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More "Sharpen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... TOOLS.—Dull tools indicate the character of the workman. In an experience of over forty years, I have never known a good workman to keep poorly sharpened tools. While it is true that the capacity to sharpen tools can be acquired only by practice, correct habits at the start will materially assist. In doing this part of the artisan's work, it should be understood that there is a right as well as a ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... that although we found no kind of metal in any of these islands, yet, the inhabitants of all of them, the moment they got a piece of iron in their possession, began to sharpen it, but made no such attempt on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... extend the Long House, smoke the magic pipe, sharpen his tomahawk, for he is a son of your League, and shall sit with you in the Council for ever, bearing the name of Arahseh, 'Our Cousin,' and the totem ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... no more than sharpen punctuation. The eighth in general continues to trim little excesses, though the loss is scarcely noticeable. Richardson further reduces Hill's praise of the book and his own praise of Hill, feeling his way toward ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... daily and exhausting battle for her private opinions as talkative people have, simply because she rarely if ever expressed an opinion; but her father stood ready always, a post of resistance to innovation, upon which she could sharpen the claws of her conclusion silently ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... took his knee between his hands, closing one of his eyes in order to sharpen his recollection. He poured forth a stream of reminiscence, mingled observation, and personal experience. Bartley followed him with his pencil, jotting down points, striking in sub-head lines, and now and then interrupting him with ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... lines of the form will not only aid one in adopting a more becoming style of dress, but will sharpen the artistic perceptions, thus adding ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... of both sexes, paired and unpaired!"—It was already evident from this address, how necessary it was that a preacher of repentance should arise, and sharpen the conscience of the company. "One part of my noble friends is paired, and they may find themselves quite happy; another unpaired, and these find themselves in the highest degree miserable, as I can assure you from my own experience: ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... this scouting life develop your faculties, sharpen your senses of hearing and of seeing, and, in practical ways, of thinking too; of noting signs and little portents and drawing conclusions from them; of observing things. You feel more alive than you ever felt before. Every day you are more or less dependent on your ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... and, pretending to be very kind, she called them to her and joked with them, and led them into a beautiful room, where she gave them food to eat, and showed them a soft cushion on which they might sleep. Then she left them and went down into the palace kitchens, where she told the servants to sharpen the knives, and to make a great fire ready, and hang a large ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... sufficient for entrance at the University is all that is incumbent on students who have been submitted to the academical course. So that we are unavoidably led on to the further question, viz., shall we sharpen and refine the youthful intellect, and then leave it to exercise its new powers upon the most sacred of subjects, as it will, and with the chance of its exercising them wrongly; or shall we proceed to feed it with divine truth, as it gains an appetite ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... in the air, I mind, to sharpen up the appetites; an' a-boardin' with a widdy, too, bad 'cess ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... constant dependence on Divine aid, you may confidentially hope to make continual progress. Among men of the world, a youth of softness and sweetness will often, as we formerly remarked, harden into insensibility, and sharpen into moroseness. But it is the office of Christianity to reverse this order. It is pleasing to witness this blessed renovation: to see, as life advances, asperities gradually smoothing down, and roughnesses mellowing away: while the subject of this happy change experiences ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... used for cutting on either edge, and that are carried in sheathes, to prevent the mechanics from cutting their neighbours' fingers. These files were to be distributed to the paupers in Ireland, to enable them to sharpen their teeth, so that they could masticate animal food at the grand barbecue that was to be given on the landing of our vessel. Another portion of the cargo was 200,000 puff-balls and sugar-plums, for gratuitous distribution ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... governed and ruled by the senses. But there is nothing paradoxical about all this, for the Yogis, while preaching the folly of sense life, and manifesting the teaching in their lives, nevertheless believe in any and all exercises calculated to "sharpen" the Mind, and develop it to a ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... descended upon him this afternoon that especial ecstasy that is surrendered once and again by the gods to men to lead them, maybe, into some especial blunder or to sharpen, for Olympian humour, the contrast of some ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... became common among them. They became at once hard, wily, and rapacious, and ready instruments in ignoble and oppressive callings. Shut out from open paths and honourable ambitions they haunted the obscurer byways of industry; they were to be found in many occupations which sharpen the intellect but blunt the moral sense, and they threw themselves passionately into the acquisition of wealth and of secret power. Exposed for generations, even in lands where they were not more seriously persecuted, to constant ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lay outside the coverlet as he spoke, "I do not know what to make of them. They might have been made by a carding-machine; but that supposition is untenable. It is within the bounds of possibility that they might have been made by a wild animal if it had taken care to sharpen its claws. That too is, I take it, impossible. By the way, have you any strange pets here in the house; anything of an exceptional kind, such as a tiger-cat or anything out of the common?" Miss Trelawny smiled a sad smile which made my heart ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... pecuniary interests in some of the claims he urged with so obstinate a pertinacity. And though there was not the smallest evidence of such utter abandonment of honour, though it was probably but a calumnious whisper, yet the mere suspicion of such practices served to sharpen the aversion of his enemies, and justify the disgust of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as many twigs, about 18 in. in length, as he intends hanging springes. There are two methods of hanging them—in one the twig is bent into the form of the figure six, the tail end running through a slit out in the upper part of the twig. The other method is to sharpen a twig at both ends, and insert the points into a grower or stem of underwood, thus forming a bow, of which the stem forms the string below the springe; and hanging from the lower part of the bow is placed a small branch, with three or four berries ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive, we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on, while you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us with lack of common ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... only to sharpen his appetite, for in a moment he dragged out from the grass something which startled me. Was it feathers or fur or a ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... necessary for the regulation, after the war, of International Finance, it remains to consider what can be done to amend the evils from which it suffers, and likewise what, if anything, can be done to strengthen our financial weapon, and sharpen its edge to help us in the difficult fight that will follow the present war, however it ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... answered the peasant, smiling. "A minute here, a minute there. The time costs nothing. What am I doing? Nothing. I digest. To pass the time I sharpen the knife. I am like this. I say it is a ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... them. These pleasures he held to be inferior to those of the senses and less refined than those of the intellect. He looked upon imaginative pleasure as consisting in resemblances discovered between imitations and things imitated, between copies and originals, an exercise adapted to sharpen the spirit of observation. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... much cannot be seen of the warm, delicate blendings. There is always the look of a flowerbed at dawn, before Chanticleer's second call has brought the sun to sharpen outlines, before dreams and night-mist have altogether quitted the place. Plenty of warm wood colours are there, of lake blues, of smothered reds. Precious they are to the eye, these scenes, but ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Government placed the liberated population under police surveillance, compelling each individual to prove honest acquirement of the slender means necessary for subsistence. Contact with the world begins to sharpen native intelligence, already heightened by the fusion of European blood with the island race, and external cleanliness being enforced systematically in Dutch territory, the concrete cottages which alternate with the thatched dwellings are dazzlingly white, the diligent sweeping and watering ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... if you please? He was a fool and a bore, but I wished him no harm. I was sorry as any one when I heard of his death, and I offered a good reward for the catching of the mean skunk that killed him. If I had done so myself I wouldn't have been such a fool as to sharpen the scent of the hounds on ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... with intense disdain; "the husband's helpless. He may sharpen his—tusks, but he'll never come to battle. How good and great you are! It is quite refreshing to hear your strictures on innocent amusements. But I beg you will speak of that lady with due respect; she is the first—yes, positively the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... When he set on the stove cover, it seemed to break the spell of her rigidity and she turned, hurried into the scullery and came back. She had, he saw, a knife. That was not alarming. It was a small kitchen knife, but he recognized it as the one she made a great fuss about, asking him to sharpen it often and keeping it for special use. But she gripped it strangely. Besides, there was the strangeness of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the whole people with all ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... clever girls who rambled over Scotland cross the border to the Emerald Isle, and again they sharpen their wits against new conditions, and revel in the land of ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... it difficult to see how this has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the cabin, and Trask took the occasion to slip into the galley while Doc and Tom were absent, and lifting out an old rat-tail file, which the cook used to sharpen his knives on, slipped it up the ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... Smith, the representative for Norwich, took the mail; and after a nap, talked very unrestrainedly with me on the present state of France, on Buonaparte, the criminal law, and the wisdom of the Justices at sessions. I was determined—like Horace's whetstone, which can sharpen other things, though blunt itself, to put an edge on him—to say something deep and decisive on some of the subjects, but I got nothing from him but working-day talk. Perhaps (like the character with the Greek name in the Rambler, who tells his guest, showing ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth." The wide range of truth secured through reading acts in two ways upon the reader. It spiritualizes his character, and it makes him mighty in action. Knowledge on almost any subject has a marked tendency to sharpen one's wits, to refine his tastes, to ennoble his spirit, to improve his judgement, to strengthen his will, to subdue his baser passions, and to fill his soul with the breath of life. It is only upon truth that the soul feeds, and by means of knowledge that ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment and sharpen it on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity and half praise, and, lather the victim all over before they put ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... down, and the coals were drawn up, though the furnace shaft could also be used for that purpose. There were men to tend the furnaces, and stable-men to look after the horses, and lamp-men, and blacksmiths to sharpen the tools and mend the iron-work of the wagons, and rolley-way-men to keep the roads in order, besides several for other sorts of jobs. All these were busy working away at their several posts. Samuel Kempson was among ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... Rio Negro and the Guainia. They do not eat the ants as a luxury, but because, according to the expression of the missionaries, the fat of ants (the white part of the abdomen) is a very substantial food. When the cakes of cassava were prepared, Father Zea, whose fever seemed rather to sharpen than to enfeeble his appetite, ordered a little bag to be brought to him filled with smoked vachacos. He mixed these bruised insects with flour of cassava, which he pressed us to taste. It somewhat resembled rancid butter mixed with crumb of bread. The cassava had not an acid taste, but some ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... first to go! At the same time they know—the clever ones—that they can't keep their place except by borrowing the weapons of the class they really fear—the professional class—the writers and thinkers—the lawyers and journalists. And so they take some trouble to sharpen their own brains. And the cleverer they are, the more tyrannous they are. And that, if you please, is ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nervy, determined, persevering and persistent. He discovered, staked off, owned and worked many claims in Leavenworth and other gulches. Sometimes he had streaks of luck and often the reverse. When lucky he would hire men to help him, when "broke" he would put more patches on his clothes, sharpen his own tools, borrow a sack of flour and work away. Some years later he discovered a really rich gold mine, then worked a silver mine in Utah and became a millionaire. During the spring of 1861 and the winter previous, he prospected ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... surprised that I should say Not Yet so emphatically, but the fact is I love my country, and, besides, all my interests and those of my children are bound up with the prosperity of the country. This ought to sharpen a man's wits, if anything could do it, and I have for many years been engaged in thinking out the matter, and my mind ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... a good job done," Dick said, "but a very hot one. Now, Surajah, sharpen three or four pieces of wood, and drive them down into the ground at the foot of that strut; then it will be as ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... To sharpen our sense of what is illusive in the illusion of the puppets, let us sit not too far from the stage. Choosing our place carefully, we shall have the satisfaction of always seeing the wires at their work, while I think we shall lose nothing of what is most savoury in the feast of the illusion. There ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there were already many colours in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an advantage ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... isn't so long ago since we were in it," nodded Jane. "Tommy was the last to be in it. Please pass the potatoes. This life at sea does sharpen one's appetite. It wouldn't do for me to go to sea really. I'd get so hungry between meals that I'd gnaw the masts ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... mainspring of life; they seemed to think exercise was the goal of existence. A man whom I saw there and who, I learnt, had been chosen to teach the young on account of his wisdom, told me that competition trained the man to sharpen his faculties; and that the tension which it provoked is in itself a useful training. I do not believe this. A cat or a boa constrictor will lie absolutely idle until it perceives an object worthy of its appetite; ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... their faces of shooting Barney and the burros from the rim-rock. It had occurred to him that if they believed Barney dead, they might reveal something of their purpose in the attack. Concealment, he felt vaguely, would serve merely to sharpen their suspicion of him. It had seemed very important to Casey that these three should not know that Barney was probably well on his way to Barstow ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... with the desire to know; they no longer look with interest upon things, except to see them pass; they do nothing except doubt and test; they ransack the world as though they were God's spies; they sharpen their thoughts into arrows, and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... [2] the ship is on the high seas, and the crew must row whole days together to reach moorings. [3] Now note the difference. Here you may find a captain [4] able by dint of speech and conduct to whet the souls of those he leads, and sharpen them to voluntary toils; and there another so dull of wit and destitute of feeling that it will take his crew just twice the time to finish the same voyage. See them step on shore. The first ship's company are drenched in sweat; but listen, they are loud in praise of one another, the ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... did work in the field. He made wagons, plows, plowstocks, buzzard wings—they call them turning plows now. They used to make and put them on the stocks. He made anything-handles, baskets. He could fill wagon wheels. He could sharpen tools. Anything that come under the line of blacksmith, that is what he did. He used to fix wagons all the time I knowed him. In harvest time in the fall he would drive from Bienville where they were slaves to Monroe in Ouachita Parish. He kept all the plows and was sharpening and fixing ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... vociferates, and makes more gestures than the Gitano, and, in imitation of him, her arms are in continual motion, to give more expression to the imagery with which she accompanies her discourse; her whole body contributes to her gesture, and to increase its force; endeavouring by these means to sharpen the effect of language in itself insufficient; and her vivid and disordered imagination is displayed in her ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... matter for comment that American newspaper advertising of the English packaged medicines was singularly drab. In the mother country, the proprietors or their heirs were faced with vigorous competition. It behooved them to sharpen up their adjectives and reach for their vitriol. In America the apothecary or merchant had no proprietary interest in any of the different brands of the imported medicines which were sold. Moreover, there was probably no great surplus of supply over ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... comprising far less of complex ideas; and partly because their organisation was, by hereditary culture, much more ductile and more readily capable of acquiring knowledge than mine. At this I secretly demurred; and having had in the course of a practical life, to sharpen my wits, whether at home or in travel, I could not allow that my cerebral organisation could possibly be duller than that of people who had lived all their lives by lamplight. However, while I was thus thinking, Zee quietly pointed her forefinger ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... I 've hit on a plan," said Adah, and she produced a Mme. Demorest pattern of a sleeve, upon which, with infinite pains, she had traced certain lines with the wreck of a pencil which little Josephine had tried to sharpen ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... it's saddles or harness or mending shoes. I can cut things in hardwood and sharpen saws too, and I'll work for a trial for nothing but ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... exercises by which the sense of touch is blunted and deadened, and others which sharpen it and make it delicate and discriminating. The former, which employ much movement and force for the continued impression of hard bodies, make the skin hard and thick, and deprive it of its natural sensitiveness. The latter are those which give variety to this feeling, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... think," replied De Montaigne, "that the dead did not feel the same when they first trod the path that leads to the life beyond life? Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise the genius, to attempt to delight or to instruct your race; and even supposing you fall short of every model you set before you—supposing your name moulder with your dust, still you will ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reading of the letters of the Keeper of the Seals, and the speech of the Advocate-General Blancmesnil which followed, the opinions taken, the order given, sometimes reiterated to keep the two double doors open, did not surprise anybody; served only as the preface to all the rest; to sharpen curiosity more and more as the moment approached in which it was to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... off and presently returned with a string of big gray trout. Sitting down, he began to sharpen his knife, but Carrie ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... to apply that influence to the electors: on the contrary, it renders it much more necessary to them, if they seek to have a majority in parliament, to increase the means of that influence, and redouble their diligence, and to sharpen dexterity in the application. The whole effect of the bill is therefore the removing the application of some part of the influence from the elected to the electors, and further to strengthen and extend ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... was new to these parts; he had but lately come from the Baron's establishment in St. Petersburg. He had never been in this wood after dark, and he had never seen a wolf save in the Zoological Gardens. The atmosphere now began to sharpen. From being merely cold it became positively icy, and muttering, "I never felt anything like this in St. Petersburg," the driver shrank into the depths of his furs, and tried to settle himself more comfortably in his seat. The horses, too, four in number, were strangers in Estonia, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... is a fool!" said Archy, as he settled down into his reclining posture again. "He needs a whipping to sharpen his understanding." ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... "Sharpen the edge on the marble of the chimney-piece, like this," continued Chiquita, "and polish the blade on the sole of ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... eager or unhappy, and our eyes are apt to get dulled to this eventfulness of form in those things which we are always looking at. Now it is one of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter: for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in: forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four years. He took it abroad with him, took it to bed: Frances had to retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. Once at a lecture in Dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the amusement of the audience may be imagined. In origin it was, Father O'Connor relates, a Texan or Mexican general utility implement. It was ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... few weeks, Victor Emmanuel lost his brother, his mother, and his wife. The King, who felt keenly when he did feel, was driven distraught with grief; no circumstance was wanting which could sharpen the edge of his sorrow. The two Queens, both Austrian princesses, had never interfered in foreign politics; what they suffered they suffered in silence. But they were greatly influenced by the ministers of the religion which had been a comfort of their ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... bad drop in you that attached to you out of the grandfather. What did your languages do for you but to sharpen your tongue, till the scrape of it would take the skin off, the same as a cat! My blessing on you, Conan, but my curse upon ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... would be induced to look with a suspicious eye upon every stranger, especially every solitary stranger, that fell under their observation. The prize of one hundred guineas was held out to excite their avarice and sharpen their penetration. It was no longer Bow-street, it was a million of men in arms against me. Neither had I the refuge, which few men have been so miserable as to want, of one single individual with whom to repose my alarms, and who might ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the American boy who has ever learned to manipulate them, and it is wonderful how much skill can be attained in their use. Any boy with a little mechanical ingenuity can make a pair of skis (pronounced skees). They can be made from two barrel staves. Select staves of straight grained wood. Sharpen the ends of each and score each end by cutting grooves in the wood, as shown in the cut, Fig. 7. A pocket knife or small gouge will suffice for this work. Then smear the end of the staves with oil and hold them close to a hot fire until they can be bent so ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... not a fast thinker. Years of teaching Roman history to classes of dozing students, interested only in easy credits, are not reckoned to sharpen one's wits. However, I instantly realized what must have happened. I tapped the little ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... who you are, but it seems to me that while you are still young you ought to leave Nizhni and spend two or three years rubbing shoulders with literature and literary people; not to learn to crow like the rest of us and to sharpen your wits, but to take the final plunge head first into literature and to grow to love it. Besides, the provinces age a man early. Korolenko, Potapenko, Mamin, Ertel, are first-rate men; you would perhaps at first feel their company rather boring, but in a year or two ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... a quarter of an hour, at a time. My wrists and arms and shoulders are aching, as if I had been beaten with sticks. Tomorrow I will take up a good supply of firewood. The chisels got blunted before we had worked an hour; and we should get on a deal faster, if we could sharpen them frequently." ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... a half must be tuned slightly sharper than perfect; if the octaves are tuned perfect, the upper tones of the instrument will sound flat when used in scale and arpeggio passages covering a large portion of the key-board. Begin to sharpen your octaves slightly from about the seventeenth key from the last; counting both black and white. In other words, begin to sharpen from the last A[b] but one, in the standard scale of seven and a third octaves of which ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... Audubon upon his guard. It was midnight, Audubon lay on some bear skins in one corner of the room, feigning sleep. He had previously slipped out of the cabin and had loaded his gun, which lay close at hand. Presently he saw the woman sharpen a huge carving knife, and thrust it into the hand of her drunken son, with the injunction to kill yon stranger and secure the watch. He was just on the point of springing up to shoot his would-be murderers, when the door burst open, and two travellers, each with a long knife, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... keep watch with the dead," Phronie complained under her breath. "It's dark in yonder. Dark and still as the grave. A body's got to have light. How else can they see to make it to the other world?" She paused to sharpen her knife on the edge of the crock, glancing cautiously now and then toward the door of the narrow hallway that led to the room where the dead ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... or they would have hated themselves for it: they thought they were doing God service. The fervour of their love towards him was probably greater than mine; yet this did not make them superior to prejudice, or sharpen their logical faculties to see that they were idolizing words to which they attached no ideas. On several occasions I had distinctly perceived how serious alarm I gave by resolutely refusing to admit any shiftings and shufflings of language. I felt convinced, that ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... as a son he exhibited filial piety; as a father he was kind and considerate; towards his subjects he was steadfastly faithful. This virtuous and accomplished sovereign, Wan, took great pains to sharpen his intellect and to make his heart more sensitive to all obligations. How majestic, how glorious was he; he shall ever be remembered by his grateful people at the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... clean, attractive and made up to date," said Ned. "The man who owns these outfits is working up some good routes. If you have anything to sharpen, now, I'll show you the ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... a man's blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat, much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen anybody's wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and, crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... blow, or whatever had struck Jan Cuxson down on the threshold of the temple, had served to sharpen his wits; anyway, for some unknown reason, words uttered by the priest on the first day of his imprisonment began to repeat themselves over and over again in his brain, as he sat uncomfortably with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed with a certain crafty ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... announced the return and elevation of Andronicus. [17] The people rose in arms: from the Asiatic shore the tyrant despatched his troops and galleys to assist the national revenge; and the hopeless resistance of the strangers served only to justify the rage, and sharpen the daggers, of the assassins. Neither age, nor sex, nor the ties of friendship or kindred, could save the victims of national hatred, and avarice, and religious zeal; the Latins were slaughtered in their houses and in the streets; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... under his practised eye! How proud were the young amateur blacksmiths when the kind-hearted owner of the shop gave them liberty to heat and pound a bit of nail-rod, to mend a skate or a sled-runner, or sharpen a pronged fish- spear! Still happier were they, when, at night, with his sons and nephew, they were allowed to huddle on the forge, sitting on the bottoms of old buckets or boxes, and watching the fire, from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... or the Bended Twig," published and widely read not long ago, was a volume to sharpen the reader's appetite for "more of the same sort." ***** 'Ups and Downs' is a cluster of sketches and incidents in real life, narrated with a grace of thought and flow of expression rarely to be met. The sketches well ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and here ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... you mean when you say Betty," declared Elizabeth, and leapt forward so far that the other two had to sharpen their ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... electricity. The clubs in which Johnson delighted were excellently adapted to foster his peculiar talent. There a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"—a pleasure hardly to be enjoyed now. And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each other's skill in all dialectic manoeuvres. Conversation may be pleasantest, as Johnson admitted, when two friends meet quietly to exchange their minds without any thought of display. But conversation considered ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... not the Lord give way to this for a time, to try thy seriousness, patience, submission and faith, and to sharpen thy diligence, and kindle up thy zeal? And should we not submit to his ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... talked, through the window they saw a great crowd of people come rushing into the courtyard of the building to sharpen weapons at a huge grindstone that stood there. They were going to murder the prisoners with which the jails were by ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... by persons who were acquainted with the late sagacious magistrate Sir John Fielding; who, when fatigued with attending to complicated cases, and perplexed with discordant depositions, used to retire to a little closet in a remote and tranquil part of the house, to rest his mental powers and sharpen perception. He told a great physician, now living, who complained of the distance of places, as caused by the great extension of London, that 'he (the physician) would not have been able to visit many patients to any purpose, if they had resided ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... pointing out what are taken for irreconcileable discrepancies, are beside the mark. Nor does the supposition that the one night in the den (of Dan. vi.) was increased to six, nor that the detail of withholding the lions' usual food to sharpen their appetites (in Θ only), were added for the purpose of heightening the effect, carry much weight. The omission of Daniel's speech, with the detail[71] of the angel closing the lions' mouths (vv. 21, 22), tells in the opposite direction. It is no ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... it needless to observe how artfully these chapters are calculated for that excellent purpose; for in these we have always taken care to intersperse somewhat of the sour or acid kind, in order to sharpen and stimulate the said ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the numerous variants of this story[162] the heroine is sent by her husband's mother to the Baba Yaga's, and the advice which saves her comes from her husband. The Baba Yaga goes into another room "in order to sharpen her teeth," and while she is engaged in that operation the girl escapes, having previously—by the advice of the Cat, to which she had given a lump of butter—spat under the threshold. The spittle answers for her in her ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... blade of a large knife before the eyes of his prisoner; then, seating himself on a broken truck near the shaft he began deliberately to sharpen the knife on his boot. The operation was not in the least hurried—the man was desirous of making a ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... laid in a damp hole in the rock, sat down on a heap of ore, and ate his supper. Then he leaned back for five minutes' rest before beginning his work again, and laid his head against the rock. He had not kept the position for one minute before he heard something which made him sharpen his ears. It sounded like a voice inside the rock. After a while he heard it again. It was a goblin voice—there could be no doubt about that—and this time he could make out ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... sharpen the edges of a diamond-shaped trowel used at the diggings, with a piece of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. It is a troublesome process when there are a thousand such objects ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hide,—how long that bright purity could resist the corrosion of the world's breath; and half thinking that it would be better for the spirit to pass away, with its lustre upon it, than stay till self-interest should sharpen the eye, and the lines of diplomacy write themselves on that fair brow. "Better ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... surged up in Malloring, dyeing his face brick-red. So! He had come all that way with the best intentions—to be treated like this; to meet this 'land lawyer,' who, he could see, was only here to sharpen his tongue, and those two scarecrow-looking chaps, who had come to testify, no doubt, to his discomfiture. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... But theyr peaceabler in pot-pies than any other thing: And it's when I git my shotgun drawed up in stiddy rest, She's as full of tribbelation as a yeller-jacket's nest; And a few shots before dinner, when the sun's a-shinin' right, Seems to kindo'-sorto' sharpen up ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... up in the morning to the sound of martial strain. The sergeant says: "Go get that scythe and sharpen it again. The grass has grown six inches, men, while we have been in bed, So hustle, soldiers, ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... countrymen. But the vanquished population was deprived of the means for revolt. The Israelites were forbidden the use of arms, and no itinerant smith was permitted to enter their territory. The Hebrew who wished to sharpen his ploughshare or axe was forced to ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... appears that this young man is a fire-eater," said Louis, in order to sharpen the sentiment ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of tools; how to sharpen them; to design and layout work. Printed from new plates and bound in cloth. Profusely illustrated. Each book is wrapped in a ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... might have been a pleasant companion in happier, easier circumstances. She had banished him, threatened him, wheedled him out of victory. She, too, would be slipping back to the beast. Her body would warp, her skin grow hairy, her teeth lengthen and sharpen—Ugh! That, at ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... a jest. The levity, indeed, which he mingled with his worst and most inhuman acts, and the slightness of the occasions upon which he delighted to hang his most memorable atrocities, aggravated their impression at the time, and must have contributed greatly to sharpen the sword of vengeance. His palace happened to be contiguous to the circus. Some seats, it seems, were open indiscriminately to the public; consequently, the only way in which they could be appropriated, was by taking possession of them as early as the midnight preceding any great ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... twilight, ninety dry beans, called ceci, and upon each of these to write one of the ninety numbers drawn in the lottery, with an ink made of pitch and lard, which would not be affected by water. They were then to sharpen a knife, taking care that he who did so should touch no one during the operation; and after a day of fasting, they were to dig up at night a body recently dead, and, having cut off the head and removed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... he remained many hours longer in their hands. To effect this, he looked for no aid from others; for experience had taught him the value of self-reliance. The whole life of this singular being, indeed, had been one which was peculiarly calculated to throw him on his own resources, sharpen his wits, and render him fertile in expedients. He had been a foundling, and knew no more of his parentage than a young ostrich, that springs from the deserted egg in the sand. He was left, when an infant, at the door of a poor mechanic, in ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... healthy mind ought to be inseparable. We need not be passionless because we reason correctly. Strange to say, one's feelings will often sharpen one's knowledge of the truth, as they do ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... capering. "Splendid!" he cried. "Splendid! That will sharpen his temper if it don't his wits. The Squire's house was tried, you say?" He turned on the farmer again. "Hullo, my friend! I understood there were no ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and the Sect Epicurean. Yet nonsense notwithstanding, the Essay Club had members who proved in time to have superior minds if ever men had, and their disputations in one another's rooms helped to sharpen their mental apparatus, to start trains of ideas however immature, and to shake the cherished dogmatisms brought from beloved homes, even if dogmatism as stringent took their place. This is how the world moves, and Oxford was just beginning to rub its eyes, awaking ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... lion. Rubens has lifted his great hand, and the mark he has made has endured for two centuries, and we still continue wondering at him, and admiring him. What a strength in that arm! What splendor of will hidden behind that tawny beard, and those honest eyes! Sharpen your pen, my good critic, shoot a feather into him; hit him, and make him wince. Yes, you may hit him fair, and make him bleed, too; but, for all that, he is a lion—a mighty, conquering, generous, rampageous ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the state of their wardrobe, leaving the later portion of the morning for reading, or for some amusing recreation. "Recreation," says Bishop Hall, "is intended to the mind as whetting is to the scythe, to sharpen the edge of it, which would otherwise grow dull and blunt. He, therefore, that spends his whole time in recreation is ever whetting, never mowing; his grass may grow and his steed starve; as, contrarily, he that always toils and never recreates, is ever mowing, never whetting, labouring much ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... effectually. He tried to do so on a flat piece of rock, and then on the sole of his shoe, but after an attempt he found that it was very little sharper than before. He discovered, indeed, that he was ignorant of the way to sharpen a knife, as he was of ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... and prayed that so I might reduce this grosser material frame, and sharpen and quicken every nerve, and stimulate every fibre of the brain. So alone could I most nearly approach to the commune of spirits. Thus had those saints and prophets of old done when they had entered upon the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... have greatly enjoyed this peaceful repast. But it is now time for me to go and sharpen my boarding-pike. ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... Lines, that little patch of mud, stirred up and exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the whole people with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... tell the other her inmost secrets, and consult her in all matters of difficulty. Rosalind and Bertha have agreed to form a pair in the daily crocodile, and Grace has sent Florence to Coventry because she has dared to sharpen pencils for Lottie, the school pet, when she knew perfectly well that it was Grace's special privilege, and she is a nasty, interfering thing, anyhow, and ought to be snubbed! What chance has a poor late-comer against such syndicates as these? There is nothing for her but to ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hope for peace, pray, threaten, or complain; And thus, betwixt his wonder at the ill And his despair, there stood he gaping still. "Your answer, sir!—Shall I depart a spot I thus detest?"—"Oh, miserable lot!" Exclaim'd the man. "Go, serpent! nor remain To sharpen woe by insult and disdain; A nest of harpies was I doom'd to meet; What plots, what combinations of deceit! I see it now—all plann'd, design'd, contrived; Served by that villain—by this fury wived - What fate is mine! What wisdom, virtue truth, ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... further served to sharpen the political sense of the people. Year after year the assemblies had engaged in matters of serious moment They laid heavy taxes and collected them; they discussed foreign policy and their own defence; they protested against acts of the British government which affected them. Although no union ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... the Oyler boys are privileged to make anything which appeals to them and for which they can supply the material. The school machines are theirs, subject to their use at any time. Taking advantage of this, the boys sharpen the home knives and hatchets, make axe handles, umbrella racks, hall stands, stools, sleds, cane chairs, and repair or make any product which fancy ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... and mother have aged ten years. The old man, when I took him my watch to regulate the other day—for on week-days he is a watch-maker—began to ask questions, as eagerly as a child, about the village news. It turned out that, for a whole week, he had not been down to sharpen his knife upon the bridge. He has given up his glass of beer, too, and altogether the zeal of his house is eating ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... right to a fraction! I'll ask Miss Munns to take me in hand next—since she has scored such a triumph out of you. Evening classes two or three times a week, with Sylvia to sit by me and sharpen my pencils—that would be a happy way of combining instruction and amusement for the winter evenings, wouldn't it?" and—shades of Esmeralda!—Bridgie smiled, and ejaculated, "You naughty boy!" in a tone as far removed from fault-finding as it ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in amazement. The amazement changed to suspicion. His whole face seemed to narrow and sharpen out of his own likeness into something ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... undress with delight, but when she had finished she put out the candles. I complained of this act of hers, but she said she could not sleep with the light shining on her. I began to suspect that I might have some difficulties thrown in my way to sharpen the pleasure, but I determined to be resigned and to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... reputation that was beginning to attach to him. Fontenoy was content; and the scantiness of the majority by which the Resolution was defeated served at once to make the prospects of the Maxwell Bill, which was to be brought in after Easter, more doubtful, and to sharpen ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one does well to carry in his pocket a small flat file with which to sharpen his broad-heads before shooting them. They should have a serrated, meat-cutting edge. Even carrying arrows in a quiver tends to dull them, because they chafe each other while in motion. From time ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... out in the air, I mind, to sharpen up the appetites; an' a-boardin' with a widdy, too, ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... had suspected in his own mind that there existed a creature, somewhat like a mouse, somewhat like a red flower-pot, which glided around during the night-watches to sharpen slate-pencils, smooth out dog-ears from school-books, erase lead-pencil marks, polish up marbles, straighten kite strings, put the "suck" into brick-suckers, and otherwise make itself useful. If there were not such a creature, there ought ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a writing-material of the ancients; they used it to smoothe the roughness of the parchment, or to sharpen their reeds. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... accuse them to their faces of shooting Barney and the burros from the rim-rock. It had occurred to him that if they believed Barney dead, they might reveal something of their purpose in the attack. Concealment, he felt vaguely, would serve merely to sharpen their suspicion of him. It had seemed very important to Casey that these three should not know that Barney was probably well on his way to ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... out for favour by the head girl was in itself a distinction; but, apart from that, Marjorie keenly appreciated her society. She would wait about to do any little errand for her, would wash her brushes after the oil-painting lesson, sharpen her pencils, set butterflies for her, mount pressed flowers, or print out photographs. Winifrede was fond of entomology, and Marjorie, beforetime a lukewarm naturalist, now waxed enthusiastic in the collection of specimens. ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... kindred honor. Ever strive to give good counsel, Wear a countenance of sunshine, Bear a head upon thy shoulders Filled with wise and ancient sayings; Open bright thine eyes at morning To behold the silver sunrise, Sharpen well thine ears at evening, Thus to hear the rooster crowing; When he makes his second calling, Straightway thou must rise from slumber, Let the aged sleep in quiet; Should the rooster fail to call thee, Let the moonbeams touch thine eyelids, Let the Great Bear be thy keeper Often ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... that this young man is a fire-eater," said Louis, in order to sharpen the sentiment which he ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... perfectly cheery, as brave as the unthinking at their side, but they tramp firmly to a certain end. War lets loose the rich life of subconsciousness which most mortals keep bottled up in the sleepy secular days of humdrum. Peril and sudden death uncork those heady vapors, and sharpen the super-senses. This race of men with their presciences have no quarrel with death. They have made their peace with it. It is merely that they carry a foreknowledge of it—they are sure they will know when it is on ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... about 460 B.C., but spent most of his life at Larissa, in Thessaly. He was educated as a physician by his father, and travelled extensively as an itinerant practitioner for several years. His travels in different climates and among many different people undoubtedly tended to sharpen his keen sense of observation. He was a practical physician as well as a theorist, and, withal, a clear and concise writer. "Life is short," he says, "opportunity fleeting, judgment difficult, treatment easy, but treatment after ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... from his mouth, critically inspecting the sharp point which he had sucked it to. By a sort of vacuum process he could sharpen a stick of candy till it rivaled ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... is, that remains in a deceiving memory. The volume lies before me, no doubt, and if it is merely a question of detail, a name or a scene, I can find the page and verify my sentence. But I cannot catch a momentary sight of the book, the book itself; I cannot look up from my writing and sharpen my impression with a straight, unhampered view of the author's work; to glance at a book, though the phrase is so often in our mouths, is in fact an impossibility. The form of a novel—and how often a critic uses that expression too—is ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... censured, not for too rude a neglect, but for too elaborate a cultivation, of theatrical craft—such as introducing his principal characters, his Niobe and Achilles [30], with their faces hid, and preserving long and obstinate silence, in order by that suspense to sharpen the expectation of the audience. Aeschylus, in fact, contrary to the general criticism, was as earnest and thoughtful an artist as Sophocles himself. There was this difference, it is true; one invented the art and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... footing, each having given quarter to the other. As for the girl, I still thought of her hardly at all, in spite of Brian's words. She was an unknown quantity, which I would waste no time in studying, while the situation that opened bade me sharpen ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to him, looked at it earnestly, and said: "That's it all right. I tried to sharpen it a day or two ago, so that it would sharpen a pencil. I generally leave my penknife in the waist-coat I'm not wearing. But I couldn't get it ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... it in writing long letters that traveled across land and sea to far-away England; and the eldest and biggest brothers puttered it away in the blacksmith-shop, where there were farm implements to mend, hoes to sharpen, and picket-ropes and tugs to splice. Usually it was the lonesomest day of the week to the little girl; but this Sunday proved ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... staked off, owned and worked many claims in Leavenworth and other gulches. Sometimes he had streaks of luck and often the reverse. When lucky he would hire men to help him, when "broke" he would put more patches on his clothes, sharpen his own tools, borrow a sack of flour and work away. Some years later he discovered a really rich gold mine, then worked a silver mine in Utah and became a millionaire. During the spring of 1861 and the winter previous, he prospected ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... called the equal temperament system the attempt is made to divide the octave into twelve equal parts or semi-tones, thus rendering all keys alike. To do this it is necessary to slightly flatten all the fifths and sharpen the major thirds. The difference from just intonation is about one-fiftieth of a semi-tone. Although recommended and used by J. S. Bach, equal temperament was not introduced into English organs ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... make a mellow hour: Fill your pipe, and taste the wine— Warp your face, if it be sour, I can spare a smile from mine; If it sharpen up your wit, Let me feel the edge of it— I have eager ears to lend, Tom Van Arden, ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... in a glass case; And F a Foramen, that pierced the skull's base. G was a Grinder, who sharpen'd the fools; And H means the Half-and-half drunk at the schools. Fol ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... time, after sternly following up Scarlet-fevers, Small-poxes, and Ship-plagues, and driving them forth from their chosen haunts, it certainly needs to look after its own constitution a little, and sharpen, by country airs and odors, the powers probably deteriorated amid the noxious vapors ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... Jackie. "You see I was only practising at biting the ball with my teeth. I always bite things to sharpen my teeth so I can gnaw big bones when I get ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... coursers bounding o'er the dusty field. The first who marked them was the Cretan king; High on a rising ground, above the ring, The monarch sat: from whence with sure survey He well observ'd the chief who led the way, And heard from far his animating cries, And saw the foremost steed with sharpen'd eyes. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... desertion and its consequences: don't expect thanks for this noble devotion. I heard him draw a pleasant picture to Zillah of what he would do if he were as strong as I: the inclination is there, and his very weakness will sharpen his wits to ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... deficient in the ordinary mental ability of his tribe) who does not indicate an appreciation of every one of these in his own way. It is the idea of the useful which teaches him his utilitarian arts; which teaches him to build his house; to chip the flint for his weapon; to sharpen the stick to dig the place to drop the seed; and all those we call the arts of utility, the useful arts; and yet you will not find a savage tribe to-day but what goes somewhat above this; because among them all they make also an effort that these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... length, as he intends hanging springes. There are two methods of hanging them—in one the twig is bent into the form of the figure six, the tail end running through a slit out in the upper part of the twig. The other method is to sharpen a twig at both ends, and insert the points into a grower or stem of underwood, thus forming a bow, of which the stem forms the string below the springe; and hanging from the lower part of the bow is placed a small branch, with three or four berries of the mountain ash (there called "sorbier ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... sumptuous works, which were sold for 1000 and more livres at public sales. 3. Dictionnaire, &c., des principaux livres condamnes au feu, supprimes ou censures, Paris, 1806, 8vo., 2 vols. The very title of such a work must sharpen the edge of curiosity with those bibliomaniacs who have never seen it. 4. Bibliographie Curieuse, ou Notice Raisonnee des livres imprimes a cent exemplaires au plus, suivie d'une notice de quelques ouvrages tires sur papier de couleur, Paris, 1808, 8vo. Only one hundred ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... "but we must sharpen our wits in due proportion: though, at present, I suspect it is arms we shall want. I know the room well, and there is a lot of creeping ivy and such plants under the window; the greatest difficulty will be with ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... pillow; it is the only gift I can make you, but despise it not. It will surely prove useful to you, as it can cut down all that lies before it. Only beware of putting it into the fire to temper it. Sharpen it, however, as you will, but in that way never." So saying, she was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... little song carelessly, commonly, without a thought of the words, interrupting himself every now and then to sharpen his scythe, and then beginning again. To Eleanor it seemed the natural voice of the morning; one more, echo of the cry of universal parting, now for a day, now for a season, now for ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Trees and Herbs within our Country grow. But then you must not cheat and wrong the Indians, Or treat us with Reproach, Contempt, and Scorn; Else we will raise the Hatchet to the Sky, And let it never touch the Earth again, Sharpen its Edge, and keep it bright as Silver, Or stain it red with Murder and with Blood. Mind what I say, I do not ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... to select two long and slender pieces of wood, and sharpen the ends of them. Then he drove each of them into the ground in such a way that their tops crossed one another. These he bound fast together. Two other stakes were driven into the ground, and secured in the same way, about six or seven feet off. Another long ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... pointed to him an open piano. He should have remembered that in counting without the host, it is necessary to count twice. Chopin at first refused, but wearied at last by continued persecution, assuming, to sharpen the sting of his words, a stifled and languid tone of voice, he exclaimed: "Ah, sir, I have ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... a cigar, on the end of the balcony, where he had been contentedly contemplating the beautiful death of day. His calm, classic features began to whiten (and sharpen) in ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... spice-trading, and by emancipation of the slaves in 1861, when the Dutch Government placed the liberated population under police surveillance, compelling each individual to prove honest acquirement of the slender means necessary for subsistence. Contact with the world begins to sharpen native intelligence, already heightened by the fusion of European blood with the island race, and external cleanliness being enforced systematically in Dutch territory, the concrete cottages which alternate with the thatched dwellings are dazzlingly white, the diligent sweeping and watering ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... managed very fairly well. Most of the camels bogged, but some did not, nor did the horses, and our loads now consisted of little else but the saddles, and were therefore no great weight to carry. The weather was lovely now, bright warm days and frosty nights; unfortunately this tends to sharpen the appetite, which we had small means of satisfying. For the last ten days we had had nothing but damper, and not much of that, on which we spread tinned milk which had previously been discarded as unfit for use, being dark brown ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... chance for tillin'," he replied; "the land's wuss'n whar I was brung up down in Connecticut, an' thar we had ter round up the sheep once a week an' sharpen thar noses on the grin'stun! We manage ter raise 'nough ter ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... great offenders in regard to the abominable practice of killing fish by means of dynamite. It is very well to say that the law forbids it; but the administrators of the law are not always a terror to evil-doers, and perhaps the timely present of a dish of fine trout does not sharpen the energies of the officials. Another mode of destroying fish is practised by the Wallacks. There grows in this locality a poisonous plant, of which they make a decoction and throw it into the river, thereby killing great numbers of fish ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... Marzio, leaning back to sharpen his pencil, and staring at the wall. "You change every day. You are not at all what you used to be, and you know it. You are going back to the priests. You fawn on my brother ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... which may be found necessary for the regulation, after the war, of International Finance, it remains to consider what can be done to amend the evils from which it suffers, and likewise what, if anything, can be done to strengthen our financial weapon, and sharpen its edge to help us in the difficult fight that will follow the present war, ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... Sagamore, having thus secured another guardian for the sister whom he tenderly loved. "He shall stay, but Sassacus will return to the river of the Pequots, and will speak a loud word in the ears of his tribe, and they shall fill their quivers with arrows, and sharpen their tomahawks, and many will come back with him to ask for Neebin. Sassacus will go alone, and ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... fifteenth century, several circumstances operated to sharpen the edge of intolerance, especially against the Arabs. The Turks, whose political consideration of late years had made them the peculiar representatives and champions of Mahometanism, had shown a ferocity and cruelty in their treatment of the Christians, which brought ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... in slices about one inch thick, from half as large as the hand to four times that size. Sharpen a stick or branch of convenient length—say, from two to four feet long—and weave the point of the stick through the steak several times, so that it may be readily turned over a few brisk coals or on the windward side of a small fire. ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... after all you have done, to put yourself in my power!' cried she. 'Well, you sha'n't escape me THIS time!' And she took down a large knife and began to sharpen it.' ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... comin' into this world," said Uncle Terry once, "an' I don't 'spect to be 'bout goin' out. I was born on a wayback farm in Connecticut, where the rocks was so thick we used ter round the sheep up once a week an' sharpen thar noses on the grin'stun, so't they could get 'em 'tween the stuns. I walked a mile to school winters, an' stubbed my toes on the farm summers, till I was fourteen, an' then the old man 'greed to give me my time till I was twenty-one if I'ud pay him half I earned. I had a colt an' old busted ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... o' property, this 'ere farm," he said, surveying the scene around him with the air of a connoisseur. "None o' yer stun pastur land where the sheep can't get their noses down through the rocks without a file to sharpen 'em! Deacon Pitkin did a putty fair stroke o' business when he swapped off his old place for this 'ere. That are old place was all swamp land and stun pastur; wa'n't good for raisin' nothin' but juniper bushes and bull frogs. But I tell yeu" preceded ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you please? He was a fool and a bore, but I wished him no harm. I was sorry as any one when I heard of his death, and I offered a good reward for the catching of the mean skunk that killed him. If I had done so myself I wouldn't have been such a fool as to sharpen the scent of the hounds on ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... no protection for murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... fun of Lory and Raven, though Lory's lasted little longer than Jack's joy of his white mount. Of course Jack was too game to let on he knew he'd been done, but not too busy to sharpen ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... here sharpen a little the distinction between sensations and things. Standing at some distance from the tree, I see an apple fall to the ground. Were I only half as far away, my experience would not be exactly the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... that. I used to think Rockwell was quite a promising young man at one time. But that is not the question. If, after all, though it does sharpen a man's wits, it only makes him discontented for the rest of his life, I maintain that such a state of improvement is not to be desired. If things are really better and pleasanter in Europe, I don't want to know ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... you—-might do, Mr. Driggs," hinted Tom Reade. "You might lend us a grindstone, if you have one to spare. Then we can sharpen our knives right on the ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... to face, how changed is the hideous aspect of his deed, from that fair face of promise with which it tempted him! Conscience, and honor, and plain honesty, which left him when they could not restrain, now come back to sharpen his anguish. Overawed by the prospect of open shame, of his wife's disgrace, and his children's beggary, he cows down, and slinks out of life ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... number of terms which we are in the habit of using in a vague though not unintelligible way, and which it is as well now to define. These terms are the tools with which we are to work, and the first thing is to sharpen them. It is nothing to us that they have been sharpened a thousand times before; they always get dull in the using, and every new workman has a right to carry them to the grindstone and sharpen ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and the two men, in rather a surly manner, promised to meet Mr. Hancock. The next afternoon Mr. Hancock gave us a couple of stakes, which he told us to sharpen, and then we went up to the Salem road together. We found Sam and Jesse sitting ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... her intimacy with this monk gave room for some suspicion that her privacies with him were not all employed about the care of her soul. Afterward, to ridicule her yet more, King Albert sent her a hone to sharpen her needles, and swore not to put on his nightcap until she had yielded to him. But under perilous circumstances Margaret was never at a loss how to act. She acted here with the utmost prudence, trying first to gain the favor of the peers of the state, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you up in the tower, pray? And why did you send me in such a hurry to the leads? and why did he sharpen his long knife, and roar out to you ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... never more than one; and besides this circumstance, the canal which passes from the crop to the gizzard, is by one-half too small to give passage to such a mass. We used them, in preference to any other stone, to sharpen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the peasant, smiling. "A minute here, a minute there. The time costs nothing. What am I doing? Nothing. I digest. To pass the time I sharpen the knife. I am like this. I say it is a sin to ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the cavern, he looked down And saw a gloomy place, dismal as hell; But not one cursed, impious sorcerer Was visible in that infernal depth. Awhile he stood—his falchion in his grasp, And rubbed his eyes to sharpen his dim sight, And then a mountain-form, covered with hair, Filling up all the space, rose into view. The monster was asleep, but presently The daring shouts of Rustem broke his rest, And brought him suddenly upon his feet, When ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... we would look to see when the village down there will have to be reaped.' 'What do you mean?' I said. 'You cannot see what we see,' they answered; 'but a human place is like a flower, or a field of corn, and grows ripe, or won't grow ripe, and then some of us up there have to sharpen our sickles.' 'What!' said I, for a great fear came upon me, 'they are not wicked people down there!' 'No, not very wicked, but slow and dull.' Then I could say nothing more for a while, and they did not ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... He was never tired of visiting the museum in the tower, and spent endless hours in inspecting the exhibits, till he was thoroughly familiar with every detail of all of them. He asked permission to clean and polish and sharpen them—a favour which was readily granted. In addition to the above objects, there were many things of a kind to awaken human fear. Stuffed serpents of the most objectionable and horrid kind; giant insects from the tropics, fearsome in every detail; fishes and crustaceans covered with weird ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... dogs found a location for the camp they were fortunate enough to find a big herd of buffalo. On their return, before they reached the camp they began to sing a crazy dog song, riding abreast. It means: 'A song to sharpen your knife, and patch up your stomach, for you are going to have something good to eat.' They made a circle, coming to camp from the sunrise, and moved toward the sunset, and then the leaders told the camp they had seen lots of buffalo. Then they dismounted ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... seek out arms; and now they rub their shields smooth and make their spearheads glitter with [627-659]fat lard, and grind their axes on the whetstone: rejoicingly they advance under their standards and hear the trumpet note. Five great cities set up the anvil and sharpen the sword, strong Atina and proud Tibur, Ardea and Crustumeri, and turreted Antemnae. They hollow out head-gear to guard them, and plait wickerwork round shield-bosses; others forge breastplates of brass or smooth greaves ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... reckless breeding insisted upon. But beneath all this wordy pretension and economic jargon, we detect another aim. That is the unconscious dramatization of human society into the "class conflict." Nothing was overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this "conflict." Marx depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues were embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the capitalist. In the end, as always in such ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... intense disdain; "the husband's helpless. He may sharpen his—tusks, but he'll never come to battle. How good and great you are! It is quite refreshing to hear your strictures on innocent amusements. But I beg you will speak of that lady with due respect; she is the first—yes, positively the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... beams of a blazing sun, they were partly relieved from their sufferings; but a few handfuls of barley they had managed to secrete and bring in from the field, proved only sufficient to sharpen an appetite which they could ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... see the hopes and disappointments of the miner. While we were at work on the canal we had occasion to blast some boulders that were in our way. We had a blacksmith to sharpen the picks and drills who had a portable forge on the point of land between the two rivers. When we were ready to blast the rock we gave him timely warning, he paid no heed, the blast went off, and a portion of a boulder weighing about 500 pounds went directly ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... was then that on board the "Startler" there was no little excitement. The grindstone was in full use to sharpen cutlasses, and in addition there was a great demand made on the armourer for files to give to the lethal weapons a keener edge, one which was tried over and over again, as various messmates consulted together as to the probability of taking off a Malay's ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... then again there was the flat file, in respectable numbers, that are used for cutting on either edge, and that are carried in sheathes, to prevent the mechanics from cutting their neighbours' fingers. These files were to be distributed to the paupers in Ireland, to enable them to sharpen their teeth, so that they could masticate animal food at the grand barbecue that was to be given on the landing of our vessel. Another portion of the cargo was 200,000 puff-balls and sugar-plums, for gratuitous distribution ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... brim trimmed with tinkling bells. A rope was tied around his waist to hold him in shape, for he was stuffed with straw in every part of him except the top of his head, where at one time the Wizard of Oz had placed sawdust, mixed with needles and pins, to sharpen his wits. The head itself was merely a bag of cloth, fastened to the body at the neck, and on the front of this bag was painted the ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the ship is on the high seas, and the crew must row whole days together to reach moorings. [3] Now note the difference. Here you may find a captain [4] able by dint of speech and conduct to whet the souls of those he leads, and sharpen them to voluntary toils; and there another so dull of wit and destitute of feeling that it will take his crew just twice the time to finish the same voyage. See them step on shore. The first ship's ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... to doe the like. [Sidenote: Great offers.] But the better to allure our hungry stomackes, he brought vs a trimme baite of raw flesh, which for fashion sake with a boat-hooke wee caught into our boate: but when the cunning Cater perceiued his first cold morsell could nothing sharpen our stomacks, he cast about for a new traine of warme flesh to procure our appetites, wherefore be caused one of his fellowes in halting maner, to come foorth as a lame man from behind the rockes, and the better to declare his kindnes in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... have been a pleasant companion in happier, easier circumstances. She had banished him, threatened him, wheedled him out of victory. She, too, would be slipping back to the beast. Her body would warp, her skin grow hairy, her teeth lengthen and sharpen—Ugh! That, at least, ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... agonies he suffered, and take off his mind from the greater that he feared. He was never more at home, or more at ease, than with his class. He loved to enrich them out of his own stores, and thereby draw out and sharpen their independent faculties. He was not disconcerted when he sometimes drew to little purpose; though sure, by set remonstrance, or by his peculiar, quaint, dry and caustic humor, to rebuke indifference and neglect, or expose the artifice of a bold, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... officials who sat like spiders spinning murderous webs in Dublin Castle. The audience were delighted with this, but their joy reached its height when someone shouted: 'You might speak better of the men who tore down the placard on Wednesday.' Mr. O'Rourke ignored the suggestion, and passed on to sharpen his wit upon the landlords. He described them as 'ill-omened tax-gatherers who suck the life-blood of the country, and refuse to disgorge a penny of it for any useful purpose.' Mr. O'Rourke was not a man who shrank from a mixed ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... lightning.' The hoarse Cyprian owes her existence to copious draughts of Jacky. The Link-boy and Mud Larks, in joining their browns together, are for some Stark Naked. And the Out and Outers, from the addition of bitters to it, in order to sharpen up a dissipated and damaged Victualling Office, cannot take any thing but Fuller's Earth. Much it should seem, therefore, depends upon a name; and as a soft sound is at all times pleasing to the listener—to ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... deeds of almost Christian kindness, returned to their wigwams, to sharpen the edges of their tomahawks, the points of their javelins, the barbs of their arrows; and were soon, with hideous yells, rushing upon their foes the Miamis, burning, killing, scalping—performing deeds of cruelty which ought to cause even ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... han' your story tell, When wi' a bosom crony; But still keep something to yoursel' Ye scarcely tell to ony. Conceal yoursel' as weel's ye can Frae critical dissection; But keek thro' ev'ry other man, Wi' sharpen'd, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... impartial? Yes, if her instincts be pure and harmonious, and her worldly knowledge that of a child. Her discrimination between right and wrong would be at once accurate and involuntary, like the test of poison. Love for the criminal would but sharpen her intuition. The sentence would not be spoken, but would be readable in eyes untainted alike by prejudice ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small States into large ones which has been operating ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... or harness or mending shoes. I can cut things in hardwood and sharpen saws too, and I'll work for a trial ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... ahead, and leaping across a deep run that traversed the path, the Indian stopped on the brink, threw his tomahawk, and gave up the pursuit with one of those fierce yells which rage and disappointment both served to sharpen. It was distinctly heard at both the forts. About sixteen years since, an Indian tomahawk was ploughed up near this spot, and was most probably the one thrown at Mr. Meigs; as the rescue and pursuit from Fort Harmar was ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... were excellently adapted to foster his peculiar talent. There a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"—a pleasure hardly to be enjoyed now. And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each other's skill in all dialectic manoeuvres. Conversation may be pleasantest, as Johnson admitted, when two friends meet quietly to exchange their minds without any thought of display. But conversation considered as a game, as a bout of intellectual ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of Andronicus. [17] The people rose in arms: from the Asiatic shore the tyrant despatched his troops and galleys to assist the national revenge; and the hopeless resistance of the strangers served only to justify the rage, and sharpen the daggers, of the assassins. Neither age, nor sex, nor the ties of friendship or kindred, could save the victims of national hatred, and avarice, and religious zeal; the Latins were slaughtered in their houses ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... science, that he has by his own skill and application purchased for himself the discernment which places him in so painful a preeminence. The great triumph of man is in the power of education, to improve his intellect, to sharpen his perceptions, and to regulate and modify his moral qualities. But craniology reduces this to almost nothing, and exhibits us for the most part as the helpless victims of a blind ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... in the midst of the afternoon silence, her eyelids closed. It seemed to Zbyszko that she was not asleep,—when at the other end of the meadow a man who was mowing hay stopped and began to sharpen his scythe loudly upon the hone. Then she trembled a little and opened her eyelids for a moment, but immediately closed them again. Her breast heaved as though she was deeply inspiring, and in a ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... simple and anxious to be pleased, is shrewdly alert. Every now and then they shuffle the trains at Jamaica just to keep him guessing and sharpen his faculty of judging whether this train goes to Brooklyn or Penn Station. His decisions have to be made rapidly. We are speaking now of Long Island commuters, whom we know best; but commuters are the same ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... see it, you cut it out with a sharp knife removing the bark to the wood. Blighted trees send up shoots from the base, below the blighted bark. So you take one of these shoots, sharpen it at the top and insert this sharpened tip under the healthy bark at the top of the blighted area. The shoot should be a little longer than the blighted area so that you can get a spring to the shoot as you push its tip in between the bark and the trunk. Even if it ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... all the way to Grantham, nothing in the whole affair provoked him so much as the condolences of his friends, and the foolish figure they should both make at church, the first Sunday;—of which, in the satirical vehemence of his wit, now sharpen'd a little by vexation, he would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions,—and place his rib and self in so many tormenting lights and attitudes in the face of the whole congregation;—that my mother declared, these two stages were so truly ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... his complexion reddening in his turn, "I know your quick wit too well of old to have sought an interview that you might sharpen its edge at the expense of my honour. Lord Ruthven and myself, with Sir Robert Melville as a concurrent, come to your Grace on the part of the Secret Council, to tender to you what much concerns the safety of your own life and the welfare ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... headed off any designs that might be had upon Pat, his mother went to sharpen her own wits for whatever the morrow might have ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... son of man. These contradictions, which are not strange to human nature, possessed his mind, and could not be brought to rest, either through the divinely-given gentleness of his father and brother, or the loving and alleviating co-operation of his sister-wife. In order to sharpen them to the point of impossibility of endurance, Satan comes upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit, who begins by unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously through all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... wilderness, where the struggle against savage and beast of prey sharpen the wits and teach the pioneer the need for rapid decisions, lost no time in executing his commission. As soon as word could reach Lyon, he informed his old comrade of the work he had in mind for him. The next post told Mordecai that the two men with their tools, gin saws and other ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... inspiration, they were not altogether unconscious of higher influences: nay, they speak of their hymns as god-given ('devattam,' Rv. III. 37, 4). One poets says (Rv. VI. 47, 10): 'O god (Indra) have mercy, give me my daily bread! Sharpen my mind, like the edge of iron. Whatever I now may utter, longing for thee, do thou accept it; make me possessed of God!' Another utters for the first time the famous hymn, the Gayatri, which now for more than three thousand years has been the daily prayer of every Brahman, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... health and life. They are thus very diligent in rinsing out their mouths and cleansing their teeth after eating, and upon arising in the morning. For the same purpose they treat and adorn their teeth in the following way: From early childhood they file and sharpen them, [44] either leaving them uniform or fashioning them all to a point, like a saw—although this latter is not practiced by the more elegant. They all cover their teeth with a varnish, either lustrous black or bright ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... attention: "Now listen, everybody! I got someting to say. Beesvings don't have all dis to herselluf. Now it is my turn. Come up closer so I get hold of you. Vait, and I git back on de platform. Here, you olt frent of mine, Dan Porterfield, here is a new butcher-knife sharpener for you, to sharpen your knives on ven you cuts dem bifsteaks. And, Heffern, come close; here is a silver-plated skimmer for dot cream you make, and a pig fan for your daughter. And Polly Codman—git out of de way dere, and let Polly Codman come up!—here, Polly, is a pair of gloves for ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... knew always that one of us would kill him. Oh, it was a grand fight. But Gunnar will sharpen his sword no more. There was a ford near my father's house where the clear water ran fresh over the stones. That might help me. But it is far away. And my father too. You tell Freida that we did not make the ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... ready for the jungle hunt to-night," answered Mrs. Lion. "I heard him say something about taking you, so perhaps you had better sharpen your claws, also." ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... was curious to know if the cow was in milk. Dad noticed him; sprang upon him; seized him by the shirt collar and swung him round and trailed him through the yard, saying: "Find me th' knife; d' y' HEAR?" It seemed to sharpen Joe's memory, for he suddenly remembered having stuck it ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... spirit declared there was no sin. She had merely been resolute and truthful. So she strengthened herself in her belief in her own blamelessness, and drove down the misgiving to prey on the depths of her soul, and sharpen her temper by ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the Fashionable World to sharpen its wits upon," he continued, keeping his stern gaze perseveringly averted. "And so, my lady—because I cannot any longer cheat folks into accepting me as a—gentleman, I shall in all probability become a ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... his cravat, roll up his shirt-sleeves, give his curly hair the right touch before the glass, get out his book on engineering, his boxes of instruments, his drawing paper, his profile paper, open the book of logarithms, mix his India ink, sharpen his pencils, light a cigar, and sit down at the table to "lay out a line," with the most grave notion that he was mastering the details of engineering. He would spend half a day in these preparations without ever working out a problem or having the faintest ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... indifferent: we, for our parts, are busy or sluggish, eager or unhappy, and our eyes are apt to get dulled to this eventfulness of form in those things which we are always looking at. Now it is one of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter: for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in: forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in which the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... came black Lords; and Dwarfs obscene With lavish tongues; and Trolls; and treacherous Things Like loose-lipp'd Councillors and cruel Kings Who sharpen lies and daggers subterrene: And flashed their evil eyes and weeping cried, "We ruled the world for Peace. By her own hand ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... with them, and led them into a beautiful room, where she gave them food to eat, and showed them a soft cushion on which they might sleep. Then she left them and went down into the palace kitchens, where she told the servants to sharpen the knives, and to make a great fire ready, and hang a large kettleful ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... a few weeks, Victor Emmanuel lost his brother, his mother, and his wife. The King, who felt keenly when he did feel, was driven distraught with grief; no circumstance was wanting which could sharpen the edge of his sorrow. The two Queens, both Austrian princesses, had never interfered in foreign politics; what they suffered they suffered in silence. But they were greatly influenced by the ministers of the religion which had been a comfort ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... according to the expression of the missionaries, the fat of ants (the white part of the abdomen) is a very substantial food. When the cakes of cassava were prepared, Father Zea, whose fever seemed rather to sharpen than to enfeeble his appetite, ordered a little bag to be brought to him filled with smoked vachacos. He mixed these bruised insects with flour of cassava, which he pressed us to taste. It somewhat resembled rancid butter ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... she needed most to finish her sandals were scissors. They would cost so much to buy she would have to manage without them. Fortunately she had her knife, and with the help of a stone to sharpen the point she could make it fine ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... What produced the friction? Force. What is more, the amount of heat produced is the exact measure of the amount of force used. Heat is a form of force. I must urge you to realize precisely this energy of force. When you sharpen a knife you put oil upon the hone. Why?—When the carpenter saws a piece of wood he greases the saw. Why?—When you travel by train you see the railway-porter running up and down the platform with a box of yellow grease with which he greases the wheels. Why?—The ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... or twilight, ninety dry beans, called ceci, and upon each of these to write one of the ninety numbers drawn in the lottery, with an ink made of pitch and lard, which would not be affected by water. They were then to sharpen a knife, taking care that he who did so should touch no one during the operation; and after a day of fasting, they were to dig up at night a body recently dead, and, having cut off the head and removed the brain, they were to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... tries to imitate the absolute thinness of thin or slight things, as much modern wood carving does, I saw in Italy, a year or two ago, a marble sculpture of birds' nests.] On the other hand, we cast our iron into bars—brittle, though an inch thick—sharpen them at the ends, and consider fences, and other work, made of such materials, decorative! I do not believe it would be easy to calculate the amount of mischief done to our taste in England by that fence iron-work of ours alone. If ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... turned up, but let the points be deeper than for the bed or sofa. This is because the ends of the envelope are to form the sides of the cart and must be longer from front to back. Bend the tips of the points in and crease the folds sharply that they may lie flat against the sides. Sharpen one end of a small, round stick and push it through the middle of the folded point on one side, then slide a large, empty spool on the stick and thrust the point of the stick through the opposite side (Fig. 100). The stick should stand out beyond the cart about half an inch on ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... reduced in blackness and the surface of the paper becomes roughened, so that it will soil easier and be harder to clean. In order to produce fine pencil lines without requiring a very frequent sharpening of the pencil it is best to sharpen the pencil as in Figures 7 and 8, so that the edge shall be long in the direction in which it is moved, which is denoted by the arrow in Figure 7. But when very fine work is to be done, as in the case of Patent Office drawings, a long, round point is ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... the power of the foe whose fury they were about to brave, were not at all disposed to precipitate hostilities, but Philip found it difficult to hold his young men under restraint. They became very insolent and boastful, and would sharpen their knives and tomahawks upon the door-sills of the colonists, vaporing in mysterious phrase of the great deeds ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... world is perpetually in danger of making a wrong application of moral principles to individual cases, and, so with the very best intentions in the world, may occasion much mischief both to himself and others. Comedy is intended to sharpen our powers of discrimination, both of persons and situations; to make us shrewder; and this is its true ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... while," he answered. He sat down facing her. "At six o'clock I found out you were here. At eight—as soon as I could get away—I came out. I told you how I spent the evening. If I had needed anything to sharpen my longing for you that would have done it—but I think I had reached about the limit of what I could bear in that line already. It has been one constant augmenting thirst for a draught that was ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... strenuous days the Department has no time for baiting individuals. It has two or three millions of men to sharpen its wit upon. Its favourite pastime at present is a sort of giant's game of chess, the fair face of England serving as board, and the various units of the K. armies as pieces. The object of the players is to get each piece through as many squares as possible in a given time, it ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... preparation was to sharpen the edges of a diamond-shaped trowel used at the diggings, with a piece ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Me!" Discernment is succeeded by obedience. That is the one condition of becoming a saint—to follow the immediate call of the Lord. And it is the one condition of becoming an expert listener. Every time I hear the voice, and follow, I sharpen my sense of hearing, and the next time the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... the preparation of which constitutes a distinct industry, are either of larch, Spanish chestnut, ash, willow, birch, or beech—larch or chestnut being preferred. Women clear the poles of the bark, and men sharpen them at one end, which is dipped in creosote before being used. The ground is cleared, and the poles are stuck in against the old plants ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... place it in the left hand between the index and second fingers, holding the fingers about half an inch apart, and bending the paper to fit between them; then rub the eraser in the crease thus formed, holding it at an acute angle. Sometimes it is necessary to sharpen the eraser with a knife or a pair of scissors before rubbing it on the emery paper. In working with the eraser on the crayon paper do not rub hard enough to remove all the crayon from the surface of the ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... and other questions of the same sort, occupied the brains, the tongues, and the pens of the ablest men in the civilised world during several centuries. This sort of philosophy, it is evident, could not be progressive. It might indeed sharpen and invigorate the minds of those who devoted themselves to it; and so might the disputes of the orthodox Lilliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of eggs. But such disputes could add nothing to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... consort yours, 40 Heedless of the inhabitants of heav'n Alike, and of the just revenge of man. But death is on the wing; death for you all. He said; their cheeks all faded at the sound, And each with sharpen'd eyes search'd ev'ry nook For an escape from his impending doom, Till thus, alone, Eurymachus replied. If thou indeed art he, the mighty Chief Of Ithaca return'd, thou hast rehears'd With truth the crimes committed by the Greeks 50 Frequent, both in thy house and ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... hour is nigh: now hearts beat high; Each sword is sharpen'd well; And who dares die, who stoops to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the Bended Twig," published and widely read not long ago, was a volume to sharpen the reader's appetite for "more of the same sort." ***** 'Ups and Downs' is a cluster of sketches and incidents in real life, narrated with a grace of thought and flow of expression rarely to be met. The sketches well entitle the volume to ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... under its film of tissue—the only thing between him and death. I thought of it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase: '"Sharpen sabres!' was ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... generally accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... mowing in a field as a Wanderer went by clad in a dark blue cloak and carrying a wanderer's staff in his hand. One of the thralls spoke to the Wanderer: "Tell them in the house of Baugi up yonder that I can mow no more until a whetstone to sharpen my scythe is sent to me." "Here is a whetstone," said the Wanderer, and he took one from his belt. The thrall who had spoken whetted his scythe with it and began to mow. The grass went down before his scythe as if the wind had cut it. "Give us the whetstone, give us ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... a sharp instrument, made of the end of a gun-barrel, something like a carpenter's gouge, and this had a bone handle, with which she kept scraping off the inside of the skin of its fibres, so as to make it soft and pliable. She had a stone to sharpen the tool with, and as she leaned over, tugging away, the perspiration rolled off her face in streams. Poor old creature, I felt sorry for her, as the work might have been done by several big, lazy, half-grown Indian boys I saw romping ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... was in his usual conversational mood. He released his Majesty's nose for a moment, and, as he turned to sharpen ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... is, that work done under the influence of any kind of stimulants is unhealthy work, and tends to no good. I never use any kind of stimulant for intellectual work—only a glass of wine during dinner to sharpen the appetite. As to smoking generally, it is a vile and odious practice; but I do not know that, unless carried to excess, it is in any way unhealthy. Instead of stimulants, literary men should seek for aid in a pleasant variety of ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... Simmons had sold my place, the place my grandfather built, I had about a thousand dollars left, and I thought I would start a little business with it, a ... a gun store,—I like guns,—here in Greenstream. And I'd sharpen scythes, put sickles into condition, you know, things like that. I went to Stenton with my capital in my pocket, looking for some stock to open with, and met a man in a hotel who said he was the representative of the Standard Hardware Company. He could ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sort of heirloom or secret. The grandfather while at work used to trouble and puzzle himself how to get a very sharp edge, and at length one night he dreamed how to do it. From that time he became prosperous. If a celebrated sonata was revealed in a dream, why not the way to sharpen ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... it, a machinist; nor have we any desire to present a lot of useful articles as samples of what to make. The object is to show the boy what are the requirements necessary to make him a machinist; how to hold, handle, sharpen and grind the various tools; the proper ones to use for each particular character of work; how the various machines are handled and cared for; the best materials to use; and suggest the numerous things which can be done in a shop which will pave the way for making his work ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... guides on the Gussie took their machetes to a grindstone on the hurricane-deck. Our soldiers gathered around to see them sharpen their long knives, but only one could be induced to test the edge of these barbarous instruments with ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... it will certainly provoke much ill-feeling. I must not, however, be deterred by that, for it is the daily concomitant of public life, and hard words break no bones, as they say, but rather serve to thicken the skins and sharpen the tongues of us public men, so that, we are able to meet our opponents with their own weapons. I perceive before me, indeed, a liberal education in just those public qualities wherein I am conscious of being as yet deficient." And his heart sank within him, thinking of the carts on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the other articles. It was heavy work toiling over the sand, but Owen, setting the example, the rest cheerfully obeyed. It took several days to fit the boat for sea. The tools were blunt, and no means existed to sharpen them. ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... only groaned. Seeing that in his present state he could say nothing, I went across to the table and mixed him a glass of grog. When I gave it to him he drank it eagerly. It seemed to sharpen his ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... God! said I, kicking my portmanteau aside, what is there in this world's goods which should sharpen our spirits, and make so many kind-hearted brethren of us fall out so cruelly as ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... said George, "I have prayed against this on my knees every night of my life, and it is come upon me at last. Sharpen your ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... innocent altogether," laughed the Pencil, rubbing its leaden head rapidly on a piece of paper, to sharpen its point. "A regular sitting! What do you think? No, sir, no, emphatically never. Such an operation would be fatal to the delicate constitution of a caricature, and the result would not be worth the paper upon which it is drawn. It is only in ordinary portraiture that ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... been quite garrulous, have I not? Now I must disturb some document-dust, and sharpen my pen afresh to the police-official style, for the president of the provincial court and the government. Could I but enclose myself herewith, or go along in a salmon-basket as mail-matter! Till we meet again, dearest black one.[13] I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not ever-sensible countenances. How should they?—but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them.—Some admire the Jewish female physiognomy. I admire it—but with trembling. Jael had those full dark ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fell to thinking of Sexberga, and those thoughts were pleasant enough. And idly I began to sharpen my seax again on a great square stone that was handy in the wall as I sat, but it was very soft, and crumbled away under the steel ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... Look at it well. Then lay it aside. Close your eyes. Reproduce the picture mentally in detail. Then repose your mind on the same image to the exclusion of all other thoughts. This is a more fixed and meditative method and will sharpen the mind wonderfully. It will also develop the power of conscious Mental Imagery. The key to Objective Concentration ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... pair of scissors and pretended to sharpen them, looking at Griswold as if he meant ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... and tribble the value of what they have to Sell, and never take less than the real value of the article in Such things as is calculated to do them Service. Such as Blue & white heeds, with which they trade with the nativs above; files which they make use of to Sharpen their tools, fish hooks of different Sises and tobacco- Tobacco and blue beeds they do ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... so furiously that he broke his pencil, and had, as you observe, to sharpen it again. This is of interest, Watson. The pencil was not an ordinary one. It was above the usual size, with a soft lead; the outer colour was dark blue, the maker's name was printed in silver lettering, and the piece remaining is only about an inch and a half ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... under the pretext of picking up a case knife to sharpen her pencil. Now though her lids were lowered as she hacked at the stubby point, she was perfectly aware of the hopeful curiosity in the freshman's side glance at her. Lila despised the habit of side glances. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... me!" she mocked, "and you used to be so quick-witted, my ascetic. Still, health and happiness do not always sharpen the wits. You are healthy ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... worked away at the boat, while he despatched the rest of the party to bring up the other articles. It was heavy work toiling over the sand, but Owen, setting the example, the rest cheerfully obeyed. It took several days to fit the boat for sea. The tools were blunt, and no means existed to sharpen them. ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... To be singled out for favour by the head girl was in itself a distinction; but, apart from that, Marjorie keenly appreciated her society. She would wait about to do any little errand for her, would wash her brushes after the oil-painting lesson, sharpen her pencils, set butterflies for her, mount pressed flowers, or print out photographs. Winifrede was fond of entomology, and Marjorie, beforetime a lukewarm naturalist, now waxed enthusiastic in the collection of specimens. She was running one day in pursuit ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... as he pushed him into a corner by the molasses barrel, and took him by the neck and choked him so his eyes stuck out. "You have driven away several of my best customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have your life," and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it on ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... unconsciously fetched it out; and looking on that black continent at arm's length, withered inwardly and felt his features sharpen as with mortal sickness. ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... amazement. The amazement changed to suspicion. His whole face seemed to narrow and sharpen out of his own likeness into ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the Advocate-General Blancmesnil which followed, the opinions taken, the order given, sometimes reiterated to keep the two double doors open, did not surprise anybody; served only as the preface to all the rest; to sharpen curiosity more and more as the moment approached in which it ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... take and sharpen a good bread-knife', said Dapplegrim,' and do as if you were going to cut in two the third loaf on the left hand of those four loaves which are lying on the dresser in the king's kitchen, and you'll find her ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... was almost capering. "Splendid!" he cried. "Splendid! That will sharpen his temper if it don't his wits. The Squire's house was tried, you say?" He turned on the farmer again. "Hullo, my friend! I understood there were ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and when he was certain that the creepers had completely veiled him from the eyes of watchers on the yacht he picked up a small flat stone from the ground, drew a yachting knife from his belt and crouching on his heels started to sharpen the blade. As he rubbed industriously he sang a weird tune in his native tongue, rounding off each verse with five words in English that explained his industry. The words were: "Now I'll kill you, Soma," and the chant was a poem of consolation to the spirit of the ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... fool and a bore, but I wished him no harm. I was sorry as any one when I heard of his death, and I offered a good reward for the catching of the mean skunk that killed him. If I had done so myself I wouldn't have been such a fool as to sharpen the scent of the hounds on my ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... companion in happier, easier circumstances. She had banished him, threatened him, wheedled him out of victory. She, too, would be slipping back to the beast. Her body would warp, her skin grow hairy, her teeth lengthen and sharpen—Ugh! ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... of some of his followers. I am sorry to say this variety does not come out so well in the reproduction on page 194 [Transcribers Note: Plate XLIV] as I could have wished, the half-tone process having a tendency to sharpen edges ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... who scarce could gain this place, Through stony mountains and a dreary waste; Through cliffs, whose sharpen'd stones tremendous hung, Where dreadful darkness spread ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... you receive have pushed aside your false nose; it is in vain that you decree, that you rob, that you incarcerate; you are too grotesque to be terrible. Even if you carried the parody out to the end, and thought fit to erect a guillotine and sharpen the knife, we should even then decline to look seriously upon you, and were we to see one by one five hundred heads fell into the basket, we should still persist in thinking that your axe was of wood, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... determination of words to the mouth, and went best pace with his tongue instead of coughing and hemming, and stammering and stuttering—wishing himself 'well out of it,' as the saying is. His seclusion only seemed to sharpen his faculties and make him enjoy society more. He gushed forth like a pent-up fountain. He was not a bit afraid of the ladies—rather the contrary; indeed, he would make love to them all—all that were good-looking, at least, for he always candidly said that he 'wouldn't have anything ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... toil impos'd, And hurtful quarrels; for in wordy war About a girl, Achilles and myself Engag'd; and I, alas! the strife began: Could we be friends again, delay were none, How short soe'er, of Ilium's final doom. But now to breakfast, ere we wage the fight. Each sharpen well his spear, his shield prepare, Each to his fiery steeds their forage give, Each look his chariot o'er, that through the day We may unwearied stem the tide of war; For respite none, how short soe'er, shall be Till night shall bid the storm of battle ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... regulations, things that can be imposed by authority. Standards exist in the mind, where they grow out of that personal sense of values which is one of the twin pillars on which civilization rests. All that authority can do is to stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle education and absolute sincerity. The critic can put good things in another man's way and present them in a sympathetic light; also, he can resolutely refuse ever to pretend that he likes what he does not like. Standards are imposed from above in the sense ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... ey'd us, as at eventide One eyes another under a new moon, And toward us sharpen'd their sight as keen, As an old tailor at ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... a porpoise), and undertook to break the subject to him. It is quite common to find candidates for service very deaf, and if they contrive to pass their 'entrance examination' (for which no doubt they sharpen their faculties), they stay with you for a month at least with an excellent excuse for making it a holiday, since, whatever you tell them to do they cannot hear and do not do it, or do something else which they like better. Mistresses who are silent ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... designs that might be had upon Pat, his mother went to sharpen her own wits for whatever the morrow might have in ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... the room. Not a girl dared to giggle; a few began nervously to sharpen pencils, but most sat and stared while the casts were denuded of their trappings. Miss Hampson removed the moustache from Venus as if she were apologizing to that deity for sacrilege, and, with her own ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... and dreamy during his first three years at school, and caused me some uneasiness, has made a sudden start. Doubtless he realized, in a way most children never do, the aim of all this preparatory work, which is to sharpen the intelligence, to get them into habits of application and accustom them to that fundamental principle of all society—obedience. My dear, a few days ago I had the proud joy of seeing Armand crowned at the great interscholastic competition in the crowded Sorbonne, when your godson received the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... youth. The material operated on here is of a nature too subtle to be shaped and fashioned by the undeviating routine of any such mechanical operations. The process necessary to sharpen one intellect may terrify and confound another. The means which in one instance serve to convince, serve in other cases to confuse. The illustration which to one is a ray of light, is to another only "darkness visible." Mind is not, like matter, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil society, and to reverse the order of political ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to fight a daily and exhausting battle for her private opinions as talkative people have, simply because she rarely if ever expressed an opinion; but her father stood ready always, a post of resistance to innovation, upon which she could sharpen the claws of her conclusion silently ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... quite garrulous, have I not? Now I must disturb some document-dust, and sharpen my pen afresh to the police-official style, for the president of the provincial court and the government. Could I but enclose myself herewith, or go along in a salmon-basket as mail-matter! Till we meet again, dearest black one.[13] I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... What I told you is what I know. He said he was sold that one time. Hubbards had plenty to eat and wear. He was a boy and they didn't want to stunt the children. Papa was a water boy and filed the hoes for the chopping hands. He carried a file along with them hoeing and would sharpen their hoes and fetch 'em water in their jugs. Aunt Sallie, his sister, took keer of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Lord give way to this for a time, to try thy seriousness, patience, submission and faith, and to sharpen thy diligence, and kindle up thy zeal? And should we not submit ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... coarse wretch! Yes, but he is a lion. Rubens has lifted his great hand, and the mark he has made has endured for two centuries, and we still continue wondering at him, and admiring him. What a strength in that arm! What splendor of will hidden behind that tawny beard, and those honest eyes! Sharpen your pen, my good critic, shoot a feather into him; hit him, and make him wince. Yes, you may hit him fair, and make him bleed, too; but, for all that, he is a lion—a mighty, conquering, generous, rampageous Leo Belgicus—monarch of his wood. And ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reprobates, with not room on your phizzes for a Chinese woman to kiss, I'm offering you a bargain at half a dollar! Well, I'll throw in this strop at half a dollar! razor and strop! a recent patent; two rubs upon it will sharpen the city attorney; all for four bits; and a piece of soap, sweeter than roses, lathers better than a school-master, and strong enough to wash all the stains from a California politician's countenance, all for four bits. Why, you have only to ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... gaining fast upon the white ignorance, and the despised Negro is found to be living above many of his illiterate white neighbors. This makes it easy work for designing men to sharpen race prejudices, which by force and fear shall ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... Such accidents should only serve to sharpen our wits. The more obstacles I encounter, the firmer is my resolution to ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... innovation in Rembrandt's mature graphic work."[33] After etching his skeletal design on the plate, he went to work with his drypoint needles—long, stiff, iron instruments—sharpened to a fine point. An artist generally has several available, so that he does not have to stop and re-sharpen in the course of his work. Rembrandt evidently went even further and deliberately used dull needles to obtain certain ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... nearer the city, orders were sent to the guard, through the grates of their prison, that the instant the shipping should fire upon the town, they were to kill them, together with the other prisoners confined with them. The guard, on receiving these orders, began to sharpen the instruments with which they intended to kill them, and moved them about their heads to show with how much skill and pleasure they would attend to their orders. Upon the floor where they intended to butcher them, a large quantity of sand was spread to receive ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... have spoken under 'xcitement. Every man don' have his price! An' I hope de bro' will recant—like as de Psalmist goes out o' his way to say 'In my haste I said, All men are liars.' He was a very busy man, de Psalmist—writin' down hymns all day, sharpen'n' his lead-pencil, bossin' 'roun' de choir—callin' Selah! Well, bro'n an' sisters "—both arms going out, and his voice going up—" one day, seems like, he was in gre't haste—got to finish a psalm for ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... she bided, and this have I wotted for long; But I knew that her heart is as mine to remember the grief and the wrong, So the days of thy sister I told not, in her life would I have no part, Lest a foe for thy life I should fashion, and sharpen a sword for thine heart: But now is the day of our deeds, and no longer durst I refrain, Lest I put the Gods' hands from me, and make their gifts but vain. Yea, the woman is of the Niblungs, and often I knew her of old, How her heart would ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... gradually stir in half an ounce of flour; add a little broth, and a little pepper and salt; boil up for a few minutes; add a table-spoonful of claret, or port wine, and same of mushroom catchup, (you may sharpen it with a little lemon-juice or vinegar,) and rub it through a tamis or ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... into the cabin, and Trask took the occasion to slip into the galley while Doc and Tom were absent, and lifting out an old rat-tail file, which the cook used to sharpen his knives on, slipped it up the sleeve of ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... of respectability, and glorifies selfishness with the aureole of sacrifice. It sets down all collisions as foreordained, and never observes that they occur because people will not smooth off their angles, but sharpen them, and not only sharpen them, but run them into you. It forgets that the Lord made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions. It attributes all the confusion and inaptitude which it finds to the nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... mother rushed into an inner apartment, shaking the stool in the pale countenance of her lord as she retreated, in a manner and with a look which said, as plainly as words could say, that this temporary delay would only sharpen her appetite for vengeance, and exaggerate its terrors when the hour did arrive. It was with a hesitating step and wobegone countenance, therefore, that the officer proceeded to his parlor, where a no less troublesome, but ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... dawn or twilight, ninety dry beans, called ceci, and upon each of these to write one of the ninety numbers drawn in the lottery, with an ink made of pitch and lard, which would not be affected by water. They were then to sharpen a knife, taking care that he who did so should touch no one during the operation; and after a day of fasting, they were to dig up at night a body recently dead, and, having cut off the head and removed the brain, they were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... pertinaciously stubborn: and he will display the least folly, who shall first yield. But if the adversaries become heated in the dispute, which always happens, when they suppose the matter important, or when they would defend the cause of their own self-love; from thence their passions sharpen, they grow angry, quarrels are provoked, they hate each other, and end by reciprocal injury. It is thus, that for opinions, which no man can demonstrate, we see the Brahmin despised; the Mahommedan hated; the Pagan held in contempt; that they oppress and disdain each with the most ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... sail-boat, and had himself rowed across the Narrows, where the overlooker of a salt estate he had bought awaited him with a horse. Once he would have thought nothing of walking the eight miles to Basseterre, but the Tropics, while they sharpen the nerves, caress unceasingly the indolence of man. During the hurricane season he crossed as often as he thought necessary, for with expert oarsmen there was little danger, even from squalls, and the distance was ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... in the other ships, the information they had before received was confirmed, that the Cacafuego was but a short distance ahead of them. Their hopes, therefore, rose higher than ever. Drake, who was not less eager than his men to capture the rich argosy, to sharpen their eyesight promised to the first that should discover her the gold chain he wore ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... you cannot do it," said Rabbit. "Your teeth are too blunt to bite anything. Let me sharpen them for you so they are like mine. My teeth are so sharp I can cut through a stick just ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... the carriage, having with him the oil-cloth apron and a plan. Four long sticks were not hard to find, or to sharpen with his pocket knife, and a few knocks drove them into the soft earth, two on each side of a log near the fire. He then stretched the oil-cloth over the sticks, tying the corners, and had a canopied throne in the midst of this lively camp. A chunk served for a footstool. ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... gift of prophecy, that you have done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where I can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... mind at the first, one would not deem it advisable to enter the lists a second time," said Captain Douglas. "Bear in mind the Major has too much on his hands already." "Constant practice only serves to sharpen his wits," said Mr. Howe, with a vein of sarcasm in his tones. "It grows late, or, I should say, early," said Douglas, without taking notice of the last sentence. "Howe, good morning, I shall retire." "Au ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... lay it aside. Close your eyes. Reproduce the picture mentally in detail. Then repose your mind on the same image to the exclusion of all other thoughts. This is a more fixed and meditative method and will sharpen the mind wonderfully. It will also develop the power of conscious Mental Imagery. The key to Objective Concentration is Conscious ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... raising his right hand, asked the Chamberlain for his snuffbox; he took several pinches, but did not vouchsafe to finish his tale, as though he wished to sharpen the curiosity of his hearers. At last he was beginning—when that tale, so curious and so diligently hearkened to, was again interrupted! For some one had unexpectedly sent a man to the Judge, with ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... gallop like that of a horse! The driver was new to these parts; he had but lately come from the Baron's establishment in St. Petersburg. He had never been in this wood after dark, and he had never seen a wolf save in the Zoological Gardens. The atmosphere now began to sharpen. From being merely cold it became positively icy, and muttering, "I never felt anything like this in St. Petersburg," the driver shrank into the depths of his furs, and tried to settle himself more comfortably in his seat. The horses, too, four in number, were strangers in Estonia, the Baron ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... found beautiful pictures everywhere, and Greta plenty of play in building snow-houses and statues. And, moreover, Carl had lately discovered in the brooks some colored stones, which were soft enough to sharpen sufficiently to give a blue tint to his skies, and green to his trees; and thus he made pictures that Nurse Heine said were more wonderful than those in the chapel of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... in Public affairs, when they should be indisposed in the summer season", the other, "that such places might justly be accounted amongst those things that prove temptations to ambitious men, and exceedingly tend to sharpen their appetite to ascend the Throne". To-day we may say that it is fortunate that the first party won the day, and the Parliament duly ordered "that the House called Hampton Court, with the outhouses and gardens thereunto belonging, and the little park ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... most diggings men are left to sharpen their own wits by experience. Sometimes, however, the biter is pretty well bitten. There was a poor Chilian once who was deceived in this way, and paid four hundred dollars for a claim that was scarcely worth working. He looked rather ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... attempt could not but sharpen the discipline of the prison, but soon the natural humanity of the commandant, Col. Smith, now believed to be Chief Engineer of the Baltimore Bridge Company, asserted itself, and things went on as before. Two incidents may, however, be mentioned in this connection, whose asperities time has removed, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... passing through Athole on his way to Edinburgh, in the interest of his ward, he was stopped and found fault with by the men of that district for passing through their country without the permission of their lord. The Tutor dismounted and sought out a stone, on which he began to sharpen his claymore, whereupon the Athole men, from a safe distance, asked him what he was doing? "I am going to make a road," was the ready answer. "You shall make no road here." "Oh, I don't seek to do so; but I shall make it between your lord's head and his shoulders if I am hindered from ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... proper to learn all that was possible of the affairs of his customers. This was the part of wisdom in a cautious banker; and he was distressed when checks that were not self-explanatory passed through the receiving-teller's window. A small bank is a good place in which to sharpen one's detective sense. Every check tells a story and is in some ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... is trained by it to quick perception, rapid judgment, prompt decision. His imagination cunningly suggests a thousand things to be done, and then trains the will and every power of body and mind in the effort to do them. The sports of childhood are admirably adapted to quicken the senses and sharpen the wits. Nature has effective ways in her school of securing the exercise which is needed to develop every mental and every bodily power. She fills the activity brimful of enjoyment, and then gives her children freedom, assured that they will be ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... variants of this story[162] the heroine is sent by her husband's mother to the Baba Yaga's, and the advice which saves her comes from her husband. The Baba Yaga goes into another room "in order to sharpen her teeth," and while she is engaged in that operation the girl escapes, having previously—by the advice of the Cat, to which she had given a lump of butter—spat under the threshold. The spittle answers for her in her absence, behaving as do, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... was especially warm against the regular clergy. "Religion," he says, "can still sharpen daggers. There is within the nation a people which has no dealings with honest folk, which does not belong to the age, which is inaccessible to the progress of reason, and over which the atrocity ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... abstracto, cannot distinguish whether a particular case in concreto ought to rank under the former; or because his faculty of judgement has not been sufficiently exercised by examples and real practice. Indeed, the grand and only use of examples, is to sharpen the judgement. For as regards the correctness and precision of the insight of the understanding, examples are commonly injurious rather than otherwise, because, as casus in terminis they seldom adequately fulfil the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... called by every one but their own party, became a whetstone for the wits to sharpen themselves on; and we have two large collections of "Rump Songs," curious chronicles of popular feeling![327] Without this evidence we should not have been so well informed respecting the phases of this portentous phenomenon. "The Rump" was celebrated in verse, till at length it became ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... have 'got up' since we retired to rest. The sky looks lowering, and the clouds are evidently surcharged with rain. In fine the weather, as my predecessor on watch informs me, bears every sign of an excellent fishday on the morrow. I accordingly grind some bait, sharpen up my hooks once more, see my lines clear, and my heaviest jigs (the technical term for hooks with pewter on them) on the rail ready for use, and at one o'clock return to my comfortable bunk. I am soon again asleep, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... from his seat on the stool. "This job ain't none too easy, as it is," he complained. "As a writer I'm a first-rate cow hand. Lemme take your knife to sharpen this pencil with. When I asked the sheriff for a stub of a pencil he ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... ejaculation of humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end." "I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen." ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... hesitated, not quite sure that the moment had come. Joe's words detained her in a way no man's words had ever done before. But she thought: "I do this for him. I sharpen the edge of his editorial and drive it home. Words could never hurt Marrin—but I can." She got under the shelter of the doorway and with numb hand pulled a copy of The Nine-Tenths from her pocket, unfolded it, and reread the burning words of: "Forty-five Treacherous Men." They roused all ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... once more tasting bread and butter! The very thought of the treat in store served to sharpen my appetite, and render the long fast more irksome. I could now fully realise all Mrs. Bowdich's longings for English bread and butter, after her three years' travel through the burning African ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... magazine, and took his knee between his hands, closing one of his eyes in order to sharpen his recollection. He poured forth a stream of reminiscence, mingled observation, and personal experience. Bartley followed him with his pencil, jotting down points, striking in sub-head lines, and now and then interrupting him with cries of "Good!" "Capital!" "It's ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... of the other Evangelists, and the condensed account of it which we have in this Gospel, by its omission of Peter's walking on the water, and of some other smaller but graphic details that the other Evangelists give us, serves to sharpen the symbolical meaning of the whole story, and to bring that as its great ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... infected with any moral fanaticism, seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and fasting, during which an impulse learns to humble and submit itself—at the same time also to PURIFY and SHARPEN itself; certain philosophical sects likewise admit of a similar interpretation (for instance, the Stoa, in the midst of Hellenic culture, with the atmosphere rank and overcharged with Aphrodisiacal odours).—Here also is a hint for the explanation of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in future, Graham. Come, get well as rapidly as possible; I have a plan to submit to you, the earliest day you are strong enough to discuss business topics. Miss Beulah, let me sharpen your pencil." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... their pockets; then again there was the flat file, in respectable numbers, that are used for cutting on either edge, and that are carried in sheathes, to prevent the mechanics from cutting their neighbours' fingers. These files were to be distributed to the paupers in Ireland, to enable them to sharpen their teeth, so that they could masticate animal food at the grand barbecue that was to be given on the landing of our vessel. Another portion of the cargo was 200,000 puff-balls and sugar-plums, for gratuitous distribution among our English ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... about the triumph, it might have passed without exciting ridicule; and one might not so maliciously have perceived how ill the four candle-snuffers crawled as elephants, and the triumphal car discovered its want of a lid. But having pre-excited attention, we had full leisure to sharpen our eye. To these imprudent authors and actors we may apply a Spanish proverb, which has the peculiar quaintness of that people, Aviendo pregonado vino, venden vinagre: "Having cried up their wine, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... vision, a dubbel depressive; in dhe real phyzzic, vizzit, and vizzion; but work equal wonders, in polysyllables ov anny extension; pretending, in dhe verry name, to' paint pollysyllabels. And dhus dhe trokees grow innumerabel, dhat shut and sharpen, shortening dhe former vowel; hwich dhey hav hiddherto' pretended to' exhibbit slowly and smoodhly open: so leving singuel dhe intermediate articulacion, hwich must be audibly dubbel, (must shut az wel az articculate,) and continnue dhe ...
— A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy • James Elphinston
... besides the regular Beldars two castes of stone-workers are found, the Pathrawats or Pathrots (stone-breakers) and the Takaris, who should perhaps be classed as separate castes. Both make and sharpen millstones and grindstones, and they are probably only occupational groups of recent formation. The Takaris are connected with the Pardhi caste of professional hunters and fowlers and may be a branch ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the window they saw a great crowd of people come rushing into the courtyard of the building to sharpen weapons at a huge grindstone that stood there. They were going to murder the prisoners with which the jails were by this ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... some such decisive taste, there is no room for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe (lest I should too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reason in a healthy mind ought to be inseparable. We need not be passionless because we reason correctly. Strange to say, one's feelings will often sharpen one's knowledge of the truth, as they do one's ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... hanging springes. There are two methods of hanging them—in one the twig is bent into the form of the figure six, the tail end running through a slit out in the upper part of the twig. The other method is to sharpen a twig at both ends, and insert the points into a grower or stem of underwood, thus forming a bow, of which the stem forms the string below the springe; and hanging from the lower part of the bow is placed a small branch, with three or four berries of the mountain ash (there called ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... measures which may be found necessary for the regulation, after the war, of International Finance, it remains to consider what can be done to amend the evils from which it suffers, and likewise what, if anything, can be done to strengthen our financial weapon, and sharpen its edge to help us in the difficult fight that will follow the present ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... what, without prejudging questions as yet sub judice, seem to be the veritable works of the heroes of the Iliad; and if he has not yet actually solved the mysteries which shroud that age, he has brought before us a perfect wealth of fact at the least calculated to sharpen our antiquarian appetite for more certain knowledge. Knowing that Dr. Schliemann is like one in old times, who, while longing to tell of the Atrides and of Cadmus, yet allowed the chords of his heart to vibrate to softer influences, I will, while proposing his health, conjoin with his name ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... found at the bottom of the river. They seize it, feel it, clasp it in their arms; they are drunk with the desire to know; they no longer look with interest upon things, except to see them pass; they do nothing except doubt and test; they ransack the world as though they were God's spies; they sharpen their thoughts into arrows, and give ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... be very kind, she called them to her and joked with them, and led them into a beautiful room, where she gave them food to eat, and showed them a soft cushion on which they might sleep. Then she left them and went down into the palace kitchens, where she told the servants to sharpen the knives, and to make a great fire ready, and hang a large kettleful ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... he will succeed. When he is confronted by barriers he leaps over them, tunnels through them, or makes a way around them. Obstacles only serve to stiffen his backbone, increase his determination, sharpen his wits and develop his innate resources. The record of human achievement is full of the truth. "There is no difficulty to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... method of division according to species—whether the discourse be shorter or longer is not to the point. No offence should be taken at length, but the longer and shorter are to be employed indifferently, according as either of them is better calculated to sharpen the wits of the auditors. Reason would also say to him who censures the length of discourses on such occasions and cannot away with their circumlocution, that he should not be in such a hurry to have ...
— Statesman • Plato
... "Neatly enough," was the reply. "You see our friend the lawyer can't refuse a drink. He's got a strong head, and can take twice as much as the next man without showing it. A single glass makes no impression on him, unless it be to sharpen him up. So a plan was laid to get half a dozen glasses aboard, more or less, before court opened on the morning the case of Walker vs. Carlton was to be called. But not willing to trust to this, we had a wine-supper ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... it very remarkable, that although we found no kind of metal in any of these islands, yet, the inhabitants of all of them, the moment they got a piece of iron in their possession, began to sharpen it, but made no such ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... if her instincts be pure and harmonious, and her worldly knowledge that of a child. Her discrimination between right and wrong would be at once accurate and involuntary, like the test of poison. Love for the criminal would but sharpen her intuition. The sentence would not be spoken, but would be readable in eyes untainted alike by ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... you recognise, even in the reverses and calamities I have known and mastered, the protecting hand of the Saviour of Nations—if those reverses were but the mercies of Him who chasteneth—necessary, it may be, to correct my earlier daring and sharpen yet more my intellect—if, in a word, thou believest me one whom, whatever be his faults, God hath preserved for the sake of Rome, forget that you are a Colonna—remember only that ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... trade," Mr. Crooke states, [294] "is undoubtedly of great antiquity. In the Veda we read, 'Sharpen us like the razor in the hands of the barber'; and again, 'Driven by the wind, Agni shaves the hair of the earth like the barber shaving a beard.'" In early times they must have enjoyed considerable dignity; Upali the barber was the first propounder of the law of the Buddhist church. The ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... pencil might be pointed the other way, the risk of amputation avoided, and the shavings and pulverised graphite left safely to the action of gravitation and centrifugal force. Yet the entire race of men refuse to see the true value of the feminine method, and, indeed, any man would rather sharpen any woman's pencil than see ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... jealous malignity of Dr. Johnson—who hated Milton without disguise as a republican, but secretly and under a mask would at any rate have hated him from jealousy of his scholarship—had not availed to sharpen these practised and these interested eyes into the detection of an oversight which argues a sudden Lethean forgetfulness on the part of Milton; and in many generations of readers, however alive and awake with malice, a corresponding forgetfulness not less astonishing. Two readers ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... most to finish her sandals were scissors. They would cost so much to buy she would have to manage without them. Fortunately she had her knife, and with the help of a stone to sharpen the point she could make it fine enough to ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... you know how fah Proudfit is fum being an a-able man; and so does he. He's evm fool enough to think he can sharpen his wits with whiskey, which you know, March, that if that was so I'd myself be as sharp as a ra-azor. But I don't suspicion but what everything's clean and square—Oh, I wouldn't swear nobody does; you know, yo'self, what double-ba'lled fools some men ah. I reckon ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Magovern's occasional visitors was Old Haley, who had regular employment upon our own place. Like Mike Quinlan, he rejoiced in a wife who was an ornament to her sex—a most respectable, handsome and intelligent woman, though education had done little to sharpen her wits or widen her experience. She could tell a one from a five dollar bill, as her husband would proudly inform you, and she could cook a dinner, do up a skirt or a frilled cap, keep a house or tend a sick friend, as well as any woman in the land. "Maggie's a janeous!" her husband would remark ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... little blade is missing, but the big blade is perfectly good if you sharpen it. Here," he said, suddenly thrusting it at Evan as if in fear of repenting ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... And fals freres forboden the fayre ladis chaumbres; 16 For knewe lordes her craft treuly I trowe They shulden nought haunten her house so ho[m]ly[64] on nyghtes, Ne bedden swich brothels in so brode shetes, 20 But sheten her heved in the stre to sharpen her wittes. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... to carry in his pocket a small flat file with which to sharpen his broad-heads before shooting them. They should have a serrated, meat-cutting edge. Even carrying arrows in a quiver tends to dull them, because they chafe each other while in motion. From time to time you should ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... became at once hard, wily, and rapacious, and ready instruments in ignoble and oppressive callings. Shut out from open paths and honourable ambitions they haunted the obscurer byways of industry; they were to be found in many occupations which sharpen the intellect but blunt the moral sense, and they threw themselves passionately into the acquisition of wealth and of secret power. Exposed for generations, even in lands where they were not more seriously persecuted, to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... amain in clouds of dust. All seek out arms; and now they rub their shields smooth and make their spearheads glitter with [627-659]fat lard, and grind their axes on the whetstone: rejoicingly they advance under their standards and hear the trumpet note. Five great cities set up the anvil and sharpen the sword, strong Atina and proud Tibur, Ardea and Crustumeri, and turreted Antemnae. They hollow out head-gear to guard them, and plait wickerwork round shield-bosses; others forge breastplates of brass or smooth greaves of flexible silver. To this is come the honour of share ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... only wearing is your paduasoy.' Not, sir, my only, I have better still, And this, you see, is but my dishabille. Wild to get loose, his patience I provoke, Mistake, confound, object at all he spoke. But as coarse iron, sharpen'd, mangles more, And itch most hurts when anger'd to a sore; So when you plague a fool, 'tis still the curse, 120 You only make the ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... sober when he met us. Sober, aye! But what a light there was in his eyes! He was eager to be at the Huns. Tales of their doings were coming back to us now, faster and faster. They were tales to shock me. But they were tales, too, to whet the courage and sharpen the steel of every man who could fight and meant ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... when Vulcan was seen urging his Cyclops to forge for Ernest their most tremendous thunderbolts with which to smite the foes of the provinces, those enemies being of course the English and the Hollanders. Venus, the while, timidly presented an arrow to her husband, which he was requested to sharpen, in order that when the wars were over Cupid, therewith might pierce the heart of some beautiful virgin, whose charms should reward Ernest—fortunately for the female world, still a bachelor—for his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... pencil lines the ink lines are reduced in blackness and the surface of the paper becomes roughened, so that it will soil easier and be harder to clean. In order to produce fine pencil lines without requiring a very frequent sharpening of the pencil it is best to sharpen the pencil as in Figures 7 and 8, so that the edge shall be long in the direction in which it is moved, which is denoted by the arrow in Figure 7. But when very fine work is to be done, as in the case of Patent ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... studies a piece of mathematics in order to understand some natural phenomenon which he has seen, or to calculate the best arrangement of some experiment which he means to make, is likely to meet with far less distraction of mind than if his sole aim had been to sharpen his mind for the successful practice of the Law, or to obtain a high place in the ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... on the bandaged wrist which lay outside the coverlet as he spoke, "I do not know what to make of them. They might have been made by a carding-machine; but that supposition is untenable. It is within the bounds of possibility that they might have been made by a wild animal if it had taken care to sharpen its claws. That too is, I take it, impossible. By the way, have you any strange pets here in the house; anything of an exceptional kind, such as a tiger-cat or anything out of the common?" Miss ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... thus secured another guardian for the sister whom he tenderly loved. "He shall stay, but Sassacus will return to the river of the Pequots, and will speak a loud word in the ears of his tribe, and they shall fill their quivers with arrows, and sharpen their tomahawks, and many will come back with him to ask for Neebin. Sassacus will go alone, and will ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... his face towards the westering sun. What was there in the stillness of its beautiful splendour that seemed to sharpen his horror and difficulty, and yet to stir him to such a daring and devilry as he had never known since he was a boy? There was little sound of life; somewhere an unknown bird was singing, and a few late bees were droning in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... eyes would have nothing to hide,—how long that bright purity could resist the corrosion of the world's breath; and half thinking that it would be better for the spirit to pass away, with its lustre upon it, than stay till self-interest should sharpen the eye, and the lines of diplomacy write themselves on that fair brow. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... boy held his left forefinger as if it were a pencil and began to sharpen it derisively with his right forefinger. They came closer, and sang like a trained chorus, "A-fray-ed ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... passed dreadful hours of suspense during that long, cold December night. More than once they heard the creature "sharpen its claws" on tree trunks, and the sound was by no means cheerful. The brute seemed bent on remaining near the little camp. I remember that Grandsir Billy said that they heard it "garp" several ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... are feminine, and things of moods. The razor you sharpen to-day may not be sharp, though manipulated upon hone or strap with all persistence and all skill. The razor you sharpen to-morrow may be far more tractable. Furthermore, the razor which is comparatively dull to-day may be sharp to-morrow, without ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... or celery, with an ounce of butter, and set them on a slow fire; turn the onions till they are highly browned; stir in half an ounce of flour; add a little broth, pepper, and salt; boil it up for a few minutes; add a spoonful of claret or port, and some mushroom ketchup. You may sharpen it with a little lemon-juice. Rub ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... for comment that American newspaper advertising of the English packaged medicines was singularly drab. In the mother country, the proprietors or their heirs were faced with vigorous competition. It behooved them to sharpen up their adjectives and reach for their vitriol. In America the apothecary or merchant had no proprietary interest in any of the different brands of the imported medicines which were sold. Moreover, there was probably no great surplus ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... unused to the task of careful observation, can tell the number of the musk-mallow's petals, or mark on paper the depth of fringe on a gentian, or match from a series of dyed silks the hues of a common buttercup? Drawing and painting sharpen the eye, and make the fingers its trained and ready servants. From the very beginning of one's task in limning bud and blossom, we see them richer in grace and loveliness than ever before. When wild flowers are sketched as they grow it is often easy to ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... water-privileges,—and I will be a spinning jenny. No! upon second thoughts, I will not be a machine. I will be an instrument, not to be confided to vulgar hands,—for instance, a chisel to polish marble, or a whetstone to sharpen steel!' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... few lines, more valuable than many volumes, J.B. Say has already remarked that there are two ways of removing the disorder introduced by hypocrisy into an honorable family; to reform Tartuffe, or sharpen the wits of Orgon. Moliere, that great painter of human life, seems constantly to have had in view the second process as the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... point was gone from his pencil, and proceeded to sharpen it. Then he heard Mona singing in the kitchen, and recollected that Mrs. Stevens had promised him warm doughnuts for supper. Perhaps Mona was frying them at that identical moment—and he had never seen anyone frying doughnuts. He caught up his cane and limped out to ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... mellow hour: Fill your pipe, and taste the wine— Warp your face, if it be sour, I can spare a smile from mine; If it sharpen up your wit, Let me feel the edge of it— I have eager ears to lend, Tom ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... interests in some of the claims he urged with so obstinate a pertinacity. And though there was not the smallest evidence of such utter abandonment of honour, though it was probably but a calumnious whisper, yet the mere suspicion of such practices served to sharpen the aversion of his enemies, and justify ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... declared there was no sin. She had merely been resolute and truthful. So she strengthened herself in her belief in her own blamelessness, and drove down the misgiving to prey on the depths of her soul, and sharpen her temper ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... none the worse for it, Captain. A year or so knocking about among the mountains of Peru will do more good to him than an equal time on board ship. It will sharpen him up, and give him habits of reliance and confidence. He will be all the better for it afterwards, even putting aside the advantage it will be to ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... eyes unfix'd their stare, My senses clearer now became, And borne unto my sharpen'd ear, I heard a ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... communicated his theory of the tides to the Archduke Leopold, he alludes in the most sarcastic manner to the conduct of the church. The same hostile tone, more or less, pervaded all his writings, and, while he laboured to sharpen the edge of his satire, he endeavoured to guard himself against its effects, by an affectation of the humblest deference to the decisions of theology. Had Galileo stood alone, his devotion to science might have withdrawn him from so hopeless a contest; but he was spurred on by the ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... for deeds done than a more showy one bought in a shop. Those that are spun with the view of splitting their opponent often have, instead of a spike, a flattened bit of iron like a little chisel, which the boys sharpen on a stone, and with these they do great execution. Sometimes somebody's foot is seriously wounded in case of a miss-fire. Now and then, for a change, a boy ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... lieutenant-generals and an hundred pieces of cannon? How much cleverer still, if he has left fifteen thousand Muscovites dead on the Spot?(939) Does the loss of only three thousand of his own men take off from or sharpen the sting of this joke? In short, all this is fact, as a courier arrived at Sion Hill this morning affirms. The city, I suppose, expect that his Majesty will now be"at leisure to step to Ticonderoga and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... pace which, considering the heat of the day and the weight of his trailing robes, is simply astounding. Up one street, down another, round a corner, along a narrow lane—on he rushes as if bent upon rivalling that indefatigable giant who "walked round the world every morning before breakfast to sharpen his appetite." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... peaceabler in pot-pies than any other thing: And it's when I git my shotgun drawed up in stiddy rest, She's as full of tribbelation as a yeller-jacket's nest; And a few shots before dinner, when the sun's a-shinin' right, Seems to kindo'-sorto' sharpen up a ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... fact that the extreme upper octave and a half must be tuned slightly sharper than perfect; if the octaves are tuned perfect, the upper tones of the instrument will sound flat when used in scale and arpeggio passages covering a large portion of the key-board. Begin to sharpen your octaves slightly from about the seventeenth key from the last; counting both black and white. In other words, begin to sharpen from the last A[b] but one, in the standard scale of seven and a third octaves ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... face; whilst the drama of the favourite was rapidly hastening to a conclusion. He now revealed his finely-spun design to Baron H. The latter was to be the instrument of it; and as the glitter of gold was no longer at hand to sharpen his palled passion for the minister's wife, and as the tears of the unfortunate daughter, the misery of the father, and the expected arrival of the crippled son, began to bear heavily upon his tender conscience, he determined at once to free himself of ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... inexpressible terrors, so long as Nena Sahibs and other miscreant sons of hell are roaming through the infinite darkness, may prompt the same fretfulness of spirit; the same deadly irritation and restlessness, which cannot but sharpen the vision of fear, will sharpen also that of watching hope, and will continually read elements of consolation or trust in that which to the uninterested eye offers only ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... being reduced, but perhaps not with the same rapidity as at first when Mr Barelli was at the top of enthusiastic—if the adjective was applicable—vigor. Oftener and oftener and oftener he paused to sharpen his implement and I thought the cropped shocks were becoming smaller and smaller. As the movement of the scythe swept the guillotined grass backward, the trailing stolons entangled themselves with the uncut stand, pulling the sheaves out of place and making ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... With his head the clouds he pierces, To his knees his beard extending, And his locks fall to his ankles; Far apart appear his eyeballs, Far apart his feet are stationed. Farther still his mighty shoulders. Now begins his axe to sharpen, Quickly to an edge he whets it, Using six hard blocks of sandstone, And of softer whetstones, seven. Straightway to the oak-tree turning, Thither stalks the mighty giant, In his raiment long and roomy, Flapping in the winds of heaven; With his second step ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... director. It is, however, true, that her intimacy with this monk gave room for some suspicion that her privacies with him were not all employed about the care of her soul. Afterward, to ridicule her yet more, King Albert sent her a hone to sharpen her needles, and swore not to put on his nightcap until she had yielded to him. But under perilous circumstances Margaret was never at a loss how to act. She acted here with the utmost prudence, trying first ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... money. You eat and drink, and boast of your exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive, we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on, while you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with that wretched old mill of ours. Why, the mill-stones wear away with rot more than with grinding corn. And the wretched fields, too, yield far more pebbles than crowns. And so, as he's now a scholar, he may as well try his fortune in Paris. There's nothing like city life to sharpen a man's wits." ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... successfully to this point that I was resolved, if my hopes were to miscarry, the misfortune should not be owing to want of vigilance on my part; and there happened an incident which inevitably tended to sharpen my watchfulness, though I was perfectly conscious there was a million to one against its occurring a second time. I came on deck to relieve Wilkinson, at midnight, after a half-hour's nodding doze by the furnace below. He ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... man is a man who can sharpen and set, And he is the only thing masculine yet According to sawyer and splitter— Or rather according to Wollombi Jim; And nothing will tempt me to differ from him, For Jim is a bit ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... aright, in conferring that dignity upon him, regard was had not only to the memory of the dead man and the grief of his father, but also to the effect it would have upon others. When such splendid rewards are bestowed upon young men—provided they deserve them—they will serve to sharpen the inclinations of the rising generation to the practice of the honourable arts; they will make our leading men more desirous of bringing up their children, increase the joy they will have in them if they survive, and provide a ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... imagine I should dare to say the things I have said except to one of the elite? Would it be worth my while, as a social reformer? Are you not vowed to great destinies? When one comes across one of the tools of the future, must one not try to sharpen it, out of one's poor resources, in ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sweetened him with the breath of her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped in her soul and sprinkled with her passion. And she said, 'I love a divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire, sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may live.' O Gods, and Sanchia gave herself ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... as civilization advances, a large class of the community are exempted from the necessity of these, and thrown upon a life of leisure. Then it is that artificial life begins, and artificial expedients become necessary to sharpen the feelings amongst the monotony of existence; every amusement and all literature become more pungent in their character; life is no longer a thing proceeding from powers within, but sustained by new ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... penalties, to do their bidding. The reader knows what the edicts were. He knows also the instructions to the corps of papal inquisitors, delivered by Charles and Philip: He knows that Philip, both in person and by letter, had done his utmost to sharpen those instructions, during the latter portion of his sojourn in the Netherlands. Fourteen new bishops, each with two special inquisitors under him, had also been appointed to carry out the great work to which the sovereign ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... transparent intrigues, by all which he had gained nothing but the character of a plotter, whose word could not be trusted. Saint Aldegonde expressed the hope that the seizure of Namur Castle would open the eyes of the people, and certainly the Prince did his best to sharpen ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... secrecy;" I shall never forget the tremor with which I awaited the arrival of a customer! I had sunk half of my slender capital, and encumbered myself with a lodging; I did not dare to think, so I sat down and began, resolutely, to sharpen my penknife on the sole of my fearfully dilapidated shoe; then, I spread my paper before me; divided the quires; looked carefully through a sheet of it at the light; laid it down again; began to grow melancholy; shook off reflection as I would have done a serpent, and again ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... thou rebuked their madness. Oftener far Thy sweetness hath reproved them. Once in woods Northward of Tara as we tracked our way Round us there gathered slaves who felled the pines For ship-masts. Scarred their hands, and red with blood, Because their master, Trian, thus had sworn, 'Let no man sharpen axe!' Upon those hands Gazing, they wept soon as thy voice they heard, Because that voice was soft. Thou heard'st their tale; Straight to that chieftain's castle went'st thou up, And bound'st him with thy fast, beside his gate Sitting in silence till ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... long ago since we were in it," nodded Jane. "Tommy was the last to be in it. Please pass the potatoes. This life at sea does sharpen one's appetite. It wouldn't do for me to go to sea really. I'd get so hungry between meals that I'd gnaw the masts ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... then they marked the camp. When these crazy dogs found a location for the camp they were fortunate enough to find a big herd of buffalo. On their return, before they reached the camp they began to sing a crazy dog song, riding abreast. It means: 'A song to sharpen your knife, and patch up your stomach, for you are going to have something good to eat.' They made a circle, coming to camp from the sunrise, and moved toward the sunset, and then the leaders told the camp they had seen lots of buffalo. Then they dismounted and went home. After the crazy ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... my watch to regulate the other day—for on week-days he is a watch-maker—began to ask questions, as eagerly as a child, about the village news. It turned out that, for a whole week, he had not been down to sharpen his knife upon the bridge. He has given up his glass of beer, too, and altogether the zeal of his ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "devil's paint-brush." Another popular title in England, from whence the plant originally came, is Grimm the Collier. All the plants in this genus take their name from hierax a hawk, because people in the old country once thought that birds of prey swooped earthward to sharpen their eyesight with leaves of the hawkweed, hawkbit, or speerhawk, as they are variously called. Transplanted into the garden, the orange hawkweed forms a spreading ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Kinglake's "Invasion of the Crimea" (four vols., large 8vo, half-calf). She saw through his disguise immediately, and, with great courage and independence, bade him begone. Rebuffed, he was not deflected. Indeed it would seem that Clio's high spirit did but sharpen his desire. Hardly a day passed but he appeared in what he hoped would be the irresistible form—a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of "The Historical Review," the note-book of Professor ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... Robin; "but we must sharpen our wits in due proportion: though, at present, I suspect it is arms we shall want. I know the room well, and there is a lot of creeping ivy and such plants under the window; the greatest difficulty will be ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
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