"Carpenter's rule" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to keep off the flies, or a feather in one's hat, and returns with the one a limp, wet rag and the other quite out of curl. I only wish any milliner could see my feathers now! All straight, rigidly straight as a carpenter's rule, and tinged with red dust besides. As for tulle or crepe-lisse frilling, or any of those soft pretty adjuncts to a simple toilette, they are five minutes' wear—no more, I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... the thick curls of dark hair, bespoke early youth. I judged him at most, to be two-and-twenty. I began my task of measuring the body, and few can tell the shudder which thrilled my frame as the carpenter's rule passed those locked hands—the vain effort of the living still to claim kindred with the dead! It was over, and I stole from the room, cautiously and silently as I entered. Once, and only once, I turned to gaze at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in truth,—it was he with the blood-stain on his band,—seemed, unless his gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... joined in: "It is all very well for you gentlemen to measure General Washington according to your own private twelve-inch carpenter's rule. But what will you say to us New Englanders who never were country gentlemen at all, and never had any liking for Virginia? What did Washington ever do for us? He never even pretended to like us. He never was more than barely civil to us. I'm not finding fault with him; everybody ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... table in the bay-window, with his desk before him—on one end of this table a case, something like a small deal music-stand, filled with manuscript books—on the other a large deal tray, filled with a leaden ink-stand, containing ink enough for a county; a magnifying glass; a carpenter's rule; several large steel pens, which it was high treason to touch; a glass bowl full of shot and water, to clean these precious pens; and some red tape, which he called 'one of the grammars of life'; a measuring line, and various other articles, more useful than ornamental. At this writing establishment, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell |
