleverly to a patient than Harry's host, who tended him without a fee, or what Boniface could make him ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sense of what will pay," answered her nephew. "That appeals to the heart of the nation—that is, to the masculine heart. If Queen Bess had been handling a lancet, and Queen Vic pounding in a mortar with a pestle, assisted by her daughter-in-law, the case would have been different; but they are at useful womanly work, and the machines will sell. They have fixed themselves in our memories already: that's the object the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... petroleum and explosions are universal. The inhabitants had either stopped up, or were engaged in stopping up, every chink through which petroleum might be thrown into their houses. Their cellar lights, their ventilators, and their gratings were being made impervious by sand, mortar, and other materials. This precaution was taken because women and children partisans of the Commune, have in numerous instances been detected throwing petroleum into houses. Not a shop was entirely open, and those that opened only doors were inferior restaurants and wine houses. Around ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... not very hard, with warm water and fine charcoal dust. A lump of charcoal should be put a second time into the fire till it is red hot, as soon as it becomes cool the external ashes should be blown off, and it should be immediately reduced to fine powder in a mortar, and kept close stopped in a phial. It takes away the bad smell from decayed teeth, by washing the mouth with this powder diffused in water immediately. The putrid smell of decaying stumps of teeth may be destroyed for a time by washing the mouth with a weak solution ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... to tear the place down, very likely. They'll certainly have no mercy on the stones and mortar, any more than they ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... might go to the powers of earth to ask them to aid the powers of heaven. Why, that Cradle had been built within the limits of civilisation. Even the mason was known: the bricks were not Egyptian bricks, nor the mortar foreign, nor the wood a tree from the heart of Africa; and yet, why was it there—nay, why was the use of it not inquired into? If Jeshurun had waxed fat and kicked against the Lord of heaven, was there no lord of earth that could tame this yellow-livered worshipper ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... her, pardner, an' I'll fix the scales." McTeague ground the lumps to fine dust in the iron mortar while Cribbens set up the tiny scales and got out the "spoons" from ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble is ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... trade whose sorry, pitiable record exists in the Quartiere Nuovo of Rome. About the Porta Nigra is no trace of stucco or rubble. The huge blocks of which it is built stand one upon the other clean-hewn and square. No signs of mortar are left, but we see marks of iron or brass clamps. Its colour is a warm, deep red, softened here and there by ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... for Rich and Poor: this being the offer of an excellent new Invention." The invention consists of a proposal to the Londoners of a cheap substitute for coal, devised by a "Mr. Richard Gesling, Ingineer, late deceased." Mr. Gesling's idea was that, if you take brickdust, mortar, sawdust, or the like, and make up pasteballs thereof mingled with the dust of sea-coal or Scotch coal, and with stable-litter, you will have a fuel much more economical than coal itself. But, though this is the practical proposal of the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... should be sufficiently hard to resist the fire, and should therefore be tested before using. It is an unnecessary expense to use either second or third quality fire-brick. As the pyroligneous acid which results from the distillation of the wood attacks lime mortar, it is best to lay up the brick with fire-clay mortar, to which a little salt has been added; sometimes loam mixed with coal-tar, to which a little salt is also added, is used. As the principal office of this mortar is to fill the joints, special ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... his rapture at being in London, the place he loathed and execrated a year ago, he could have embraced the stranger in the street. Those miles of pavement, those towering walls that seemed to make streets of the sky as he looked up, all that world of brick and mortar was Audrey's world, the ground for her feet, the scene of all her doings. The women that went by wore the fashions she would be wearing now. At any moment she herself might turn out of some shop-door, round some corner. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... as the ashes of a fire that is gone out, and the princes of the earth are no more. He hath bruised the earth in a mortar, and the dust of it is scattered abroad in the heavens. The stars in their might hath He pounded to pieces, and the foundations of the ages to fine powder. There is nothing of them left, and their voices are dead. There are dim shapes in the ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... season, his old love of good horsemanship made him watch the rider with interest and even pleasure. 'May I never!' muttered he to himself, 'if he's not coming at this wall.' And as the inclosure in question was built of large jagged stones, without mortar, and fully four feet in height, the upper course being formed of a sort of coping in which the stones stood edgewise, the attempt did look somewhat rash. Not taking the wall where it was slightly breached, and where some loose stones ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... the Republic that find him a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after the geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... splendour, and find (save in the treble-gilt aodication and their own accession) the coat, the immortal coat, unchanged! The waistcoat is of a material known only to themselves—a sort of nightmare illusion of velvet, covered with a slight tracery of refined mortar, curiously picked out and guarded with a nondescript collection of the very greenest green pellets of hyson-bloom gunpowder tea. The buttons (things of use in this garment) describe the figure and proportions of a large turbot. They consist of two rows (leaving imagination to fill up a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... neither did I know how to go about it; besides, I had no possible way to make the iron gudgeons for the spindle or axis of the wheel to run in; so I gave it over, and so, for carrying away the earth which I dug out of the cave, I made me a thing like a hod which the labourers carry mortar in when they serve the bricklayers. This was not so difficult to me as the making the shovel: and yet this and the shovel, and the attempt which I made in vain to make a wheelbarrow, took me up no less than four days - I mean always excepting my morning walk with my gun, ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... not finished when the foliage of the oak rustled, a quantity of mortar and moss fell from the old wall, and a man threw himself at the feet of Diana, who uttered an ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... streams, until at last a lump of pasty metal remained. This was squeezed again and again, until not a single globule of quicksilver passed through the leather. The ball, which was of the consistency of half-dried mortar was then taken out, and the process repeated again and again until the whole of the quicksilver had been passed through the leather. Six lumps of amalgam about the size of small hens' ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty

... than we, 55 Drowned in the Gadarean sea— I wish that pity would drive out the devils, Which in your royal bosom hold their revels, And sink us in the waves of thy compassion! Alas! the Pigs are an unhappy nation! 60 Now if your Majesty would have our bristles To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gristles, In policy—ask else your royal Solons— You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, 65 And sties well thatched; besides ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... bee thus made: Take the flesh of a Rabet or Cat cut smal, and Bean-flower, or (if not easily got then) other flowre, and then mix these together, and put to them either Sugar, or Honey, which I think better, and then beat these together in a Mortar; or sometimes work them in your hands, (your hands being very clean) and then make it into a ball, or two, or three, as you like best for your use: but you must work or pound it so long in the Mortar, as to make ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton

... evident that this was the case, but it was equally evident that in a few moments he would succeed in clearing himself from the chimney. His teeth and claws were hard at work, and the stones and mortar were flying in all directions. The funnel would soon be down below his broad chest, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... to the plain suet pudding mixture 1 pound stoned cherries (which should be dusted with flour before adding) and finish the same as Apple Suet Pudding; serve with following sauce:—Take 1 pound cherries and pound half of them fine in a mortar; place the whole cherries with the pounded ones in a saucepan over the fire, add 1 cup water and boil till tender; then strain them through a sieve, return the liquor to saucepan, sweeten to taste, add 2 teaspoonfuls cornstarch dissolved ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke

... of these life-cars, therefore, arrangements are made for sending the hawser out from the shore to the ship. The apparatus by which this is accomplished consists, first, of a piece of ordnance called a mortar, made large enough to throw a shot of about six inches in diameter; secondly, the shot itself, which has a small iron staple set in it; thirdly, a long line, one end of which is to be attached to the staple in the shot, when the shot is thrown; and, fourthly, a rack ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... we noticed a hand-loom with linen in it, which the good housewife was weaving for her family. Before it was a wooden tub, wherein flour for making brown bread was standing ready to be mixed on the morrow; in front of it was a large wooden mortar, cut out ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... place attentively; it was a long, narrow, little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick-wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles, stuck into mortar. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... weak, seek to promote internal discord, so that thou mayest become only terrible to thyself! And remove from thee the false prophets, who have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad. O, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... down a side street, and took his stand behind a huge wooden column surmounted by a gilded mortar and pestle. Here he was about to rip open the envelope, but a glance across the street discovered a policeman looking at him. Bog felt guilty and awkward. He coughed, and thrust the letter into his pocket, and moved on again. The exciting ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... were frequent heavy bombardments by the enemy during the month of July, but the gallant soldiers of the Dominion consolidated their positions won in battle at Loos and elsewhere, and fully held their own. In trench mortar fighting their batteries maintained the upper hand, often returning six shells for one thrown by the Germans. The Canadian patrols were very active; every night reconnaissances were made all along the Canadian front, and numerous hostile working parties engaged in strengthening ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... demons grew as vigilant as the pupils of Amoros,—bold as hawks, agile at all exercises, clever and strong as criminals. They trained themselves in climbing roofs, scaling houses, jumping and walking noiselessly, mixing mortar, and walling up doors. They collected an arsenal of ropes, ladders, tools, and disguises. After a time the Knights of Idleness attained to the beau-ideal of malicious mischief, not only as to the accomplishment but, still more, in the invention ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... it, was unimportant—when one day, stopping in the Quartier du Marais to view the works at the new Place Royale, I saw the boy. He was in charge of a decent-looking servant, whose hand he was holding, and the two were gazing at a horse that, alarmed by the heaps of stone and mortar, was rearing and trying to unseat its rider. The child did not see me, and I bade Maignan follow him home, and learn where he lived ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... ceremony that seemed more suitable for a princess than for her—an oaken coffin heavily trimmed with metal, cushions of silk with gold and silver tassels, and a grave eight yards deep lined with stones and mortar. He himself stood beside the vault with his youngest child in his arms and watched the work. On the day of the funeral the corpse, white as snow, was placed in a room which he had had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... years, centuries, to create. They glory in destruction and ruin and they can no more build up again such a temple as stood there than they can restore trees that have taken six hundred years to grow. There—out there, Herse, in the hollow where those black fellows are stirring mortar—they have given them shirts too, because they are ashamed of the beauty of men's bodies—that is where the grotto was where we ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... liberally displayed, and a skin of dark brown velvet. His voice, shrill and clear, is always heard foremost; he cooks for the crew, he jumps overboard with the rope and gives advice on all occasions, grinds the coffee with the end of a stick in a mortar, which he holds between his feet, and uses the same large stick to walk proudly before me, brandishing it if I go ashore for a minute, and ordering everybody out of the way. 'Ya Achmet!' resounds all day whenever anybody wants anything, and the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... Arriving a little breathless, he looked down at the bluish, white streak that nakedly crossed a little ridge, clipped to a ravine on either side, and reappeared boldly further on. Fisette picked up samples from time to time, at which his patron glanced, and finally, taking mortar and pan, crushed a fist full of ore and washed it delicately, till a long tapering tail of yellow metal clung to the rounded angle of the pan. And at that Clark asked a few questions of the mining engineer who had come with him, nodded contentedly and started ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... ledge, between the western base of this Safr and the eastern side of the Bada' valley, lie masses of ruin now become mere rubbish; bits of wall built with cut stone, and water-conduits of fine mortar containing, like that of the Pyramids, powdered brick and sometimes pebbles. We carried off a lump of sandstone bearing unintelligible marks, possibly intended for a man and a beast. We called it "St. George and the Dragon," but the former is afoot—possibly the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... did; but at the window opposite the old house there sat a little boy with fresh rosy cheeks and bright beaming eyes: he certainly liked the old house best, and that both in sunshine and moonshine. And when he looked across at the wall where the mortar had fallen out, he could sit and find out there the strangest figures imaginable; exactly as the street had appeared before, with steps, projecting windows, and pointed gables; he could see soldiers with halberds, and spouts where the water ran, like dragons and serpents. That was ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen

... the mortar—you call it a gum? Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, Sure to taste sweetly,—is that poison, too? Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures, What a wild crowd ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... example of the lowering of melting-point by the mixture of salts. The melting-point of monohydrochloride of turpentine oil is 125 deg., while that of the dihydrochloride is 50 deg.; but on simply stirring together these compounds in a mortar at common temperatures, they immediately liquefy. Two molecules of the monohydrochloride and one molecule of the dihydrochloride form a mixture which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... the reader that "'Arabiyyun" pl. 'Urb is a man of pure Arab race, whether of the Ahl al-Madar (people of mortar, i.e. citizens) or Ahl al-Wabar (tents of goat or camel's hair); whereas "A'rbiyyun" pl. A'rb is one who dwells in the Desert whether Arab or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... fire proposed to cover the floors and stairs of the adjoining houses with earth; Mr. Hartley proposed to prevent houses from taking fire by covering the cieling with thin iron-plates, and Lord Mahon by a bed of coarse mortar or plaister between the cieling and floor above it. May not this age of chemical science discover some method of injecting or soaking timber with lime-water and afterwards with vitriolic acid, and thus fill ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... patriotism; for self-love includes one's country. Clerambault would never have expected to find any sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity. She had little enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies. She would have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or somebody had ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... was going down the steps: it was that of a stout man lying at the bottom, shaken in every bone, yet sound as a grape ensconced in jelly. As he touched the bottom he heard a little noise as of some small substance falling, but seeing a piece of old mortar dislodged, he did not turn round to examine the place. If he had done so he would have found behind the ladder the wedge he had just inserted to secure the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... more firmly upon his head, spat upon his hands, and once more stooping in the fireplace, gave a leap, and up the chimney he went with a rattle of loose mortar and a black ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... should require repeated blows to break it, rather than one hard blow (such bricks will withstand cartage and handling best). So much for bricks. To make brickwork, however, another ingredient is required—namely, mortar or cement. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... looked, indeed, as if a tornado had struck it. The fireplace was a litter of broken brick and mortar; half the floor was ripped up and the boards flung back anyhow; table drawers and bookcases had been ransacked, and looked it; books rifled in vain were heaped in disorderly hummocks wherever there was room ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... that a gentleman learns about town.—But perhaps you would like a set at tennis, or a game at balloon—we have an indifferent good court hard by here, and a set of as gentleman-like blades as ever banged leather against brick and mortar." ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... where they were ordered to build themselves houses, plant gardens and remain till their children were ten years old. Then the Sultan caused all the children to be brought to him, both boys and girls. The boys were apprenticed to masons, carpenters, and other tradesmen; others were employed to make mortar. The next year they were taught to drive the mules, the third to make adobe for building; the fourth year they learned to ride horses bareback, the fifth they were taught to ride in the saddle while using firearms. At the age of sixteen these boys became ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... the mound formed by covering the chamber and passage-way with earth. The walls of the chambered passages were about 2 feet thick, vertical, and well made of stones, which were evenly laid without clay or mortar of any kind. The top of one of the chambers had a covering of large, flat rocks, but the others seem to have been closed over with wood. The chambers were filled with clay which had been burnt, and appeared as if it had fallen in from above. The inside walls of the chambers ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar, wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. The whole is greater than the part: how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, Nothing can act but where it is: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... food; I can't eat the mule-meat. We boil the rice and eat it cold with milk for supper. Martha runs the gauntlet to buy the meat and milk once a day in a perfect terror. The shells seem to have many different names; I hear the soldiers say, "That's a mortar-shell. There goes a Parrott. That's a rifle-shell." They are all equally terrible. A pair of chimney-swallows have built in the parlor chimney. The concussion of the house often sends down parts of their nest, which they patiently ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... by the dying fire, evidently engaged upon some absorbing occupation. It was a woman clad in a sprigged silk gown, the image of my lady of the dining-room portrait. What was she doing? Seemingly pounding some substance in a small mortar. As I gazed astounded a slight knock sounded on the door. My Lady seemed extraordinarily perturbed; she started violently, seemed to shake something white from the mortar as she gathered it hastily to her, moved swiftly with the slightest rustle as ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... as he could, took a short run, and threw himself against the wall with all his force. After a few repetitions of this vigorous but not very prudent proceeding, the frail bulwark gave way, and amidst a shower of dust and mortar, Paco entered the vault into which he ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none the less—-and with the flexible personality of houses—taking on the print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... enough, Twisty-Tail was building a little house of red bricks, and it was the tap-tap-tapping of his trowel, or mortar-shovel, that made the ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis

... does in a bad dream: "Fearful things are happening to me..." In the salon beside the pharmacy where she was taking her little nap after supper, Mme. Bezuquet, mere, might hear him, or the pupil whose pestle was pounding its regular blows in the big marble mortar of the laboratory. Bezuquet continued his reading in a low voice, beginning it over again two or three times, very pale, his hair literally standing on end. Then, with a rapid look about him, cra cra... ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... stone shot in her of eighteen inches diameter, which was shot then in use: and afterwards meeting with Captain Perriman and Mr. Castle at Half-way Tree, they tell me of stone-shot of thirty-six inches diameter, which they shot out of mortar-pieces. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... in favor of the Dutch was with the motive of making isolation more complete, and of securing the perfect safety which that isolation was expected to bring. For, having built, not indeed with brick and mortar, but by means of edict and law, both open and secret, a great wall of exclusion more powerful than that of China's, it was necessary that there should be a port-hole, for both sally and exit, and a slit for vigilant scrutiny of any attempt to force seclusion or violate ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... the fullest development of character. Furthermore, character is not built negatively but positively. A building can never be erected by merely keeping out of it all unworthy material. There must be an actual putting together of brick and mortar, and the great truth is evident that whenever a place is filled by the good, the bad is in that very act kept out, whether in buildings or character. The motive back of many a "don't" is worthy, and often there may be no alternative but to instantly check ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... houses, we concluded our morning's work with a visit to the large graveyard. Apparently it did not contain the bones of Moslems: long lines of stones pointed westward, and one tomb was covered with a coating of hard mortar, in whose sculptured edge my benighted friends detected magical inscriptions. I heard of another city called Ahammed in the neighbouring hills, but did not visit it. These are all remains of Galla settlements, which the ignorance and exaggeration ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... are among the most pleasing of all the architectural creations that serve to increase its picturesque beauty. Their structure is light and elegant, and very different from the brick and mortar monstrosities that line the southern ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various

... soups, potages, ragouts, hashes, and the like hotche-potches; entire joints of meat being never served, and animals, whether fish or fowl, seldom brought to table whole, but hacked and hewed, and cut in pieces or gobbets [77]; the mortar also was in great request, some messes being actually denominated from it, as mortrews, or morterelys as in the Editor's MS. Now in this state of things, the general mode of eating must either have been with the spoon or the ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge

... followed by another and another, cut the stillness, and the earth beneath was aflame with light as the high explosives and shells stored in the concealed ammunition depot were set off. Nothing escaped destruction; flesh and blood, mortar and brick went skyward together, and a great gash in the earth was all that was left to tell the story of ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... experience in such work, some disturbance of the surface above the east tunnel resulted, and several house fronts were damaged. The portion of the tunnel affected was bulkheaded at each end, packed with rubble and grouted with Portland cement mortar injected under pressure through pipes sunk from the street surface above. When the interior was firm, the tunnel was redriven, using much the same methods that are employed for tunnels through earth when the arch ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... proves nothing and explains nothing," said the student, covering himself up with a sheet; "all that is simply pounding liquid in a mortar. No one knows anything and nothing can be proved ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... had been quiet. Now, by "quiet" I do not mean that there was any cessation of hostilities for there is always artillery firing and sniping going on, with a fair amount of rifle grenade and trench-mortar activity. It simply means that there is no attempt being made, by either side, to attack in force and to capture and ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride

... gradually to the summit. It served the double purpose of a road, and also a protection for riflemen; as a bank was thrown up on the outer edge of it breast high. Where the road reached the summit of the bluff, was placed a six-inch mortar, mounted on a pivot carriage; and a little further on was a battery, mounting three eight-inch mortars, which were cast in 1804, and looked as if they had seen much service. A great extent of ground was cleared on the summit, and extensive land defences laid out; but while these were in progress ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson

... was busy with a gun. For three minutes lives were cheap at the Experimental Farm, and the banging of guns filled the air. Redwood, careless of Bensington in his excitement, rushed in pursuit, and was knocked headlong by a mass of brick fragments, mortar, plaster, and rotten lath splinters that came flying out at him as a ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... hold of each vessel, along the whole length, was laid down a solid flooring of brick and mortar, one foot thick and five feet wide. Upon this was built a chamber of marble mason-work, forty feet long, three and a half feet broad, as many high, and with side-walks [walls? ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... before your sathu can be ready, while rice—pound, eat and go. But if you like, as you are in a greater hurry than I am, I will change my rice for your sathu." The other traveller unsuspectingly consented, thinking he was getting the best of the bargain, and while he was still looking for a mortar in which to pound his rice, the first traveller had mixed and eaten the sathu and proceeded on his journey. In the vernacular the point is brought out by the onomatopoeic character of the lines, which cannot ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... recognising the melody at all, at least from the too- exciting transports which it might produce in a more concentrated form. The process is termed "setting" by Composers, and any one, that has ever experienced the emotion of being unexpectedly set down in a heap of mortar, will recognise the truthfulness ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll

... confined to fortification; but, as the season advanced, they seemed to think that the branch of a tree, or a sheet of canvass, was too slender a barrier between them and a frosty night, and their fortified camp was gradually becoming a fortified town, of regular brick and mortar. Though we were living under the influence of the same sky, we did not think it necessary to give ourselves the same trouble, but reasoned on their proceedings like philosophers, and calculated, from the aspect of the times, that there ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid

... Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... the rest of the country by a narrow neck of land. A wide ditch was dug across this narrow tongue of land, and the whole camp was surrounded by a thick wall of stone, simply piled one upon another, without either mortar or cement." "One of these walls, when described, was ten feet thick, and the same in height." These intrenched positions were so well chosen that most of them continued to be occupied during the ages which ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... building instead of the missing bricks. The taskmasters forced each man of the Israelites to put his own child in the building. The father would place his son in the wall, and cover him over with mortar, all the while weeping, his tears ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... city in the world men have run up their dreams and their ambitions into slim skyscrapers that seem to exclaim at the audacity of the mere mortar that sustains them. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... do odd things. Les Miserables who have to write like myself must put up with anything and be thankful for permission to exist; but people with mighty incomes from tea, or crockery-ware, or mud, or bricks and mortar—why on earth these happy and favoured mortals do not live like ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... they all as they gave three cheers for their new abode. The tower, they all agreed, was an especial feature. It was built of adobe up to the height of the other walls, but the upper storey had been built of bricks two-thick and laid in mortar. The top had been embattled; and the boys laughed, and said the house looked exactly like a ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty

... commencing to fall upon the houses, the crash that told of ruin and destruction was heard more frequently. One exploded in the Rue des Voyards, another grazed the tall chimney of the factory, and the bricks and mortar came tumbling to the ground directly in front of the shed where the surgeons were at work. Bouroche looked ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it? Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you'll make nothing more of it than the chemists have ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... it the best that mine eyes had seen. The ostentation and richness of this empire being evidenced in nothing more than the richness of their pavilions, sumptuous beyond the fixed palaces of princes, erected with marble and mortar.' ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... terrible as the spread of the quick busy weeds between the paving-stones; the air smelt of pounded mortar and crushed stone; the sound of a footfall echoed like the drop of a pebble in a well. At first the horror of wrecked apartment-houses and big shops laid open makes one waste energy in anger. It is not seemly that rooms should ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling

... best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India. He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds' weight of tents, on the march in Upper India. He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. He had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... of an antiquity-hunter, and am fond of exploring London in quest of the relics of old times. These are principally to be found in the depths of the city, swallowed up and almost lost in a wilderness of brick and mortar, but deriving poetical and romantic interest from the commonplace, prosaic world around them. I was struck with an instance of the kind in the course of a recent summer ramble into the city; for the city is only to be explored to advantage in summer-time, when free from ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... dislodged the bricks, and having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while with little trouble I relaid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick-work. When I had finished I felt satisfied ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... use in mortar, too, Lime, water, sand and hair, They nicely mix and smoothly fix, ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller

... man's heart having come slowly to this generous decision was not light,—if the other boy had lived, if Belle had married some one who could have gone into the business. The bricks and mortar of the building were part of his own being, and he longed to live out these last few years in the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... have been erected in a much shorter space of time. When the ruder appliances of the earlier period are taken into account, such a keep could not have been built in a hurry, for time would be needed to allow the great mass of the foundation to gradually settle, and for the mortar to set. Although preparations for its erection may have begun as early as 1083, it seems more probable that the White Tower was not commenced much before 1087, or completed ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... to the seniors to rise. They put on their mortar-boards. The president said once more, "By the power invested in me...." The seniors filed by the president, and the grand marshal handed each of them a roll of parchment tied with blue and orange ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks

... supply Sumter with food alone, unless they should be opposed in attempting to carry out their errand. This did not suit Jefferson Davis at all; and, to cut it short, at half-past four, on the morning of April 12, 1861, there arose into the air from the mortar battery near old Fort Johnson, on the south side of the harbor, a bomb-shell, which curved high and slow through the dawn, and fell upon Fort Sumter, thus starting four years of civil war. One week later the Union proclaimed a blockade on the ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... had been threatening all the morning, now came down with sweeping fury; and although not sufficiently cold to freeze, yet it possessed a keenness that appeared to penetrate the skin. The roads being of a clayey soil soon became of the consistency of mortar by the tramping of so many feet, and our march might have been traced for several miles by the old boots, shoes, and stockings, which were left sticking in the mud in the hurry of the march. I have no doubt that we made ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... silica, mostly in the form of flint arrowheads and spear-points. Then came the metals, bronze to begin with and later iron. The nitrogenous era in warfare began when Friar Roger Bacon or Friar Schwartz—whichever it was—ground together in his mortar saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur. The Chinese, to be sure, had invented gunpowder long before, but they—poor innocents—did not know of anything worse to do with it than to make it into fire-crackers. With the introduction of "villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... from the shells and scrape off the brown skin, pound them to a paste in a mortar with the hard-boiled yolk and sweet herbs. When quite smooth, add the shalot and parsley minced, the salt, pepper, lemon rind, baked potato, and bread crumbs. Mix all well together, then add the two raw yolks; stir well again, and, lastly, add the whites beaten ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich

... Donal about to stop dead against a high wall, but ere they quite reached the end, they turned at right angles, skirted the wall for some distance, then turned again with it. It was a somewhat dreary wall—of gray stone, with mortar as gray—not like the rich-coloured walls of old red brick one meets in England. But its roof-like coping was crowned with tufts of wall-plants, and a few lichens did something to relieve the grayness. It guided them to a farm-yard. ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... vigor of these lines, which nobody could have written who had not been compelled, in the sunny summer-days, to bray drugs in a mortar. Yet who does not like to read a medical book?—to pore over its jargon, to muddle himself into a hypo, and to imagine himself afflicted with the dreadful disease with the long Latin name, the meaning of which he does not by any means comprehend? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... European military standards, and absolutely worthless if it should have to withstand a siege by artillery. But to the savages it was an imposing fortress, the very laws of its construction unknown to them, even the mortar between the logs, a substance of which they had no comprehension. Over the bastion as they emerged on the other side they beheld the English flag floating. This they took to be some kind of an Okee, in which ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... seized with a sudden impulse to go round and fortify the place. Accordingly they set to work in earnest, and having no iron tools, picked up stones, and put them together as they happened to fit, and where mortar was needed, carried it on their backs for want of hods, stooping down to make it stay on, and clasping their hands together behind to prevent it falling off; sparing no effort to be able to complete the most ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides



Words linked to "Mortar" :   bricks and mortar, masonry, daub, cement, trench mortar



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