"Tinkering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reply to this; instead, he bent over Hal who was still tinkering with the engine of ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... and pans! All the broad earth is the tinkering man's— The green leafy lane or the fields are his home, The road or the river, where'er he way roam. He roves for a living and rests where he can. Then bring out your kettle! ho! ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... Abercromby was coming. Even then Montcalm and his regulars were ready, but nothing else was. Every one knew that Ticonderoga was the key to the south of Canada; yet the fort was not ready, though the Canadian engineers had been tinkering at it for two whole summers. These engineers were, in fact, friends of Bigot, and had found that they could make money by spinning the work out as long as possible, charging for good material and putting in bad, and letting the gang plunder the stores on the way to ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... and approached Warren Hatch, who was standing and frowningly watching the efforts of the one who was tinkering at the automobile. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... quite hot. If you have brought up a family for years on the proceeds of such jobs as driving a ten-penny nail in here or there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof, knocking up a shelf in the vicarage kitchen, and mending a panel of fence, to be suddenly confronted with a proposal to engage workmen and undertake "contracts" is shortening to the breath and heating ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... insane excitement. I sprang up and ran, Crusoe and the Honorable Cuthbert at my heels. There in the midst of the camp Mr. Tubbs stood, the center of a group who were regarding him with astonished looks. Mr. Shaw and the captain had left their tinkering, Cookie his saucepans, and Aunt Jane and Violet had come hurrying from the hut. Among us all stood Mr. Tubbs with folded arms, looking round upon the company with an extraordinary air ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... complicated, too cumbersome and expensive, performed too little service, and required too much tinkering and repairs to be viewed as a practical and available implement.—The English farmer found the sickle or reap hook preferable, for it was everywhere resorted to.—The cutting apparatus of Bell's consisted of shears, one ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... pacing the village through, With her twelve Young Ladies, two and two, Looking, as such young ladies do, Trussed by Decorum and stuffed with morals - Whether she listened to Hob or Bob, Nob or Snob, The Squire on his cob, Or Trudge and his ass at a tinkering job, To the "Saint" who expounded at "Little Zion" - Or the "Sinner" who kept the "Golden Lion" - The man teetotally weaned from liquor - The Beadle, the Clerk, or the Reverend Vicar - Nay, the very Pie in its cage of wicker - She gathered such meanings, double or single, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... education. It is by education that the American is trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and with which even bad institutions and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... time for us to stop tinkering and turn into astronomers. We've been out for fifty I-P hours, and we'd better begin looking around for our heap of scrap metal," and, the girl at the communicator plate and Stevens at their one small telescope, they ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... boatmen, white and black, who had been tinkering about in the various barges, shallops and canoes tied to the mossy piles, left their employments and scrambled up upon the platform, and a trio of youthful darkies, fishing for crabs with a string and a piece of salt pork, allowed their lines to fall slack ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... simply this," she said: "I've been tinkering with that machine gun most of the day, and my conviction is that it will work. You simply turn a handle like a hand sewing machine. As soon as you hear me starting it you leave the church by that shell hole at the ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mean it." Leoh said. "This is the first real intellectual puzzle I've had to contend with in years. Tinkering with machinery ... that's easy. You know what you want, all you need is to make the machinery perform properly. But this ... I'm afraid I'm too old to handle ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... to bed that night, Blix sought out her father, who was still sitting up tinkering with the cuckoo clock, which he had taken all to pieces under the pretext that it was out of order ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... by any judicious and kind exertions made on their behalf. There are already several families of them within my knowledge, who reside in houses during the winter, and travel about only in the summer. Their means of subsistence are tinkering, and fiddling at feasts and fairs; by which some, I believe, make a good deal of money, which helps them out in the winter, when there is less work and ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... nothing but their labor, or their brains, or their capital to sell with the owners of vast monopolies who exact from production an ever-increasing toll that needs to be restrained, and this not by abolishing "the custom of working by contract," or by state interference and legislative tinkering, to which the Pope leans in spite of his protests against socialism, but by the abolition of the monopolies or their absorption into the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... understood that in a hinterland of this size there might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found it ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... interest in the question were increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the value of such efforts as the Working Men's College, and less and less ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more extensive repairs were needed to make the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Tinkering, doctoring, shifting, deranging, Urged by a constant satiety on, Ever the new for the newer exchanging, Hazarding ever the ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... the want of finality in legislation. Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... aweary of this sort of praise, And he longed to be back with his out-o'-door days, With his feet in the grass and his back to a tree, Rhyming and tinkering, fameless and free. He said so one day to the Mayor of Quog, And declared he'd as lief live the life ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... water-power which employs nearly a thousand people; so that if a bill like yours could be worked in a satisfactory manner here, on so small a stream as the Ribble, it may anywhere in the kingdom. But if you make a tinkering job of it, and ask for too little, you will rouse your opponents and discourage your friends. By all means go for a free passage for the fish every night from sunset to sunrise in all cases where this does not interfere with ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"—which Wordsworth thought exquisite—they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... stick was Ramrod. He knew a little of most mechanical things and was for ever tinkering at something or other, useful or otherwise as the case might be. He could also "doctor" a sick cow or dog, and was even known to have successfully set the broken leg of an old and ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... suppose that they expect to lessen it; but, to be sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Assuredly not, though great efforts were made! Darkness fell so swiftly that the Officers had scarcely time to "site" the position of their trenches. Then the weary business of entrenching began again. Have you ever heard the tinkering, tapping, thudding sounds made by entrenching implements or spades? None of the men who heard it that night will ever forget it. It will give them a memory of energy, promoted by the desire for safety, clogged ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... at the end of half an hour I conclude to face the elements and take my chances of finding some other shelter farther ahead rather than endure their vociferous onslaughts any longer. They all three come out to see what is going to happen, and I am not ashamed to admit that I stand tinkering around the bicycle in the pelting rain longer than is necessary before mounting, in order to keep them out in it and get them wet through, if possible, in revenge for having practically ousted me from the culvert, and since I have a water-proof, and they have nothing of the sort, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... nozzle and flowed down the Headquarters gutter-pipes to a selected spot well behind the trenches. Unfortunately the pump, being old-fashioned, was somewhat noisy, and all the packing and oiling and tinkering failed to silence its clank-clink, clank-clink, as ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... on banks. Attempts to deal with the difficulty without clear perception of its cause took the form of legislative tinkering and patching. Taxes were gathered from corporations by any device that seemed workable. The banks, being the earlier important corporations, were first experimented upon. Taxes on capital stock and on circulation were tried first ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... readjustment of our moral attitude, of a change in our laws and in our judgments strictly parallel to several we have considered. Once more I am convinced of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immorality of our views. Nor do I find great improvement to-day over yesterday. There is much talk and some tinkering, but though our judgments are less harsh, still we are choked with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine egoism. We fail to attack ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... from London "from fear of consumption," that he must do something or go mad, so, having a knowledge of smithing that enabled him to acquire the tinkering craft, he became a sort of Petulengro himself. A few days after pitching his tent in Mumper's Dingle, near Willenhall, as he slept against an ash tree, a voice seemed to cry in his ear Danger! Danger! and he ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... it happened to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... him tinkering away in the garden, his whistling ringing out as he sawed and hammered away. It always gave her a sense of warmth and peace to hear him thus as she lay in bed, the children not yet awake, in the bright early morning, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... opposed to Liberalism, but is shrewd enough to have a moderate Liberal among his kingly advisers; for William realizes the political weakness of further constitution-tinkering. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... in work than to increase material well-being. They have revived the quest for liberty, which was growing somewhat dimmed under the regime of Parliamentary Socialism, and they have reminded men that what our modern society needs is not a little tinkering here and there, nor the kind of minor readjustments to which the existing holders of power may readily consent, but a fundamental reconstruction, a sweeping away of all the sources of oppression, a liberation of ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... insisted that all the nails were long ago consumed, and that she was only glued together by the rust. "You shouldn't make me laugh so much, Tommy," he would say. "I am afraid I'll shake the sternpost out of her." And, as Hemstead went to and fro with his tool-basket on an endless round of tinkering, Wicks lost no opportunity of chaffing him upon his duties. "If you'd turn to at sailoring or washing paint or something useful, now," he would say, "I could see the fun of it. But to be mending things that haven't no insides to them appears to me the height of foolishness." And doubtless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four small industries—a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... bastard: The Prince of Angola, by one J. Ferriar, 'a tragedy altered from the play of Oroonoko and adapted to the circumstances of the present times.'[4] (Manchester, 1788.) It must be confessed that all this tinkering with an original, which does not require from any point of view the slightest alteration or omission, is most uncalled for, crude, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... end of the wire in its beak, the Phoenix flew up into the darkness once more. The tinkering sounds began again, and a spurt of falling debris rattled in the leaves of ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... providential escapes from accidents which threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford river"—the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt of danger, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Charlotte in her haste—then adding that she was not quite sure if they had progressed so rapidly as before; blushingly correcting herself at this point and that, in the tinkering manner of a nervous organization aiming at nicety where it ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... day given to tube-tinkering with tompions, stays, plugs, plates, and wedges, to the distraction of the ship's carpenter and blacksmith, steam was coaxed up; and, at 9.15 a.m. (February 7th), we ran northwards through the deep narrow channel, rounding the upper end of the Pharaohnic islet. Here the encircling wall ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... were returning from a rather hurried excursion to a near-by town when they came face to face with the motorcyclist. His motor had evidently stalled, and he was standing in the middle of the road tinkering ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... is simple in design and construction and does not require constant tinkering and adjustment of valve gears or taking up of wear in the running parts, it is like any other piece of fine machinery in that it should receive intelligent and careful attention from the operator by inspection of the working parts that are not at ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... low houses were grouped dozens of curiosity seekers. The scouts soon joined the throng and began to inspect the quarters of the races. Each garage contained a big sullen looking car about which was grouped half a dozen mechanics. These men were tinkering here, tightening a bolt there, or wiping and polishing the great machines as if they were so many sacred elephants. Mechanical parts, pumps, jacks, boxes of tools, cans of oil, extra tires and wheels, cushions ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... time in London, was one of the most dissolute men of the Regency. He was a wit at court, a personal friend of the Prince Regent. There was no form of dissipation he did not cultivate, and he died of excess at a comparatively early age. By what would seem to be a special tinkering of the devil with the work of Almighty God those lusts have taken possession of one section of Byam Warner's brain only, diseased it, redistributed its particles in a manner that has resulted in the abnormal faculty we call genius, but deprived it of ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... piece in my pocket the day I went down to see old Stephen Chippering, when he made me agent, and I've kept it ever since. And I'll tell you a funny thing—it's enough to make any man believe in luck. Do you remember that day last summer I was tinkering with the car by the canal ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the purposes for which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves. But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires. You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes. A few hours' tinkering would have set them right. They were still good for years of service. But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors. To ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... the old man stood in silence, then with a rush, he stumbled down the hatchway, and in another moment Dave heard him tinkering away at his engines. ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... the road and died there. Never got to New York at all. Ike Schumann wouldn't let Fillmore have a theatre. The book wanted fixing and the numbers wanted fixing and the scenery wasn't right: and while they were tinkering with all that there was trouble about the cast and the Actors Equity closed the show. Best thing that could have happened, really, and I was glad at the time, because going on with it would only have meant wasting more money, and it had cost a fortune already. After that ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come to her that the men tinkering with the car wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the programme she had made for ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... to meddle nor make with Huckster Hedinn, saying he is a rude unfriendly fellow. Next morning thou must be off early and go to the farm nearest Hrutstede. There thou must offer thy goods for sale, praising up all that is worst, and tinkering up the faults. The master of the house will pry about and find out the faults. Thou must snatch the wares away from him, and speak ill to him. He will say—'Twas not to be hoped that thou wouldst behave well to him, when thou behavest ill to every one else. Then thou shalt fly ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... we find you waiting like a Peri at the gates of Paradise? Polton is upstairs, you know, tinkering at one of his inventions. If you ever find the nest empty, you had better go up and bang at the laboratory door. He's ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up. The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... said, Let me a little open that scripture to you: 'As every man hath received the gift'; that is, said he, as every one hath received a trade, so let him follow it. If any man have received a gift of tinkering, as thou hast done, let him follow his tinkering. And so other men their trades; and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they were ready to submerge again. Zimby Cox joined the crew. Bud suggested taking along hydrolungs in case of any need for tinkering with the transducers ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... he says that's an electric battery. He uses it for rheumatism; but I haven't seen him work it yet. He said it was out of order, and he's tinkering with it the last ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... stride Helen had learned to know already, came out from the living-room, hat in hand, carrying a pair of spurs he had been tinkering with. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... to mar, the Constitution of the United States, we ought to have regard to every express or implied limitation upon our power imposed by that great instrument. When gentlemen object to amending the Constitution, when they talk sneeringly about tinkering with the Constitution, they do not remember that it is one of the express provisions of that instrument that Congress shall have power to propose amendments to the Legislatures of the several States. Do gentlemen mean, by the logic to which we have listened for the past five days ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... powerful Pallas of the Foreign Office, the goddess that is never seen without her lance and helmet? Does our Whitehall Mars make eyes there at bright young Venus of the Privy Seal, disgusting that quaint tinkering Vulcan, who is blowing his bellows at our Exchequer, not altogether unsuccessfully? Old Saturn of the Woolsack sits there mute, we will say, a relic of other days, as seated in this divan. The hall in which he rules is now elsewhere. Is our Mercury ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... you? Nice piece of impudence! Here am I, who have devoted half my life to the tinkering up of damaged soldiers, and know to a tittle how much a man can bear, all wrong, of course! And you, a young jackanapes of a subaltern, a mere boy, tell me to my face that you know better than ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... than that conduit was for me, and there were twelve feet of conduit; good long strait-jacket, but I've been in it a lot of times now, and feel quite at home. You see, the job couldn't be done in one go, for I had to make the hole under the fountain bigger, and I've been tinkering away for nearly a week, o' nights when the water was stopped. And if I'd come up at last, like a demon in a pantomime, to find I'd had my trouble for my pains, I can't say what I should have ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... people, sir, who occasionally used to come about in vans and carts, the men buying and selling horses, and sometimes tinkering, whilst the women ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... of tinkering and trying, they did succeed in making two paddle wheels. They were very rough and crude, but strong and serviceable. They fastened each of these wheels to the end of an iron rod which they passed through the boat from side to side. The rod was bent in the middle ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... Wordsworth's 'Excursion' suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is—in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the shifting scenes and persons in the 'Excursion.' Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented with that place, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... clothing covered with the sand, which it has gathered up while he was being unceremoniously rolled out of the way, is a victim of one of these arrangements, having just taken his pay in rum for a little job of tinkering about the tavern. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the bad old times will never return. They may, of course, promise a reformation of manners if the Holy Father's dominion is restored, but the world will not believe them. Reforming the Papacy, as Carlyle grimly said, is like tinkering a rusty old kettle. If you stop up the holes of it with temporary putty, it may hang together for awhile; but "begin to hammer at it, solder it, to what you call mend and rectify it,—it will fall to shreds, as sure as rust is rust; go all into nameless ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... inclined to work, away from his Elmira study. "Magnanimous Incident Literature" (for the Atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with the "Visit to Heaven," and after one reconstruction Howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The story ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... constitutionally due it and no more; that freedom shall have all its rights recognised and respected." Speech of Charles L. Beale of Kinderhook.—Ibid., p. 974. "We of the North are called upon to save the Union by making concessions and giving new guarantees to the South.... But I am opposed to tinkering with the Constitution, especially in these exciting times. I am satisfied with it as it is." Speech of Alfred Ely of Rochester.—Ibid., Appendix, p. 243. "I should be opposed to any alteration of the Constitution which would extend the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both. 'The lion shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be tinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him change your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, a piece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into a vat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and bring your camera, Miss Fixit, and take that picture of the queen's fan. I'll be home all morning." Because Shirley was always tinkering with her camera, the Colonel had playfully given her the name of ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... monks, who made difficulty about parting with the first parchment, refused to let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be—the tinkering of a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas himself. And there were scholars who accounted the manuscript ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the car suddenly and got out. Ruth looked ahead with curiosity. The road seemed rather smooth and quite unoccupied. There was a group of trees, tortured by gunfire, which hid a turn in the track and what lay beyond. Charlie was tinkering with the ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... merely playing at—a tinker or a gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker, than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain; for I could only ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing—although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... you cast about for new methods of reform. Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected of it; is not the panacea;—you see that, to bring the chaos of affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering, and set up some undivided council,—some Man, for God's sake!—a Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your Imperator, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... came home from the foundry early that afternoon, and when Dot and Twaddles heard him tinkering in the garage, they ran out to see ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... smattering of Portuguese, to say nothing of dozens of other subjects. You graduated in the upper tenth of your class with a B.S. in both Transportation and Criminology which is why you're riding patrol and not punching a computer or tinkering with an engine. You'd think with all that education that somewhere along the line you'd have learned to think with your head ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... the general depression, a fact which he attributed himself to the happy accident of being in a position to sit back and watch the others toil. But in reality Jill knew that he was working as hard as any one. He was working all the time, changing scenes, adding lines, tinkering with lyrics, smoothing over principals whose nerves had become strained by the incessant rehearsing, keeping within bounds Mr Goble's passion for being the big noise about the theatre. His cheerfulness was due to the spirit ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... I bought 'em in the little booth where we had chocolate with Mr. Blowitz the other day. I thought we might be hungry, so I got 'em while you were tinkering with the engine. Now, ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... had finished his tinkering, "he's paralyzed from the waist down. Let this one try and get ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... strong feeling. Lenore saw Jake's hand go to her father's shoulder. "Boss," he whispered, "we can't ketch thet car now." Anderson resigned himself, averted his face so that he could not see Nash, who was tinkering with the engine. Lenore believed then that Nash had deliberately stalled the engine or disordered something, so as to permit the escape of the strange car ahead. She saw it turn off the long, straight road ahead and disappear to the right. After some minutes' delay Nash resumed ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... every day the carpenter was growing more persistent in his complaints. At last Captain Keogh ordered him to do what he pleased so long as he held his peace, whereupon the sound of hammering and tinkering might be heard for a day across ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... coming to that," returned Dr. Dale, smiling. "As some of you know, I've fitted up a workshop in the barn behind this house where I do a good deal of tinkering in my spare hours. Now I'm going to ask you boys to come out there next Saturday and see me build a wireless receiving set from A to Z. You'll be surprised to see how much can be done with a few things that cost very little money and with a lot of things that don't cost any money ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... hushed," said the woman, speaking English. "The man is a good man, and he will do us no harm. We are tinkers, sir; but we do many things besides tinkering, many sinful things, especially in Wales, whither we are soon going again. Oh, I want to be eased of some of my sins before I go into Wales again, and so do you, Tourlough, for you know how you are sometimes ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... there, Butch; have a couple of cares! Say, what'smatter wid youse guys, anyhow? This is my first saengerfest for eons. Old Bannister has a clear track ahead at last, the Championship is won for sure, and Thor, that mighty engine of destruction to Ham's and Ballard's hopes, after much tinkering, is hitting on all twelve cylinders. Why, I prithee, deny me the pleasure of a little ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... rivet it, and, without speaking one word for it, taught the House how to vote for it; and it was carried against the Chairman's leaving the chair by 165 to 84. This Is all the news I know, or at least was all when I came out of town; for I left the tinkering of the bill, and came hither last Tuesday to my workmen. I flatter myself I shall get into tolerable order to receive my Lady Ailesbury and you at your return from Sligo, from whence I have received 'your letter, and where I hope you have had my first. I say nothing of the exile ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... stop the noise, John replaced the leg in the stool, and sat on it looking innocent as only a gypsy tinker could,—calm as a summer morning. I commend the subject for a picture. Very recently, that is, in the beginning of 1881, a man of the same tinkering kind, and possibly of the same blood as Honest John, confined in the prison of Moyamensing, Philadelphia, did nearly the same thing, only that instead of making his stool leg into a musical pipe he converted ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... had various attractions. Among them was Charlie's "maginary." It was a box covered with white cloth, a piece of workmanship at which Charlie had been secretly tinkering for two days. It was labeled "A Distant Cousin of the White Elephant of Siam. Price to see, three cents, and don't tell when you've ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... some other soul in misery had called on the lawyer; and, after all, Granice's note had given no hint of his own need! No doubt Ascham thought he merely wanted to make another change in his will. Since he had come into his little property, ten years earlier, Granice had been perpetually tinkering with his will. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... grouping these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning "What is't to live" appears in Butler's Note-Book with the remark, "This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it"—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the third of these ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... helped Fritz push the machine out into the open, and watched intently while he tested the steering gear and tried the ignition. After some further tinkering, Fritz finally took his seat, pulled a lever, and, after skimming the ground for a few rods, the machine rose gracefully into ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... for help, and the chauffeur who had never had the pleasure of tinkering with a "Marvin Six," was inclined to dismount and aid at least in diagnosing the car's ailment. While he was thinking about it and surveying the parts which Harry had taken out and strewn about the running board in his pretended trouble hunt ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... married a topsawyer—I believe the ablest of them all, and probably the most unprincipled; though I ought not to say that to you. However, public men are spoken freely of. I wish to Heaven you would get him to leave off tinkering those commercial treaties that he is always making such a fuss about. More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce. However, their precious most favoured nation clause will break down the whole concern yet. But you wish ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of passion called the Civil War. There was a total upset of business. Such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the riches of nature. After four years our people awoke, as from a nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever. ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... to work on the engine. It was the only thing in the nature of work that I had to do, but, somehow or other, I did not feel like doing it any more than I had the day before. A little of my good spirits were wearing off, like the legs of my "other" trousers, and after an hour of intermittent tinkering I threw down the wrench and decided to go for a row. The sun was shining brightly, but the breeze was fresh, and, as my skiff was low in the gunwale and there was likely to be some water flying, I put on an old oilskin "slicker" ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... necessary, all being the inventions of our lack of wisdom." And the man knew, for he had just been through the alimony court, turned out of church, and was on his way to a winter resort for the tinkering of his health. ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... went straight to the Aegis hangar, where he found Grimshaw tinkering over a broken airplane wing. Mr. King had a desk in one corner of what he called ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... demonstration of the devil in his effort to obtain possession of the sick man's soul, or to the powerful influence of some conjunction of the planets, or to the new-fangled power of electricity which Dr. Franklin had just discovered and was making so much talk about, and was so recklessly tinkering with in Philadelphia at that very time. The doctor had strongly disapproved of Franklin's reprehensible and meddlesome boldness, but he felt that it was best, nevertheless, to write and obtain the philosopher's advice as to the feasibility, advisability, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Roddy, "Vicenti has told Rojas, and in an hour Pedro will arrive, and then we start. Go get something to eat, and send my dinner out here. I've some tinkering to do ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... idealist. This is shown by his self-restraint and practical wisdom in guiding events. One of the symptoms of "catching Esperanto" is a desire to introduce improvements. This morbid propensity to jejune amateur tinkering, a kind of measles of the mind (morbus linguificus[1]) attacks the immature in years or judgment. A riper acquaintance with the history and practical aims of international language purges it from the system. We have all been ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... dream that the family was living on an average income of less than sixpence a head per week. But I know how hard some decent folk will struggle with the bitterest poverty before they will give in to it. The old man came in whilst I was there. He sat down in one corner, quietly tinkering away at something he had in his hands. His old corduroy trousers were well patched, and just new washed. He had very little to say to us, except that "He could like to get summat to do; for he wur tired o' walkin' abeawt." Another case was that of a poor widow woman, with five young children. This ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... I put them in the wagon when I was tinkering with it," said Scott. "We've only two horses, you know, and I want ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... Wade had surprised Jack Belllounds in the blacksmith shop. The meetings were accidental, yet Wade ever remembered how coincidence beckoned him thither and how circumstance magnified strange reflections. There was no reason why Jack should not be tinkering in the blacksmith shop early of a morning. But Wade followed an uncanny guidance. Like his hound Fox, he never split on trails. When opportunity afforded he went into the shop and looked it over with eyes as keen as the nose of his dog. And in the dust of the floor he had ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... and trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing, mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature." ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... few days more, hopefully enough, without any outbreak, till one morning, just after they had passed the Sargasso-beds. The ship was taking care of herself; the men were all on deck under the awning, tinkering, and cobbling, and chatting; Brimblecombe was catechising his fair pupil in the cabin; Amyas and Cary, cigar in mouth, were chatting about all heaven and earth, and, above all, of the best way of getting up a fresh adventure against the Spaniards as soon as they returned; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... I'd say he was up in some creek, tinkering at that twenty horsepower engine of his that shakes the whole frame of his boat whenever he opens the throttle ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... great intricate presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning, and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the presses and made the body of every man ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... liquor business involves fundamental questions of the function and scope of government, and there is hardly any department of organized human activity that has been the subject of so much experiment and futile tinkering.... The only people who are perfectly consistent are the prohibitionists, whose policy is abolition. Let us, however, try to detach ourselves from any personal interest that we may have in the subject, and consider it impartially as ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... abominable, low, cunning craft that ignorance and idleness can devise, they practise. In some instances these things are carried out to such a pitch as to render them more like imbeciles than human beings endowed with reason. Chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking are in many instances used only as a 'blind;' while the women and children go about the country begging and fortune-telling, bringing to their heathenish tents sufficient to keep the family. The poor women ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... two hundred years: it goes of itself, and all that the driver has to do is to watch the movements, and from time to time to screw up a nut and oil the joints. It is not like Saint-Nicholas, for instance, where the machine was never allowed to go by itself. The driver was always tinkering at it, running first to the right and then to the left, peering in here and altering a wheel there, not knowing or remembering that the best mounted machine is the one which requires the least attention from the man who sets it in motion. The great advantage which I enjoy here ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... free from party politics and lay the foundation for a durable system of national taxation, upon which domestic industries may be founded without the hazard which they now encounter every year or two by "tinkering with the tariff." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the War for the sanctity of treaties and for the protection of Nationalities has been going on, have deepened the mistrust. A frank and courageous statesmanship applied to the honest carrying out of large reforms too long delayed can alone remove it. The time for political tinkering is past; the time for wise and ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... afterwards, Lord Elgin, in his communications to the home government, said that the Canadian millers and shippers had a substantial grievance, not in the introduction of free trade, but in the constant tinkering incident to the abandoned system of imperial protection. The preference given in 1843 to Canadian wheat and to flour, even when made of American wheat, had stimulated milling in Canada; but almost before the newly-built mills were fairly at work, the ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... seventeen of them, fifteen soldiers, a subaltern and a young beardless officer. The officer lay in front of the fire looking intently into the flames. The soldiers were tinkering with the firearms in ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... bungler even in its disgusting trade, And botching, patching, leaving still behind Something of which its masters are afraid, States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or congress to be made, Cobbling at manacles for all mankind, A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains, With God and ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... them of that. They carry on the prejudices and hatred of generations. I have accused some of them of being actively pro-German; of tinkering with German money to foster revolution ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... how sensitive capital is, and how timid investors are. All this sort of rot is likely to frighten them, and we can't afford to frighten them. The passengers aboard an Ocean steamer don't feel reassured when the ship's way is stopped, and they hear the workmen's hammers tinkering at the engines down below. The old Ark's going on all right as she is, and only wants quiet and room to move. Them's my sentiments, and those of some other people who have to do with money ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... portions of the intestines upon too little provocation, Sir W. Macewin, M.D., F.R.S. (B. Medical Jrn., 1904, 2 p. 874) says:—"Is this human body of ours so badly constructed that it contains so many useless parts and requires so much tinkering? Possibly I may be out of fashion with the times, as I cannot find such imperfections in the normal human body as are alleged. On the contrary, the more one looks into the human body and sees it work, the better one understands ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... of the distance between the two boats made it possible to distinguish the disabled speeder more clearly, Orme saw that the Japanese was still tinkering with the motor. He was busying himself as though he realized that he had no hope of escape unless he ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... guess. But sometimes, if she starts missing, the way she did when we were up there, you can fix things and avoid a lot of trouble by a little timely tinkering. I was up once when my engine began missing that way, and I didn't pay any attention to it. Then, about twenty minutes later, she went dead on me while I was over the water, and I had to drop, whether ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... devil does he want to do with it? If the thing works all right, what's the sense of tinkering with it?" ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... an amateur play—any less effective or less lasting than the skill acquired in sewing yards of stitches or sawing yards of board just for "exercise" in a class? On the contrary, other things being equal, arithmetic and authors and sewing and tinkering can be made both more effective and more lasting when associated with pleasurable feelings than when performed under strain, compulsion and resentment. If it is only a question of "learning" this or that, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and she will do good service if, by her means, we can get away to some Christian land. We might have been much worse off than we are, and, to my mind, we have no cause to grumble. Here's our boat still safe, and, with some tinkering, she may be made to swim and serve us well. We will tow her on shore; but first we will see what provisions we can come at ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the distance toward the Lincoln Memorial. Abe had done his share of tinkering. His weird boot-strap system for hoisting river boats off shoals and bars hadn't amounted to much, but Abe knew the principle that every man has the right to be ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... not," put in Edward; "your favourite form of amusement we all know nowadays, is to lie flat on your back on a dusty road tinkering at ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working class movement and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of the working classes had become convinced of ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... and woolen goods were failing all over the country, but he attributed this to want of fitness for the business in which they were engaged. Though the present depression in the wool market was somewhat due to tariff tinkering, was more the result of over-production—greater supply ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... upper note, and I know that an oboe has been mended of its complaint and that in these dark days of winter it yearns for a woodside stream and the return of spring. It seems rather a romantic business tinkering ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... first, the protestant dissenters had been extremely sore at the absence from the bill of any provision for their admission to the remodelled university. Bright, the most illustrious of them, told the House of Commons that he did not care whether so pusillanimous and tinkering an affair as this was passed or not. Dissenters, he said with scorn, are expected always to manifest too much of those inestimable qualities which are spoken of in the Epistle to the Corinthians: 'To hope all things, to believe ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-immoral?) In the end, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... dish-pan, and order him to come and do whatever was necessary to the back-kitchen door. Sometimes it had been the hinges and sometimes it had been the lock which had been out of order on that door for at least a year, and although they had been tinkering here and tinkering there, the door had never worked properly; and now Mrs. Cliff had said that it must be put in perfect order even if a new door and a new frame were required, and without any regard to what it might cost. This to Willy was the dawn of a new era, and the ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... chest seems to fit into the attic, as well as the small boxes of nails, rolls of wire, screws, bolts, and the hundred odds and ends of hardware which the lord of the house must be able to lay his hand on when he wants to do any tinkering about the place. A semiannual sweeping, mopping, and dusting will keep the attic in good condition if thoroughly done, with the help of the "place for everything, and everything in its place," a precept as well as an example which ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... he gives the following account: "I get the Evangelical, Scottish Congregational, Eclectic, Lancet, British and Foreign Medical Review. I can read in journeying, but little at home. Building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending, farriering, wagon-mending, preaching, schooling, lecturing on physics according to my means, beside a chair in divinity to a class of three, fill up ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... never accept the altering of the shapes of workers, the tinkering with the hereditary form of their children, the artificial grafting upon our race of revolting and unnecessary form changes. Your whole science is a degeneration of wisdom into evil, tampering with life itself. You are horrors, and you do ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... curbs, where they had been handpushed under direction from the traffic squad, stood an unbroken line of automobiles. And the hood of each was raised for the eager tinkering of its chauffeur. Past them streamed the horses, and the faces of their drivers were illumined by ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... still tinkering with the record. "Yet it does not mean that because we have new ideas, they abolish the old. Often they only explain, amplify, supplement. For instance," he said, looking up at Edith Atherton, "take heredity. Our knowledge seems new, but is it? Marriages have always been dictated by ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... roared and raged and exploded with the sharp detonations of a machine-gun. Sounds of violent coughing and tinkering came from the bowels of the trunk, telling that the child was still alive and busy. Presently he emerged to breathe and wipe the oil off ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... in the tomb; but Christ is soon coming into his kingdom. Then the thief will be remembered, be raised from the dead, and be with Christ in that paradise into which he will then introduce all his people. Thus all is as clear as a sunbeam, when the text is freed from the bungling tinkering of men. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when the victory of the commercial caste over the military caste leads to the substitution of social boycotting and pecuniary damages for duelling. At certain moments there may even be a considerable material advance, as when ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... importance of the difference; but if the rich man plunders the community by exorbitant profits, or speculation with other people's money, while the gipsy adds a fowl or two to the produce of his tinkering; or, once again, if the gipsy is as honest as the honest citizen, which is not so rare a case by any means as people imagine, I return to my question: Wherein, I say, is the warm house, the windows hung with purple, and the table covered with fine linen, more divine than the tent or the blue ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... regard which carried with it a verdict of the most abandoned juvenility, but made no comment. "News sways people more than editorials," he continued. "That's why there's so much tinkering with it. I'd like to give you a definition of news, but there isn't any. News is conventional. It's anything that interests the community. It isn't the same in any two places. In Arizona a shower is news. In New Orleans the boll-weevil is news. In Worthington anything about your father is news: ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... several attempts and enclose the final result. I think the substance is all right, and though the form might certainly be improved, I leave that to you. When I get to a certain point of tinkering my phrases I have to put them aside ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... spirit of invention, as all mechanics know, is exceedingly contagious. One man in a shop who invents something that proves successful will give the mania to half his companions, and the very apprentices will be tinkering over a device after their ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... else. All of which struck him as not only very tiresome and very silly, but very dangerous. Modern Protestantism might eventuate in Rationalism, in a limiting of human endeavour exclusively to the end of material well-being. But this worship of the pseudo- sciences, this tinkering at the accepted foundations and accepted decencies of the social order, this cultivation of intellectual and moral chaos, could, for the vast majority of its professors at all events, eventuate only in the mad-house. And to the mad-house, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the sonnet? Why should we insist upon a perfect rhyme, as if it was a cog in a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, or suggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get it into a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkering and verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call the man who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit an artist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great laws ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... there about an hour, I reckon," he continued. "By that time it was darker than a stack of black cats, and fixing to storm. I thought I might as well be moving as sit there and get soaked to the hide. While I was tinkering with the cinch I thought I heard a couple of shots. Of course, I craned my neck to listen, and in a second a regular fusillade broke out—away off, you know; about like a stick of dry wood crackling in the stove when you're outside the cabin. I loped ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of the Imperial Parliament, was to produce the greatest commercial revival, the greatest access of working prosperity, Britain had ever known. Two main causes were at work here; and the first of them, undoubtedly, was the protection afforded to our industries by Imperial preference. The time for tinkering with half-measures had gone by, and, accordingly, the fiscal belt with which the first really Imperial Parliament girdled the Empire was made broad and strong. The effect of its application was gradual, but unmistakable; its benefits grew daily more apparent as the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... a brilliant moon. At Dade's invitation they all went down to the bunkhouse. In spite of the dilapidated appearance of its exterior, the interior of the building was in comparatively good condition—due to the continual tinkering of Malcolm, who liked to spend his idle hours there—and Malcolm lighted a candle, placed it on the rough table, took a deck of cards from the shelf, and the three played "pitch" for two hours. At the end of that time Malcolm said ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of them. "That 'ere wheel'll need considerable tinkering afore it's fit for use. How came you to ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... tu, an' hoped it wance; but Clem says what she've got won't come his way. She's like as not to marry, tu—there 'm a lot of auld men tinkering after her, Billy ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what their hands found to do, and ennobled their work. They rose by being greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... he tinkering at now, mamma?" asked Tom. "He has got hold of an old, old book, full of f ss, and all yellow; he's rigged two pans in a barrel, and bought a naptha lamp, and locked us all out of ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... Elmer's conversation bored Nick to the point of almost sullen resentment. Old Elmer was a family man. His talk was all of his family—the wife, the kids, the flat. A garrulous person, lank, pasty, dish-faced, and amiable. His half day off was invariably spent tinkering about the stuffy little flat—painting, nailing up shelves, mending a broken window shade, puttying a window, playing with his pasty little boy, aged sixteen months, and his pasty little girl, aged three years. Next day he regaled his ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... take a run down to Bluewater Bill's myself to-night," he said to himself as he prepared to go to work on the aeroplane, at which Le Blanc had been busy tinkering ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... whose wild and gay attire, with their accompaniments of tents, carts, horses, dogs, and fires, added picturesqueness to the scene. With the characteristic of their race - which appears to be a shrewd mixture of mendicity and mendacity - they at once abandoned their business of tinkering and peg-making; and, resuming their other business of fortune-telling and begging, they judiciously distributed themselves among the various divisions of ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... remarks had a mysterious quality. "I'm a free trader, but I'm not a Democrat. Tariff tinkering is not free trade, and I don't believe the Democrats would do any more than the Republicans, but that aint the question. The question is whether the farmers ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... change of opinion into the national mind as to what is a sane and profitable life; if they can't work a revolution in the spirit of our education, they'll do no good. There'll be lots of talk and tinkering, tariffs and tommy-rot, and, underneath, the land-bred men dying, dying all the time. No, madam, industrialism and vested interests have got us! Bar the most strenuous national heroism, there's nothing for it now ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
