"Sawdust" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... profaneness; and a view of the interior of Doctor Daniel Burgess's Presbyterian meeting-house in Russell Court, with portraits of the reverend gentleman and the principal members of his flock. The floor was thickly strewn with sawdust and shavings; and across the room ran a long and wide bench, furnished at one end with a powerful vice; next to which three nails driven into the boards served, it would appear from the lump of unconsumed tallow ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... has been added—going well into the cuttings with a brush; then rinse in water a little hotter than the first, leave for a moment, and turn upside down on the board to drain until the next piece is ready. Then dry with a soft towel, or plunge into a box of nonresinous sawdust, better warm, which absorbs moisture not reached by the cloth. Remove from the sawdust, brush carefully, and polish with a soft cloth. If kept free from dust, sawdust can be dried and used indefinitely. Care must be taken that there is no sand in dishpan or cloth to give the glass a scratch which ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... began to rise from the flat piece of timber into which the point of the upright stick had been boring and depositing sawdust, and Rob, by industriously blowing at the accumulation, presently caused it ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... Cooker" depended in part upon the principle of non-conduction. Two vessels, one inside the other, are separated by sawdust, asbestos, or other poor conducting material (Fig. 18). Foods are heated in the usual way to the boiling point or to a high temperature, and are then placed in the inner vessel. The heat of the food cannot escape through the ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... hear Our Missis give the word "Here comes the Beast to be Fed!" and then you should see 'em indignantly skipping across the Line, from the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glass covers, and get out the—ha ha ha!—the Sherry—O my eye, my ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... sir,' said Daddy, unabashed. 'Trust an old hound like me for scenting out what he wants. But, go along with you! I'm disappointed in you. The young men nowadays have got no blood! They're made of sawdust and brown paper. The world was our orange, and we sucked it. Bedad, we did! But you—cold-blooded cubs—go to the devil, I tell you, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Ginger contains from 3.6 to 7.5 per cent of ash, from 1.5 to 3 per cent of volatile oil, and from 3 to 5.5 per cent of fixed oil. There is a large amount of starch. The chief adulterants are rice, wheat, and potato starch, mustard hulls, exhausted ginger from ginger-ale and extract factories, sawdust and ground peanut-shells, and turmeric is frequently used for coloring the product. The United States standard for ginger is not more than 42 per cent starch, 8 per cent fiber, and 6 per cent ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... Pass through strong aqueous salammoniac solution, then plunge in hot oil (palm or tallow). When thoroughly heated remove and dip in a pot of fused tin (grain tin) covered with tallow. When tinned, drain in oil pot and rub with a bunch of hemp. Clean and polish in hot sawdust. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... the trend of habits keeping pace with an income that would increase, he still hankered in quiet City moments after the tasty fleshpots of his earlier days. Here you were served by hairy English waiters in aprons; there was sawdust on the floor, and three round gilt looking-glasses hung just above the line of sight. They had only recently done away with the cubicles, too, in which you could have your chop, prime chump, with a floury-potato, without seeing your ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... obvious irritation. "I don't pretend to be a Christian, as you know, but if there is one element in Christianity that distinguishes it, it is the brotherhood of man. That's pure nitroglycerin, though it's been mixed with so much sawdust. Incendiary is a mild epithet. I never read the sermons you refer to; I dare say they're crude, but they're probably attempts to release an explosive which would blow your comfortable social system and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to a deserted place, a strip more than half a mile wide, where the trees had been cut in a broad belt through the swamp. All Nan could see was sawdust and the stumps of felled trees sticking out of it. The sawdust, Toby said, was anywhere from two to twenty feet deep, and ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view— To ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... But look! Here's some fresh sawdust on the ground! The posts have been sawed within a few hours—perhaps even inside an hour. Maybe just before I came." Dave pointed to the moist earth under some of the splintered posts and boards. There was the fine sawdust where ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... its glory this morning. The stalls were ornamented with branches of evergreens, the floors sifted over with sawdust. There were vegetables and meats, but no great variety. There was no sunny south, no swift train to send in delicious luxuries. The cold storage of that day was being buried in pits and being brought out to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the polings and breasting, all voids behind them were filled as far as possible with marsh hay or bags of sawdust or clay. To prevent loss of air in open material, the joints between the boards were plastered with clay especially prepared for the purpose in a pug mill. The sliding extensions to the floors ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... subject-matter, as might the old cook at San Josef, who, the first time her master brought home Wenham Lake ice from Port of Spain, was scandalised at the dirtiness of the 'American water,' washed off the sawdust, and dried the ice in the sun. His was a case of Handy- Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... advertised by the hostess. She would skip the pages of photographs showing forth the daily epics of Europe and ponder the illustrations of some new smock. He shook his head over her as if she were a doll come to life and nothing stirring within but a music-box and a sawdust heart. He was disappointed in her—abysmally. He devoted himself to his military work as if he ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... truth it was biscuit no longer, but a powder full of worms,—so great was the want of food, that we were forced to eat the hides with which the mainyard was covered; but we had also to make use of sawdust for food, and rats became a great delicacy," related Magellan, as he led his little ship ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Ezofowich mansion there was plenty of noise, sunlight, and gaiety. In the centre two broad-shouldered workmen were sawing wood for the winter, and in the soft sawdust several cleanly-dressed children were playing. At the well a buxom and merry servant girl was drawing water, joking with the workmen, and through the open windows of the house could be seen Raphael's and Abraham's grave heads—they were talking over business affairs ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... it now came up about the puzzled young aviators as might a snowdrift or it heap of hay. Dave dashed a filmy, flake-like substance resembling sawdust from eyes, ears and mouth. Hiram tried to disentangle himself from strips and curls of some light, fluffy substance. Then he ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... little more to make than a pair of good suspenders or garters. A little leather, a few pieces of elastic or web band, a cloth-covered pad with sawdust in it, is about all ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... fourfold, with powerful compression. The Dowson generator is 30 inches inside diameter and 76 inches in height from the bars to the top. Air is blown in by steam driven in under the hearth. There is a siphon, a coke scrubber 110 inches high, a sawdust purifier, and a gasholder of 750 cubic feet capacity, and a pipe to the engine 5.2 inches in diameter. The total area occupied by this apparatus is 140 square yards, of which two-thirds are built on. The anthracite employed was from Swansea, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... "but we've been looking over the bulletins and as near as we can estimate, it ought not to cost more than $500 for a dairy house alone, but when we build the new dairy house, I think we should abandon this old wooden ice house that keeps the yard all mussed up with sawdust— besides, you have to cut from thirty to fifty per cent, more ice than we really use in order to provide for the great waste in such a poorly built house. Now, if we build our ice house in connection with the dairy house, it will be better protected and the waste will be practically eliminated. ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... lasted for nearly three weeks, and the Dandy, being the under-man in the pit, had anything but a merry time. Down in the pit, away from the air, he worked; pulling and pushing, pushing and pulling, hour after hour, in a blinding stream of sawdust. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... company particularly select, the exhibition takes place in assembly-rooms, town-halls, large rooms at inns, or auction galleries. There is none of your open-air wagrancy at Jarley's, recollect; there is no tarpaulin and sawdust at Jarley's, remember. Every expectation held out in the handbills is realised to the utmost, and the whole forms an effect of imposing brilliancy hitherto unrivalled in this kingdom. Remember that the price of admission is ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... this the young braves would leap into the woods, to see which one first could bring back fire. Each had his own secret way of making it. Usually a bowstring was twisted about a fire stick, and the stick was turned rapidly in a groove. In a few seconds, smoke would rise from the sawdust that formed. After a little fanning ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What had he been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... tables put together in a corner, were, at length, converted into a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs, the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipe-lights, spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long, in linking itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without preparation, the sense of being locked up, the remembrance of that room up-stairs, of the two brothers, and above all of the retiring ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... staring in blank amazement at padding tigers whose phosphorescent eyes never left these morsels beyond the bars. The two girls wandered about, their arms closely locked, but the strange atmosphere, the roars of the beasts, the ineffable, pungent odour of the circus, of sawdust mingled with the effluvia of animals, had aroused an excitement that was slow in subsiding. Some time elapsed before they were capable of taking a normal interest in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ordinary routine was Cully's instant acceptance of the clown's challenge to ride the trick mule, and his winning the wager amid the plaudits of the audience, after a rough-and-tumble scramble in the sawdust, sticking so tight to his back that a bystander remarked that the only way to get the boy off would be to ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... usual to send bacon and hams to be dried in the chimneys of farm-houses where wood is burnt, in the old-fashioned manner, on dogs; but if resident in or near a small town, there is always a drying-house to be met with, where we believe sawdust is used for fuel. We have had our own dried in this manner, and always ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... behind the scenes." So Alice, trembling with excitement, went with Papa behind the big green curtain. She had fancied it a sort of fairy world; but instead she found a great bare, disorderly place. Sawdust was scattered on the ground; huge boxes were standing about, some empty, some half unpacked. From farther away came sounds of loud voices talking and disputing, and the stamping of horses' feet. It was neither a pretty or a pleasant place; and Alice, feeling shy and half frightened, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... upon at Oldtown, Senaglecouna has been for a century or centuries training up its lordly pines, that gang-saws, worked by Penobscot, should shriek through their helpless cylinders, gnashing them into boards and chewing them into sawdust. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... an apprentice," replied Will Manton, "and shut up in the shop all the week, it would be rather hard to prevent my having a little sport on Sunday. I think it is necessary to swallow a little fresh air on Sunday, to blow the sawdust out of my throat; and to have a game of ball occasionally, to keep my joints limber, for they get stiff leaning over the work-bench, shoving the jack-plane, and chiseling ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... to prevent the striker from beating the ground with his bat near to the spot where he stands during the innings, nor to prevent the bowler from filling up holes with sawdust, &c., ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... by herself. Arranging her three dolls, made of rags and sawdust, on top of the bin, she stood before them, with her fingers in her mouth. Then all at ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... couldn't crawl as fast as the others walked and the carpet-rag balloon wouldn't stay balanced on his nose but kept rolling off to the ground. The rest of the parade was halfway around the ring (marked by a circle of sawdust which Danny had made after sawing wood energetically for half a day to get enough sawdust) when the trained seal had just reached ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... the hot sun off the ice," explained the foreman. "Very little heat can get in our ice house, and it takes heat to melt ice. Of course some of it melts, but very little. Then, too, the building has two walls. In between the double walls is sawdust, and that sawdust helps to keep the heat out, and the cold in. It is like a refrigerator you see. Ice melts very slowly in a refrigerator because the cold is kept in, and ...
— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis
... and most of the shops were closed. Only here and there some late worker showed a light. The bar-rooms were open full blast, and as Pete glided down the sawdust street it needed all the remembrance of Bill's fist to keep him from parting with a portion of the jingling money for an equal amount of good cheer. But the fist had the best of it, and he went straight on to the last bar-room. Surely Bill was right. ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... run back to your dinners," said she to the children. "Take them, Julie. Mark, dear, will you help the pudding?" They all filed dutifully out of the room, and Margaret, excited and curious, continued a meal that might have been of sawdust and sand for all she knew. The strain did not last long; in about ten minutes Mrs. Paget looked into the room, with a rather worried expression, ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... on visions of reform, eh?" inquired his grandfather, smiling broadly. He did not reply immediately. He stepped ahead, for they were obliged to walk in single file past a man who was sweeping sawdust across the sidewalk. In the windows that flanked the open doors of his shop dusty cigar boxes were piled. The shelves within were empty. Harlan recognized the nature of the establishment. It was a grog-shop in its partial disguise. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... for a wide variety of fuels has made The Babcock & Wilcox Co. leaders in the field of economy. Furnaces have been built and are in successful operation for burning anthracite and bituminous coals, lignite, crude oil, gas-house tar, wood, sawdust and shavings, bagasse, tan bark, natural gas, blast furnace gas, by-product coke oven gas and for the utilization of waste heat from commercial processes. The great number of Babcock & Wilcox boilers now in satisfactory operation under such a wide range of fuel conditions constitutes an unimpeachable ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... while the other, alternately denouncing the wickedness and deriding the toothlessness of a grim Giant Pope, may be likened, at a distance, to John Bunyan. About the whole—to conclude—is an atmosphere, not too pronounced, of the Newgate Calendar, and a few patches of sawdust from the Prize Ring. May not people well have wondered (the good pious English folk to whom Luck is a scandal, as the Bible Society's secretary wrote to Borrow),—what manner of man is this, this muleteer-missionary, this natural man ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... "horse," or the ladder that stretched invitingly overhead from one end of the building to the other. By special suggestion, Don's and Dorry's Christmas gifts from Uncle were a flying-course, a swinging-bar, and a spring-board. Jack and Don carted load after load of sawdust from the lumber-mill—to soften the deck in case of a slip from the rigging, as Jack explained to Lydia—and presto! the gymnasium was in ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... old darling," Patricia broke forth, "you've given me a glimpse of what would make it worth while—the trip, I mean. That's the trouble. I get the glimpse, acquire the taste, and then I wake up to—sawdust. Oh! good God, Joan." ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... to act properly. This is the reason, why a certain bulk of food is needful to good digestion; and why those people, who live on whale oil, and other highly-nourishing food, in cold climates, mix vegetables and even sawdust with it, to make it more acceptable and digestible. So, in civilized lands, bread, potatoes, and vegetables, are mixed with more highly-concentrated nourishment. This explains why coarse bread, of unbolted wheat, so often proves beneficial. ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... drawn sawdust at every blow. One arm and both legs were torn off and weltered in the scattered stuffing beneath; the crop of black curls was tangled in the topmost limb of the sapling. The blue silk gown would never fit the pliant waist again. Rozillah was ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... used were of wrought-iron, similar to those used in conveying gas. They could be curved to suit any peculiarity of the situation; and when the pipes were lapped with felt, or enclosed in wooden troughs filled with sawdust, the loss of heat by radiation was reduced to a minimum. The loss of power was certainly much less than in the friction of a long and perhaps tortuous line of shafting. With steam of 50 lbs. to the inch, a pipe of one-inch bore ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and otherwise, marked their progress. At Cabotville, Massachusetts, on going to bed one night one of the company threw a lighted cigar stump into a box of sawdust, and the result was that, an hour or two later, they all narrowly escaped suffocation from the smoke. At Lenox, Massachusetts, they spent Sunday and Barnum went to church as usual. The sermon was directed against the circus, denouncing it in very abusive terms as an ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning, for M'liss had a doll. But then it was a peculiar doll,—a frightful perversion of wax and sawdust,—a doll fearfully and wonderfully made,—a smaller edition of M'liss. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher. It had been the oldtime companion of M'liss's wanderings, and bore evident marks of suffering. Its original complexion was long ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... and many brown, wooden hamlets, climbing roof above roof, along the steep bottom of dells, and communicating by covered bridges over the larger of the torrents. The hum of watermills, the splash of running water, the clean odour of pine sawdust, the sound and smell of the pleasant wind among the innumerable army of the mountain pines, the dropping fire of huntsmen, the dull stroke of the wood- axe, intolerable roads, fresh trout for supper in the clean bare chamber of an inn, and the song of birds and the music of the village-bells - these ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saw-mill. Can't you imagine any human interest in the lives of the people there? It seems to me that one might make almost anything out of them. Suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life in—sawdust?" ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... chair, doubling it up like crumpled paper, hurling me headlong, not to the floor of the cage, but straight through the sliding-bars which Speed had just flung open with a shout. As for me, I landed violently on my back in the sawdust, the breath knocked ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... tolerably moist until, in September, the seedlings begin to ripen off, which they must be allowed to do. When the leaves have died down, shake out the bulbs and place them on a shelf to dry. A mixture of equal parts of peat and pine sawdust, placed in a box or seed-pan, will make the best possible store for them; the box or seed-pan to be kept in any spot which is safe from heat and frost. After about six weeks, each bulb should be examined, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... sudden vehemence.] Did you think I would like it? Did you think I'd come to this world to have my head stuffed with Latin conjugations and sawdust? ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... of which rattled in the wind; a rag carpet covered the floor; an old bureau, topped off with a dirty white cloth, a rickety table similarly draped, four cane-bottomed chairs, and a huge wooden spitbox filled with sawdust, stood at intervals around. Two single beds occupied ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... work? They have carts. Big ones, made of metal. At one end is a kind of well, for brooms, mops, and the vacuum cleaner wand and tubes. But most of the cart is just a metal box. The sides open. They carry rags, soap, that sawdust stuff for the floor, and so on. Get the picture? The warehouse janitor could have had empty boxes all ready inside his cart. Then, in about two minutes flat, he could have ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... horse, just as docile as the mare. The obedient creature, at a signal, reared suddenly, and seated Mr. Little on the sawdust behind him. A similar result was attained several times, by various means. But Henry showed himself so tough, courageous, and persistent, that he made great progress, and his good-humor won his preceptors. They invited him to come ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... With the Greatest Show on Earth Andy is as a bright as a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... pans with sawdust. Bury in one pan pieces of paper bearing a rhyme about one's future, these can be about the ladies for the men to draw, and in the other pan verses for the ladies to draw. The papers are folded up tightly. The ladies and gentlemen take turns putting in their thumbs. As soon as a verse ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... through sun and rain When the ambitious fit was on, Then rested in the sawdust till A month of idleness ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... ears so melodiously and so sweetly. Lazily, drowsily we'll hold a bamboo pole and guide out shiner through the foam-crowned eddies of the whirlpool, awaiting the flash of a golden side or a lusty tug at the line; and dreamily watch a long, narrow stream of shavings and sawdust, loosed from the opposite planing-mill, float away on the current. And here, in the dear dream-days, the conquering of the world will be a simple matter; for through the mist-prisms that rise from the foaming waters below the dam ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... at this moment our friends were all anxious to see the end of the adventure that had caused them so many trials and troubles. Perhaps the Tin Woodman's heart did not beat any faster, because it was made of red velvet and stuffed with sawdust, and the Tin Soldier's heart was made of tin and reposed in his tin bosom without a hint of emotion. However, there is little doubt that they both knew that a critical moment in their lives had arrived, and that Nimmie Amee's decision was destined to influence the future ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... for an accurate description of a lock. It happened that the man of science had on one occasion been a trottee, and was glad to have an opportunity of retaliation. "A lock," said he, "is a quantity of sawdust congealed into boards, which, being let down into the water in a perpendicular slope- level, raises it to the declivity of the sea above!"—" Eh?" said the Athenian, "what dun yo' say?" The gentleman repeated his description, and the worthy Boltonian recorded every word in the tablet of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... "other things" in relation to the brain, we mean temperament, quality and health. This simple principle explains why a great many people who carry large heads are endowed with but little intellectual power. Their heads are filled with "sawdust," in other words, a brain of poor quality, supported by a feeble body, or vitiated ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... his life, the weather being very fine, Finn, with the other pups, was treated to long sun-baths in a little fenced-in square of gravel which was covered with deodorized sawdust. These sun-baths were extremely good for the pups, and provided pleasant periods of rest and relaxation for the foster-mothers, who, though never allowed to see each other, were each within smelling distance of the pups, one upon one side and one ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... one of the black beads from his worsted countenance) turned for a moment toward the table, or so much as winked, as they lay in decorous rows, gazing with mute admiration at Belinda. She, unable to repress the joy and pride which swelled her sawdust bosom till the seams gaped, gave an occasional bounce as the wind waved her yellow skirts, or made the blue boots dance a sort of jig upon the door. Hanging was evidently not a painful operation, for she smiled contentedly, and looked as if the red ribbon around her neck was ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... barrel-shaped man who was unaccountably cheerless, as if the inside structure had been carefully removed, and then replaced by sawdust, Jonas thought. Even the offer of seven kroner for a single week's stay failed to produce the delirious ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... his attention except in connection with it. With a purpose so strict, and a theory of religion so precise, there is usually little play for imagination or feeling. Though we read Protestant theology as a duty, we find it as dry in the mouth as sawdust. The literature which would please must represent nature, and nature refuses to be bound into our dogmatic systems. No object can be pictured truly, except by a mind which has sympathy with it. Shakespeare no more hates Iago than Iago hates himself. He allows Iago to exhibit ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... may brag about your breakfast foods you eat at break of day, Your crisp, delightful shavings and your stack of last year's hay, Your toasted flakes of rye and corn that fairly swim in cream, Or rave about a sawdust mash, an epicurean dream. But none of these appeals to me, though all of them I've tried— The breakfast that I liked the best was sausage ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... of the tap-room were still closed. Only a strip of the dirty floor, strewn with sawdust, was illuminated by a bar of reddish light from the daybreak outside. On the table a candle, burnt down to the socket of its brass candlestick, flared and puttered in a riot of running wag. Half in the bar of daylight from outside, half in the darkness beyond the open ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... him, either—though we longed to. He was standing outside his prosperous-looking planing-mill, at about half-past eight of a dreaming October morning. Inside, the saws were making that droning, sweet-smelling, sawdust noise that made Colin think of "Adam Bede." The willows and button-wood trees at the back of the workshops were still smoking with sunlit mist, and the quiet, massive, pretty water looked like a sleepy mirror, as it softly flooded along ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... are past description. He had had a grandmother—with no nose to speak of, a mouth large enough for two, four teeth, and one eye—who had stuffed him in his youth with horrible stories as full as a doll is of sawdust. That old lady's influence was now strong upon him. Every gust of wind that rumbled in the chimney sent a qualm to his heart. Every creak in the beams of his wooden kitchen startled his soul. Every accidental noise that occurred filled him ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... and those shops in the main street of the town with which the family dealt. Stephen was glad to go with him on these errands for uncle Charles helped him very liberally to handfuls of whatever was exposed in open boxes and barrels outside the counter. He would seize a handful of grapes and sawdust or three or four American apples and thrust them generously into his grandnephew's hand while the shopman smiled uneasily; and, on Stephen's feigning reluctance to take them, he ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... at a lighted cabin, and was followed in by Shorty in answer to the "Come in" of the voice they heard groaning. It was a simple log cabin, the walls moss-chinked, the earth floor covered with sawdust and shavings. The light was a kerosene-lamp, and they could make out four bunks, three of which were occupied by men who ceased from groaning in ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the strong steel plates and get out into the night: Louis's weakness, which had been all his appeal to her, seemed an intolerable infliction, a cruel hoax on the part of fate, just as though, for her shining lover, someone had substituted a changeling stuffed with sawdust. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... was a good-sized, solidly-built one, originally intended for a gentleman's residence, but fallen now on evil days. An odour of fried onions and sawdust pervaded the establishment, for Madame Combrisson boarded three or four of her lodgers, regaling them principally on "soupe a l'ognon," and Combrisson carried on in the back kitchen his carpentry business at which he kept these same lodgers employed, paying them in kind with food and house-room, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... to the inn of the Travellers' Rest—a tavern famous in its time, that stood half up the hill, with a store, a smithy, and a few houses grouped about it, We came up at a silent walk on a road cushioned with sawdust. D'ri rapped on the door until I thought he had roused the whole village. At last a man came to the upper window. He, too, inspected us with a candle. Then he opened the door and gave us a hearty welcome. We put up our horses for a bite, ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... had he been driven to ink and paper, would have been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women study their reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was a thing with a soul characteristic and distinct; an individual conglomeration of life, with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... water on the groaning organ. If your heart (which was what I addressed) remained unmoved, let us refer to the affair no more: crystallised emotion, the statement and the reconciliation of the sorrows of the race and the individual, is obviously no more to you than supping sawdust. Well, well. If ever I write another Threnody! My next op. will probably be a Passepied and fugue in ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and cover them with the pickle at least an inch and half above their tops. Let them lie for a fortnight; then hang them up one night; the next day rub them well with bran, and hang them in the chimney of a fire-place in which turf, wood, or sawdust is burned. If they are small they will be dry enough in a fortnight; if large, in two or three days more. Then hang them up against a wall near a fire, and not in a damp place. Tongues may be cured in the same manner, and ribs of beef may be put in at the same time with the hams. You must let ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... an' elephants. Weal animals. Dolls, you know"—she smiled as she confided the great secret—"aren't weal babies, they're just full of sawdust." ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... hour of lunch time, he went about—a scavenger of jobs—sweeping up the refuse of the paper's needs, as the boys in Covent Garden search through the barrows of sawdust for the stray, green grapes that have been thrown out with the brushings ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... his eyes on the monk, took the box, hesitated for a while, and then opened it. In it, carefully packed in sawdust, was the mask of Zingarella. It was a part of Daniel's meagre luggage; wherever ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and then stopped and listened again. The Fates were still against me. There was neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pine woods—full of birds, but nothing new—till I came out at the lake. Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by a solitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almost comical astonishment, where in the world I had come from. I told him from Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think I must look uncommonly like an invalid, a "Northern consumptive," ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... married, and it's been nothing but work ever since, and now to be laid here like a useless log, with everything going hotfoot to destruction! It's a good thing you've come at last, for the children are makin' sawdust and splinters of every bit of crockery in the house, and that Martha Spriggs has no more management than a settin' hen. I don't suppose you'll be much better, though. You never did hev much of a head, an' now you've been up among the clouds so long, you'll be more like to sugar the ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... unless assisted, but Philo Gubb was too far away to see the hand he knew must have reached out for the bundle. He ran rapidly, keeping in the sawdust that formed the unfruitful soil of the lumber-yard, until he dared come no nearer, and then he climbed to the top of the tallest lumber-pile and lay flat. He commanded every side of the hillside lumber-yard, and he did not have long to wait. From the lower side of the yard he saw a black figure ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... thousand dollars in American twenty-dollar gold pieces packed in sawdust in the bag. The Credit Lyonnais had followed Mrs. Farmingham's directions to the letter. Such is the custom of the stupid French! She had asked for eighteen thousand dollars in gold, and they had sent ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... dry sawdust is prepared in readiness for the process of annealing before the speculum is cast. The box must be a sound wooden or metal box, and must be approximately air-tight. For a speculum a foot in diameter the box must ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... board he and I went into the Major's berth. We scrutinized every part, but saw nothing to indicate that a tool had been used or a plank lifted. There was no sawdust, no chip of wood: everything to the eye was precisely as before. No man will say we had not a right to look: how were we to make sure, as captain and mate of the ship for whose safety we were responsible, that those ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... selects, by preference, a partly decayed tree in which to excavate a hole for its nest, because the digging is easier, and the sawdust and chips make a softer lining than green wood. Both male and female take turns in this hollowing-out process. The one that is off duty is allowed twenty minutes for refreshments, "consisting of grubs, beetles, ripe apples or cherries, corn, or preferably ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... conceded that the larvae are three years in reaching maturity. The young ones lie for the first year in the sapwood and the inner bark, excavating flat, shallow cavities, about the size of a silver dollar, which are filled with their sawdust-like castings. The holes by which they enter being small are soon filled up, though not until a few grains of castings have fallen from them. Their presence may, however, often be detected in young trees from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... her old post near the wharf looking as comfortable and as inviting as ever: the same Notice stood out in all its faulty spelling, where pleasure-boats were for hire, and all the bright yellow sawdust which of late years has so deeply wounded the delicate enthusiasm of the aesthete, traced in golden letters its story of industry and honest labor, on one of nature's unwritten pages. The decks of the favorite "Peerless" were already well-filled ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... boil it in sawdust; you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape; Still keeping one principal object in view— To preserve its ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... a good thing it was your doll and not mine, that fell in," went on Rose, "'cause my doll's a sawdust one—this one is. But I have a rubber doll up at ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandma Bell's • Laura Lee Hope
... so easy, you know. It was a four and a half pound shell, filled with gun-cotton slabs and shrapnel bullets packed in sawdust. The charge was black powder in a paper bag, and you stuck it at the bottom end of the pipe and put a bit of fuse into the touch-hole—but, of course, you must take care it penetrates the charge. The shell-fuse has a pinner with a detonator ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... combat of Marshal Ney and the infuriated Life-Guardsman Shaw—and the final retreat of Napoleon amidst a volley of Roman candles and the flames of an arsenicated Hougomont. Nor is our gratification less to discern, after the subsiding of the showers of sawdust so gracefully scattered by that groom in the doeskin integuments, the stately form of Widdicomb, cased in martial apparel, advancing towards the centre of the ring, and commanding—with imperious gesture, and some slight flagellation in return for dubious compliment—the double-jointed ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... penetrated was river mud and they were driven with a hammer weighing 2 tons gross; in driving the pile head was encircled by a metal cylinder into which fitted a wooden plunger or false pile with a bed of shavings and sawdust ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... she minced away Mrs. Crawley said meditatively, "The Rocking Horse Fly," and with a squeal of delight I realized that that was what she had always vaguely reminded me of. You remember the insect, don't you, in Through the Looking-Glass? It lived on sawdust. One lesson one has every opportunity of learning on board ship is to suffer fools, if not gladly, at least with patience. The curious people who stray across one's path! One woman came on at Port Said—a globe-trotter, globe-trotting alone. Can you imagine ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... wasting straw in bedding cattle, it would be much better to pass it through their bodies. If straw must be used for litter, let it be employed as economically as possible. Good substitutes, wholly or in part, for straw bedding may be found in sawdust, ashes, tan and ferns. Leaves of trees if procurable in quantity constitute ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... post. I was there on duty with them. But when that shell fell I had gone into the trench to ask the time. I found my rifle, that I'd left in my place, bent double, as if some one had folded it in his hands, the barrel like a corkscrew, and half of the stock in sawdust. The smell of fresh blood was enough to bring ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... in a fairly short time, with considerable damage to an engine or motor, if you put into it several pinches of hard grain, such as rice or wheat. They will swell up and choke the circulation of water, and the cooling system will have to be torn down to remove the obstruction. Sawdust or hair may also be used to clog a ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... hard rubber comb on a piece of woolen cloth. The sleeve of a woolen coat or sweater will do. Rub the comb quickly in the same direction several times. Now hold it over some small bits of paper or sawdust. What does it do to them? Hold it over some one's hair. The rest of this experiment will work well only on cool, clear days. Rub the comb again, a dozen or more times in quick succession. Now touch it gently to the lobe of your ear. Do ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... day the twins were taken around the woods by the driver or some of the lumbermen who were not busy. They saw big trees cut down, but were careful not to get in the way of the great, swaying trunks. They played in the piles of sawdust, jumping off powdery wood. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... critic whom I cannot rhyme to, One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim. Of him there's much to say, if I had time to Concern myself in any wise with HIM. He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to, He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim, A good deal of his sawdust ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... posture and achieving the stability of a low centre of gravity, while I was compelled to stand upright and keep my legs straight; he rode face forward, while I was riding sidewise; and also, if he fell off, he'd get only a roll in the sawdust, while I'd have been ground to ...
— The Road • Jack London
... are not enough men in the country to-day to work the claims. Several other creeks show equal promise, but very little work has been done on the latter. I have seen gold dust until it seems almost as cheap as sawdust. If you are coming in, come prepared to stay two years at least; bring plenty of clothing ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... work, across the room, I silently blessed the pale old man, bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe he held, obscured from me by the cloud of sawdust-like flying leather that spun scattered from the sole he held to the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... London. This sophisticated, big-city dish, also called a Buck Rabbit, was the making of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson later presided. And it must have been the pick of the town back in the days when barrooms still had sawdust on the floor, for the learned Doctor endorsed old Omar Khayyam's love of the pub with: "There is nothing which has been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern." Yet he was no gourmet, as ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... sympathy with the decline and fall of the Simpsonian {169b} empire. They were strangers, interlopers, called in, like mutes and feathers, to grace the 'funeral show,' to give a more graceful flourish to the final exit. The horses pawed the sawdust, evidently unconscious that the earth it covered would soon be 'let on lease for building ground'; the riders seemed in the hey-day of their equestrian triumph. Let them, however, derive from the fate of Vauxhall a deep, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... eighteen inches square and sixteen or eighteen inches deep and put four inches of sawdust into the bottom; now fill in the space between a ten-quart pail, which is set in the middle of the box with more sawdust. A cover for the box is now lined with two or three inches of newspaper, well tacked on, and is fastened ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... tearing or licking off all that could be torn or licked from objects of interest. Hester, who had presented her with the floating baby in the bath, sometimes wondered, as she watched Stella conscientiously work through a well-dressed doll down to its stitched sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when she turned her attention ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... minutely divided as to enable the gastric juice to act properly. This is the reason why a certain bulk of food is needful to good digestion; and why those people who live on whale-oil and other highly nourishing food, in cold climates, mix vegetables and even sawdust with it to make it more acceptable and digestible. So in civilized lands, fruits and vegetables are mixed with more highly concentrated nourishment. For this reason also, soups, jellies, and arrow-root should have bread or crackers mixed with them. This ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sets up his newspaper; "sawdust pudding."—After his return to America, Franklin labored so diligently that he was soon able to set up a newspaper of his own. He tried to make it a good one. But some people thought that he spoke his mind too freely. ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... half of instinct, which a little girl usually has for her doll. But Maria had never had any particular love for a doll. She had possessed dolls, of course, but she had never been quite able to rise above the obvious sham of them, the cloth and the sawdust and the paint. She had wondered how some little girls whom she had known had loved to sleep with their dolls; as for her, she would as soon have thought of taking pleasure in dozing off with any little ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in discovering an honest man he could not have felt greater satisfaction than these girls felt at the sight of that modest little oval tub, with its sawdust covering; and the way in which it was pounced upon, and borne in triumph to the laundry, brings my story of that night's revels to a climax, and no ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... under the sun, nothing more nearly approaching to a state of addle, than a builder's brains. Your regular builders (and, indeed, not a few of your architects) are the sorriest animals twaddling about on two legs; mere vivified bags of sawdust, or lumps of lath and plaster, galvanised for a while, and forming themselves into strange, uncouth, unreasonable shapes. A mere "builder" has not two ideas in his head; he has only one; he can draw only one "specification," as he calls it, under different forms; he can make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... I have no power, you simple girl. When I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting on a sawdust pincushion in ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some, colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... is not the bluest, Still, for you (the fact remains) I would gladly shed the last drop Of the sawdust in ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... may be kept bright and clean with soap and warm water, scrubbing them well with a soft nail brush. They may be dried in sawdust of box-wood. Imitation jewelry may be treated in the ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... especially common in the sea near Australia; and off Cape Leeuwin I found an allied but smaller and apparently different species. Captain Cook, in his third voyage, remarks, that the sailors gave to this appearance the name of sea-sawdust. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... peter like it. Tin, kid, tin. I could turn it inside out with a can opener. But I ain't long on a kit just now. I'm on the hog for fair, as a matter of fact. Well, I don't need a kit. I got some sawdust and I can make the soup as pretty as you ever seen. We'll blow the safe, kid, and then ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... to drinking beer if I had my afternoons to myself in the city, just for the sake of sitting and doing sums in a tap-room; if it's a big tap-room, with pew sort o' places, and dark red curtains, a fire, and a smell of sawdust; ale, and tobacco, and a boy going by outside whistling a tune of the day. Somebody comes in. 'Ah, there's an idle old chap,' he says to himself, (meaning me), and where, I should like to ask him, 'd his head be if he sat there ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me now," the rebel cried, his mouth stuffed with the cold meat and hard-tack, almost as fresh and crisp as soda-crackers, for the contractors had not yet learned the trick of making them out of sawdust, white sand, and other inexpensive ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... meat means learning day after day," she explained. "However, there are some things you can learn this morning, and one is to be sure you buy in a clean place. Look around the floor and see whether the sawdust is fresh; notice the odor of the place and whether it is disagreeable or not; look at the counter, too, and be sure it is white and freshly wiped off; and above all, see whether the meat is kept in the ice-box at the back of the shop, not ...
— A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl - Margaret's Saturday Mornings • Caroline French Benton
... once return to his home, however. Instead, he drove up to the business centre of the town. The streets were deserted, but one saloon—the Sawdust ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... half a dozen rocking chairs. Of these, five were very new and one very old, black and heavy, with a green leather seat and a coat of arms worked on its back cushions. There were little heaps of mahogany sawdust here and there on the dirty tiled floor, and a pile of sacking in one corner. Beneath a window the flap of an open trap-door half hid a large green damp-stain; a deep recess in the wall yawned like a cavern, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... its malicious fury, for not content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them and hunted them into the wheelwright's saw-pit and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and scattering the sawdust in the air, it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove them on and followed at ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... searched high and low for the nail, and found it on the floor at last, among the shavings and sawdust. I took it out and buried it on the ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... farmer-boy in New England used not to be so gay as to tire him of the pleasures of life before he became of age. A remote farmhouse, standing a little off the road, banked up with sawdust and earth to keep the frost out of the cellar, blockaded with snow, and flying a blue flag of smoke from its chimney, looks like a besieged fort. On cold and stormy winter nights, to the traveler wearily dragging along ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... affricatus, Fr., and Agaricus sphagnicola, B., are attached to bog moss in similar localities. Some few species are almost confined to the stems of herbaceous plants. Agaricus petasatus, Fr., Agaricus cucumis, P., and Paxillus panuoides, F., have a preference for sawdust. Agaricus carpophilus, Fr., and Agaricus balaninus, P., have a predilection for beech mast. Agaricus urticoecola, B. and Br., seems to confine itself to nettle roots. Coprinus radians, Fr., makes its appearance on plaster walls, Coprinus domesticus, Fr., on damp carpets. The only epizoic ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... fact, a lot of people grow nothing but Stuart. And last year they had such a crop. Last year I pointed to a farm right near the highway. "Do you see that? For years I have been trying to get you to put that sawdust, which is nearly 40 feet high in a pile, around your pecans and see the vast difference in your pecans." You know there was no rain down there all last summer, and the pecans were half the proper ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... grooved, and spring from a wide platform, approached by a flight of steps. At the base, rests a spring-plank or bascule, to which leather thongs are attached to buckle down the victim, and a basket or pannier filled with sawdust to receive the severed head. Between these, at their summit, hangs the shining knife in its appointed grooves, and a cord, which may be disconnected by a jerk, holds it to its position. Two men will be required to work the instrument promptly,—the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend |
