"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been with me ever since. His time was out some years ago, but that has made no difference. Nothing would induce him to leave me; and I would not part with him for any amount, for a more faithful and trusty fellow never lived, and when I go away I know everything will go along like clockwork. As for his wife, she's a treasure, and she knows how to cook a dinner, as ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... thirty men must have disappeared into the stifle from which the police retreated. There was no haste, no hesitation. Everything moved as smoothly as if by clockwork. Yet we could not see one of the men who had disappeared into the burning building. They had been swallowed up, as it were. For that is the way with the New York firemen. They go straight to the heart of the fire. Now and then a stream of a hose spat out ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... badly by being largely responsible for a disturbance which occurred in the dining-hall, when a clockwork frog was suddenly discovered disporting itself in Pilson's teacup; and it is probable that Jack would have continued to distinguish himself as a black sheep, in company with his three unruly classmates, had it not been for an unforeseen occurrence which ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... events engendered by psychological laws working with the regularity of clockwork. The actors in this great drama seem to move like the characters of a previously determined drama. Each says what he must say, acts as he is ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... the party was to stay to dinner. And then instantly the whole household sprang into activity. Above stairs everything would move with the smoothness of clockwork; but downstairs in the servants' quarters it was a serious matter that an elaborate banquet for seven people had to be got ready in a couple of hours. Even Samuel was pressed into service at odd jobs—something for which he was very glad, as it gave him a chance to remain in ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... and the seat of his labors for forty years; that is, until his death on April 19th, 1882. In a letter to his friend Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, written in 1846, Darwin says, "My life goes on like clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it." Happily, he was possessed of ample private fortune, and never undertook any teaching work nor gave any of his strength to the making of money. He was able to devote himself entirely to the studies in which he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... get as much of it as ever you want here," remarked the barmaid. "Look in tonight any time after eight o'clock, and if you don't know more about the history of Market Milcaster by ten than you did when you sat down, you must be deaf. There are some old gentlemen drop in here every night, regular as clockwork, who seem to feel that they couldn't go to bed unless they've told each other stories about old days which I should think they've ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... the cow should be milked a trifle earlier in order to suit my convenience. The man good-naturedly replied that, as far as the matter concerned himself, he was agreeable enough, but that the cow was not so easily to be put out of her way. She was milked regularly as clockwork at a quarter to five, the clock had only just struck four; he might leave his work and take her home, but not a drop of milk would she give before the proper time! Leaving our jug, we roamed about this little paradise, unwilling to ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... them—of ice-cream and of something else. But those saint's eyes alongside—they offered all he knew and more than he could guess. They offered books and painting, beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence. Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like clockwork. He could watch every wheel go around. Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it. But the bid of the saint's eyes was mystery, and wonder unthinkable, and eternal life. He had caught ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of Milburgh's guilt gone up in smoke, eh?" he said. "I think I know what those books contained—a little clockwork detonator and a few pounds of thermite to burn up all the clues to the ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... reality possess apart from their influence as discipline. The cabin was swept and aired, the stove cleaned, the fittings dusted, the beds made, the tides, thermometers, and barometers registered; the logs posted up, clothes mended, food cooked, traps visited, etc., with the regularity of clockwork, and every possible plan adopted to occupy every waking hour, and to prevent the men from brooding over their position. When the labours of the day were over, plans were proposed for getting up a concert, or a new play, in order to ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... action. Hence by the requirements of the case man should be capable of placing himself either in a positive or a negative relation to the Parent Mind, from which he originates; otherwise he would be nothing more than a clockwork figure. ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... right up the wall of the summer-house and along a joist bare of all save dust, and—well, the spider walked straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork, and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on her side. Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers shifted round towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach, did she leap back as if she ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... camp was pitched considerably raised the sensible heat. A bird with a most diabolical shrieking note cursed in the shadows. Another, a pigeon-like creature, began softly, and continued to repeat in diminishing energy until it seemed to have run down, like a piece of clockwork. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... present companies in operation do not afford us that to our heart's content. It is but a very few years ago since we used to glorify ourselves in the rapidity of the mail-coach, doing its ten miles an hour with the punctuality of clockwork. Now we have arrived at the ratio of forty within the same period, and yet we are not content. Next year, within fourteen hours we shall be transported from Edinburgh to London. That, it seems, is not enough. A company ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Median deserts, and upon the banks of that great, strange River, the Nile. To them the Universe was alive—instinct with forces and powers, mysterious and beyond their comprehension. To them it was no machine, no great system of clockwork; but a great live creature, an army of creatures, in sympathy with or inimical to man. To them, all was a mystery and a miracle, and the stars flashing overhead spoke to their hearts almost in an audible language. Jupiter, with his kingly splendors, was the Emperor of the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... previously it would have seemed impossible that there could have been more noise; then suddenly it seemed to double and treble in intensity. The ground shook; and over the German trenches there hung a choking cloud of fumes which drifted slowly across the front with the wind. As if by clockwork, the men got out of their trenches and walked slowly over No Man's Land behind the creeping barrage towards the reeking caldron. A great long line of men—thousands and thousands of men; but do not think of them as the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... with models of battleships,—in wood, clay, porcelain, lead, and tin,—of many sizes and prices. Some of the larger ones, moved by clockwork, are named after Japanese battleships: Shikishima, Fuji, Mikasa. One mechanical toy represents the sinking of a Russian vessel by a Japanese torpedo boat. Among cheaper things of this class is a box of colored sand, for the representation of naval engagements. ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... magnifying spectacles. A roller is attached to each end of the sheet, and when not in use the latter is wound round that attached to the conclusion. When required for reading, both rollers are fixed in a stand, and slowly moved by clockwork, which spreads before the eyes of the reader a length of about four inches at once. The motion is slackened or quickened at the reader's pleasure, and can be stopped altogether, by touching a spring. Another means of reproducing, not merely writings or drawings, but natural objects, consists ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... just as dead as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... that wise and ancient cow, Who chews her juicy cud so languid now Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep: But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley Her drowsy cud, each ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... stroke to the black cat and the rat (the rat was blue) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was wound up with an indigo key. With this history the king was even more profoundly interested than with the other—and, as the day broke before its conclusion (notwithstanding all the queen's endeavors to get through with it in time for the bowstringing), there was again no resource ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... my love, I hope you will go and put on YOURS, and change those muddy boots. Lady Pash will be here in five minutes, and you know Dobus is as punctual as clockwork." Then turning to me with a sort of apology that was as consoling as a box on the ear, "We have some friends at dinner, sir, who are rather particular persons; but I am sure when they hear that you only came on a sudden invitation, they will excuse your morning dress.—Bah! ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a musket on his shoulder. Though they did not fear the musket, they knew he might possibly let it off and alarm the town, so they stood under the dark shade of a wall, deliberating what was to be done. They watched him for some time, and ascertained that, like a clockwork figure, he always made the same round ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... compartments—one under the sleeping room floor in which stood the mechanism for running the Terror, and the other beneath the store room floor, in which stood a small powerful dynamo which operated automatically by a spring clockwork. ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... you ever seen the work these native jewelers do? And didn't you tell me about a clockwork thing they have at the university, here, to show the apparent ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... army Colt's sped true. Our pig, flat on his back, was squealing desperately, and his feet were pawing the air as last as though he had been run by clockwork and had been suddenly released from contact with the ground. Then the municipal policeman went to pick him up. But lo, a miracle! Our Christmas pig, inspired by supersusine terror on the approach of the dire representative of law, regained ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... was placed at the side of the dining-room foundation, according to the railroad men, and it was set off by some sort of clockwork," answered Polly. ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... see now the heads of the watermen who rowed, with the caps of the royal livery moving together like clockwork at the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... dignity,—romanticism in a frock-coat. The juvenile lead gulped and gasped and squeezed out a sob or two. The piece was written in the style of a tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... worked by clockwork," the detective said, and taking out his watch he timed the interval that elapsed between the opening and shutting. "It stays open for thirty seconds," he remarked after two or three experiments. "No doubt the mechanism is concealed in the thickness of the stone. At all events it seems ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... station from which she was to take her departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been already packed and sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had been taken. They had timed it all so exactly that it went like clockwork. They had known the date upon which Colonel Rufford would get Edward's letter and they had known almost exactly the hour at which they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to come to him. It had all ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... such a biby as to belave that story, Masther Jack," he said. "I tell ye it was the lion himself attacking the bastes, and you'll see he'll be about the camp now every night, as regular as clockwork. It's very good of the masther to try and put one at his aise about the wild bastes; but that there was a lion—I know it was; and if, Masther Jack, dear, I'm missing some night, ye may know that there's a lion ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... slave, and the crowning evidence of his docility, that he will fawn on the person who has beaten him, is the result of his character having been bred out of him. The dog is an engaging companion, an animated toy more diverting than the cleverest piece of clockwork, but it is only our colossal vanity that makes us take credit for the affection and faithfulness of our own particular animal. The poor beast cannot help it; all else has been bred out of him ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... what's menseful same as fowks do. At efter, mebbe cuckoo will begin to shout, an' close behind him will coom t' spinks an' pipits an' lile tits. Eh, deary me! but I've clean forgotten most pairt o' what I've larnt misel about t' birds. They do iverything as reg'lar as if 'twere clockwork. ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... serviceable of all strokes. Rowed well through from first to last, gripping the water the instant the oar is back and the body and arms forward, and dragged clean through without jerk or plunge, the swing of the bodies regular as clockwork, the feather clear and rapid—this essentially is the kind of rowing which not only puts most pace into the boat, but is capable of being sustained far ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... weariness; his complexion turns pallid, acquiring an earthy or greenish hue according to his individual temperament. In short, within a given time the most blooming young man is turned into an "inasmuch" machine—an instrument which applies the Code to individual cases with the indifference of clockwork. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... went on like clockwork. It was as if some curse had fallen upon us. The officers were ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... from which so many petted dogs suffer. He was not treated as a delicate infant in arms for a day or so, and then ignored for a week. His internal economy was never poisoned or upset by means of absurd gifts of sweetmeats. His meals reached him with the unfailing regularity of clockwork, and were so carefully designed that, whilst his growth never was retarded for lack of frequent nutriment, the finish of a meal always left him with some little appetite. And he never saw food ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... me horribly. I wanted to be revenged for that. But after a bit I was sure they were only clockwork. I wanted to stop them. I did ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... pre-eminently adapted for hard work; conscientious in the force of its instinct to carry out everything undertaken by it to the very end, and judging that whatever it undertook was good and worth finishing; having something of the nature of a strong piece of clockwork which being wound up must run to the utmost limit before stopping, whether regulated to move fast or slow, with a fateful certainty independent of will; possessed of such uncommon strength as to make it dangerous if opposed while moving, and at the same time ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... haven, which lay round a sharp corner of the cliff. But the engineer's blunder was never a check upon the alacrity of the Die-hards, who cleaned, loaded, rammed home, primed, sighted, and blazed away with the precision of clockwork and the ardour of Britons, as though aware that the true strength of a nation lay not so much in the construction of her fortresses as in the spirit of ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dreaded Boomerang collapsed and was stormed with hardly a casualty. This was owing partly to the two trench mortars lent us by the French and partly to the extraordinary fine shooting of our own battery of 4.5 howitzers. The whole show went like clockwork—like a Field Day. First the 87th Brigade took three lines of trenches; then our guns lengthened their range and fuses and the 86th Brigade, with the gallant Royal Fusiliers at their head, scrambled over the trenches already taken ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... of finding asteroids and comets by means of photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and comets will reveal themselves ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... brisk, straight, and soldierly in bearing. Their captain was proud of them, and his very step showed it. He was like a skilled operator pressing the key of some great mechanism, and at his command they moved like clockwork. Seen from the side it was as if they were all bound together by inflexible iron bars, and as the end man moved all must move with him. The crowd was full of exclamations of praise and admiration, but a tense quiet enveloped them as Company ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Bailadors were seen engaged in a song and dance. They were about eighteen inches apart, and alternately jumped two feet into the air, alighting always in the same spot. As soon as one bird alighted the other bird jumped up, their time being like clockwork in its regularity, and each "accompanying himself to the tune of 'to-le-do'—'to-le-do'—'to-le-do,' sounding the syllable 'to' as he crouched to spring, 'le' while in the air, and 'do' as he alighted." The performance was kept up for more than a minute, when the ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... all is clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless politeness, ready to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clockwork tread until the door of his own house was reached. And then he disappeared, and the latch fell feebly to, and made a faint and wavering sound, breaking the solemn silence of the night. Then all again ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was christened the Fortune, and on this the mine was to be exploded by a slow match, cut so as to explode at a calculated moment. The mine on board the Hope was to be started by a piece of clockwork, which at the appointed time was to strike fire from a flint. Planks and woodwork were piled on the decks to give to the two vessels the appearance of simple fireships. Thirty-two small craft, saturated with tar and turpentine and filled with inflammable materials, were ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... make a lane for him, divining his incredible intention. If he had not started at once, if his legs had not started of themselves, he would never have started; and, not being in command of a fiver, he would afterwards have cut a preposterous figure in the group. But started he was, like a piece of clockwork that could not be stopped! In the grand crises of his life something not himself, something more powerful than himself, jumped up in him and forced him to do things. Now for the first time he seemed to understand what had occurred within him ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... slip by reason of electrochemical decomposition. One of these surfaces consisted of a small drum or cylinder of chalk, which was kept in a moistened condition with a suitable chemical solution, and adapted to revolve continuously by clockwork. The other surface consisted of a small pad which rested with frictional pressure on the periphery of the drum. This pad was carried on the end of a vibrating arm whose lateral movement was limited between two adjustable ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... this is little Sidonia Vavasour—mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in vaudeville. Know it? 'The Snake.' Every morning that God sends comes her good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as clockwork." ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... last years passed as regularly as clockwork. At nine at night he had cards in the apartment of his daughters, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, with Lady Yarmouth, two or three of the late Queen's ladies, and as many of the most favoured officers of his own household. Every Saturday in summer he carried that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... first drawing-room, she went and lay down on the divan of the small Japanese room, wedged between two piles of cushions, motionless, so that you could see her from a distance right in the background, looking like an idol, beneath the great fan which her negro waved regularly like a piece of clockwork. These foreign women ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and see in turn the perfect lady, whose deportment and manners do credit to her breeding; the perfect wife, whose submission to her husband is only equalled by her skill in ministering to his ease; the perfect mistress, whose servants love her and run her house like clockwork; and the perfect housewife, the Mrs Beeton of the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... then, Panteley Eremyitch is such a wonderful man! He has only to wish for anything—he has only to take an idea into his head—and before you can look round, it's done; everything, you may say, goes like clockwork. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... in this order like clockwork for some time, so that when Dory did not appear on the board the others looked about for him. Just at that moment a piercing cry arose, and a dozen pairs of eyes were turned out on the lake where the boy was seen struggling frantically. It was evident that ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... baby was born, Bradley invented a self-rocking cradle for it. He constructed the motive-power of the machine from some old clockwork which was operated by a huge steel ribbon spring strong enough to move a horse-car and long enough to run for a week without rewinding. When the cradle was completed, he put the baby in it upon a pillow and started the machinery. It worked beautifully, and after watching ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... had realised that the continuous ringing of the bell would not be soothing to the nerves of our party, nor the continuous burning of the lamp calculated to prolong its life, and he had therefore added the clockwork mechanism which automatically broke the circuit after a short interval of time; further, this clockwork mechanism could be made to control the emersion of the same warning signals at intervals of time varied according to the desire of the operator;—thus because, when in bed, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents ...
— The Velveteen Rabbit • Margery Williams
... shown is called an equatorial. The convenience of this peculiar style of supporting the instrument consists in the ease with which the telescope can be moved so as to follow a star in its apparent journey across the sky. The necessary movements of the tube are given by clockwork driven by a weight, so that, once the instrument has been correctly pointed, the star will remain in the observer's field of view, and the effect of the apparent diurnal movement will be neutralised. The last refinement in this direction is the application of an electrical ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... cutting communications—everything came off like clockwork, and we caught the Boches in their ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... he read feverishly, "I have made an infernal machine with clockwork, and hid it in the hold near the gunpowder when we were at Fairhaven. I think it will go off between ten and eleven to-night, but I am not quite sure about the time. Don't tell those other beasts, but jump overboard and swim ashore. I have taken the boat I would have taken you too, ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... go on, even if one does call it eternity. And so we shall all have to begin again. Probably Sabathier himself.... But there, what on earth are we, Herbert, when all is said? Who is it has—has done all this for us—what kind of self? And to what possible end? Is it that the clockwork has been wound up and must still jolt on a while with jarring wheels? Will it never run ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... work. She made out a time-card which showed that twenty-two hours of work a day was needed for her home. She knew how much money she could spend and she proceeded to divide the work and money among several assistants coming in on different shifts. Her household now runs like clockwork. One of the splendid things about this new system is its great flexibility and the fact that it can be adapted to ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... wheel is worked by clockwork inclosed between two disks, and would rotate continuously were it not for the catch, G, working in and out of the cogs. Through this catch, G, the wheel is dependent on the movement of electro-magnet. This cogged wheel is a double one, consisting of two wheels ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... who should take down whom in the dinner parties at home. Nor was the household in which she lived one that called for much decision. Except in the one grand case of Captain Lennox's offer, everything went on with the regularity of clockwork. Once a year, there was a long discussion between her aunt and Edith as to whether they should go to the Isle of Wight, abroad, or to Scotland; but at such times Margaret herself was secure of drifting, without any exertion of her own, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... many immense cinders—mere refuse slag—of no conceivable interest to science, except to predicate the ultimate conclusion—"a played-out universe, resulting from a played-out potency within the universe." The magnificent clockwork of the heavens will then have run down, with no Darwinian whirligig to wind it up again, and the terrible reality of Byron's dream, which it would seem was not all a dream, be realized in the bright sun extinguished, the stars darkling the eternal space, rayless and pathless, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... lance, until at the end he had taken every one of the twelve. Holding the lance with its booty of captured rings in his left hand, together with the bridle rein, he drew his sabre with the right and rode back over the course. His horse moved like clockwork, his eye was true and his hand steady. Three of the wooden balls fell from the posts, split fairly in the middle, while from the fourth he sliced off a goodly piece and left the remainder standing in ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Well and good. After that she takes an hour or so to dress; that carries her on till two; then she goes for a walk in the Tuileries in the sight of all men, and she is always in by four to be ready for you. She lives like clockwork. She keeps no secrets from her maid, and Reine keeps nothing from me, you may be sure. Reine can't if she would—along of my son, for she is very sweet upon him. So, you see, if madame had any intimacy with Monsieur Crevel, we should be bound ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... I think I hear the tick-tack all the time since the last attempt. It haunts my ears, it is frightful, to say to one's self: There is clockwork somewhere, just about to reach the death-tick—and not to know where, not to know where! When the police were here I made them all listen, and I was not sure even when they had all listened and said there was no tick-tack. It is terrible to hear it in my ear any ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally so made—it is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if everything within her went by clockwork, from the gesture of her kings to ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... the way with love.—Laetitia was a good housekeeper. Everything was punctual as clockwork. I use the word advisedly. If her father, who was punctual to one date,—the dinner-hour,—made any remark to the contrary as he took up the carving-knife, Laetitia would instantly send one of her sisters to question the old clock in ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... business of counting the votes and allotting the preferences was sure to be a slow one at the first time of asking, but there was no hesitation and no confusion. The proceedings in the Wanderer's Hall went forward with the steady certainty of clockwork.... The whole trial was a high one in a town like this with a considerable element of illiterate voters; but taking it all through we have no hesitation in saying that the working of the new system was a ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... very attractive still"—"Odd she don't marry again!" "There's Captain Barfoot to be sure—calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be duly disclosed in ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... of the water-soaked package in the open yard of the shops of the Swift Construction Company, proved that there was enough explosive in the bomb to blow the shed itself to pieces. But the stopping of the clockwork attachment of course ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... girl found that the Bear did no harm, but only growled in a make-believe, jolly fashion, she decided to make friends with him. She sat down on the floor close beside him, and when the clockwork inside the toy had run down, and the Bear was still, Nettie took him up in her arms ...
— The Story of a Plush Bear • Laura Lee Hope
... had already gone on for six days, pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other provisions the force of these isolated ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the gas-tight rescue room, comprises a small dial with electrical connections, which records the number of strokes made by the machine, and a pencil point which rests on a paper diaphragm, fastened to a horizontal brass disk. This disk is driven by clockwork, and makes one complete revolution per hour. When the machine is in operation, the pencil point works back and forth, making a broad line on the paper; when the operator of the machine rests, the pencil point traces a single line. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... cure for ordinary healthy thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which makes happy ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... soon tearing along the smooth Roman road at a splendid pace, "the ponies going like clockwork," as Vixen remarked approvingly; but poor Miss McCroke thought that any clock which went as fast as those ponies would be deemed the maddest ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... depending on the rotation of the shell to give a regular motion to clockwork have been tried, but so far no practicable form of these fuzes has ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no doubt about it. For five-and-twenty years he had lived by clockwork. But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not London clockwork. He had changed his longitude, but not himself. The habits of a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... kept two hired men and a servant girl, and the sixteen-year-old of her oldest sister lived with her. There were few visitors at the Stockard place now, but Jerome "dropped in" every Saturday night with clockwork regularity and talked to Anne about her stock and advised her regarding the rotation of her crops and the setting out of her orchards. And at ten o'clock he would take his hat and cane and tell Anne to be good ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to humor her innocent taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after her mother's death, she had struck out one little indulgence after another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerre first came into the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... withdrawn a little farther; and then five of them went back to the barricade which the enemy's artillery had discovered. They sat down in the trench behind it. A German battery was trying for it—putting its four big high-explosive shells regularly round it—salvo after salvo as punctual as clockwork. It was only a matter of time ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... the end. Capt. Murray Sueter in his book on submarines gives these and other particulars of the vessel. At either end the boat had a cabin, the air in which remained good for about three hours, and in the middle of the boat was a large paddlewheel rotated by clockwork mechanism, which, it was claimed, would run for eight hours when once wound up. The iron tips at the ends of the vessel were intended for ramming, and the inventor was confident he could sink the biggest English ship afloat by crushing ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Park and of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and of Alaska. Yellowstone Park is perhaps the only region where one can see innumerable geysers shooting high into the air, performing year after year with clockwork regularity. Its opal and sapphire pools and hot sulphurous springs, its bears and wild creatures, remind one that here Nature left a specimen of her earliest creation. Motoring along the roads of Wyoming to the "Devil's Paint Pot" of hot bubbling mud, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... all events, that was the condition of mind in which I found myself as I paced the spacious poop, hour after hour, sometimes accompanied by Polson, sometimes conversing with Tudsbery, and occasionally alone. As I walked, my glances travelled, with the regularity of clockwork, first to windward, then ahead, then aloft, and finally—as I reached the binnacle—into the compass bowl; then away out to windward again, and so on, ad infinitum, until I was fairly bone- weary, and had completely ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... measure nor relation, nor aught whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness. Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details the most frivolous, the most ludicrous—the name of a street, Strond Street, Snargate Street; the round fur cap—black fur for the side, white ermine for the top—of ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... be," she said, "for she has all sorts of advantages. She's got bells, and ribbons, and a clockwork mouse, but she hasn't a very nice disposition. She often scratches. Miss Mervyn's quite afraid of her, and mother would send her away at once if she ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... the world was presently to know more, and the same must be said of another inventor, Dr. Barton, of Beckenham, who shortly completed an airship model carrying aeroplanes and operated by clockwork. In an early experiment this model travelled four ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... passed away without a single event to relieve the monotonous existence of Eugenie and her father. The same actions were performed daily with the automatic regularity of clockwork. The deep sadness of Mademoiselle Grandet was known to every one; but if others surmised the cause, she herself never uttered a word that justified the suspicions which all Saumur entertained about the state of the rich heiress's heart. Her only society was made up of the three Cruchots and a ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... do, my lad. He knows just where his orf forefoot ought to be at one o'clock, and his near hind-foot at two. Why, he goes like clockwork. I just winds him up once with a bit o' corn and a drink o' water, starts him, and there's his old legs go tick-tack, tick-tack, and his head swinging like a pendulow. Use 'is secon' natur', and all I've got to do is to tie up the ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Begum's palace," explained Archie rapidly. "Dahlia decoys the Chief Mucilage; you, Thomas, drive the submarine; Myra has charge of the clockwork mouse, and we others hang about and sing. To say more at this stage would be to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... a special machine constructed which registered, by a kind of clockwork, the intercessions made on behalf of the various applicants for healing. Each one would receive a printed bulletin, stating, for example—"Prayed on the 10th of March, at four o'clock in the afternoon, John A. Dowie." If the patient was not in Chicago, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... with that great gift are not to be met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it always happens in life that the man—or woman—with whom we would like to talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each other so seldom have a chance of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a star once found to be continuously observed. Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and screws about its point of support, by ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... certain your retreat is known. We have just had another failure, clockwork thirty hours too soon, with the usual humiliating result. Zero is quite disheartened. We are all scattered, and I could find no one but the SOLEMN ASS who brings you this and the money. I would love to ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... hundred soldiers! And it is said that Rotterdam has the name of being the most turbulent and unruly city in Holland! In fact, some time ago there was a popular demonstration against the municipality, which had no consequences but a few broken windows. But in a country like this, which runs by clockwork, it must have seemed, and did truly seem, a great event; the cavalry was sent from the Hague, the country was in commotion. One must not think, however, that this people is all sugar; the citizens of Rotterdam confess that "the holy rabble," as Carducci calls it, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... to write about Christmas. Christmas is a matter that humanity has taken so deeply to heart that we will not have our festival meddled with by bungling hands. No efficiency expert would dare tell us that Christmas is inefficient; that the clockwork toys will soon be broken; that no one can eat a peppermint cane a yard long; that the curves on our chart of kindness should be ironed out so that the "peak load" of December would be evenly distributed through the year. No ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of association. He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,—give up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship take no ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... you. Your mother would have died for shame; there was no modern cant about your mother; she thought—she said to me, sir—I'm glad she's in her grave, Dick Naseby. Misinformed! Misinformed, sir? Have you no loyalty, no spring, no natural affections? Are you clockwork, hey? Away! This is no place for you. Away!" (Waving his hands in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Zamboanga the christian natives quaked, and crowds of Moros perambulated the streets in rich and picturesque costumes, varying in design according to the usage of their tribes. Before the departure of the royal visitor the troops were formed up, military evolutions were performed with clockwork precision, and volley after volley was fired in the air. The Sultan declared he could never receive the Governor with such splendour, but he wanted him to promise to return his visit. It was not politic, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... are few who have not at some period of their life been called to notice the change which a few short hours will bring over a household. A family may have lived on for years with no break in the home circle, and every thing connected with them have moved on with the regularity of clockwork, when some sudden and unlooked-for event will all at once change the very atmosphere of their home. Owing to her advanced age, Grandma Adams' death could hardly be supposed to have been unlooked for, ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... flocking thither. In the big court-yard, and all along the wide street as far as High Street, the trades unions were gathered about their banners. The great review had all been planned beforehand, and all went as by clockwork by those who were accustomed to handling great masses of men; there was no running from side to side; every one found his place with ease. Pelle and Stolpe, who had devised the programme, went along the ranks setting ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... stir from this here chair, Mr. Polatkin," Markulies protested, "and my mother also, which I am sending her to Kalvaria—regular like clockwork—ten dollars a month, she should never walk so far from here bis that door, if that ganef didn't come in here last night and make ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... and oppression overwhelm the physical instruments of consciousness, and deprive the will of its connection with its tools. The will longs to see him who has destroyed its abode, but it no longer controls the shattered tissues; the nerves shiver like the broken springs of clockwork ere they come to a stand-still forever. The eye still distinguishes light occasionally, but it cannot see ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... light thar for nigh onto fifty years? But some of these know-alls come along and said it wasn't the right kind; it oughter blink. And they made the old captain pull down the light that he had been burning steady and true, and the Government sot up that thar newfangled thing a flashing by clockwork on Numbskull Nob. It did make the old man hot, sure. 'Shet the window, mate,' he said to me when he was dying and wanted air badly. 'I can't go off in peace with that devilish thing of Numbskull Nob a winking ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... Clockwork can often be employed for propulsion purposes, but this method is not very satisfactory. It is also very difficult to obtain suitable clockworks to install in a boat. Oftentimes it will be possible to salvage the works of an old alarm-clock, ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... pleased with that drawn by Attiret that he wished to make him a mandarin. The French in particular strove to amuse the great monarch, and to enable him to wile away his leisure with ingeniously constructed automatons worked by clockwork machinery. He also learned from them much about the politics and material condition of Europe, and it is not surprising that he became imbued with the idea that France was the greatest and most powerful state in that continent. Almost insensibly Keen Lung entertained a more favorable opinion ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... revolve by means of clockwork, were fed with mineral oil, a refined kerosine; and the refraction was caused by highly ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... superseding, on the great roads at least, the then existing system of sluggish and irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons and companies, by a new system of government coaches, in connexion with the Post-Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of passengers, with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed, which he hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous; coach proprietors, innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against Mr. Palmer; he was ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... he had been very kind to me formerly—they said he spoiled me—and he was very kind to me still. My best toys were presents from him, and my prettiest books; a wonderful wooden horse which moved by clockwork, given to me when I was seven—how much my poor father was amused when I told him this horse was "a double thoroughbred"—"Don Quixote," with Dore's illustrations, this very year; in fact some new ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... has rose early and sat up late to make him easy, when he was sotting at every alehouse in town. I knew his last wife: she was a woman of breeding, good humour, and complaisance—knew how to live in the world. As for you, you look like a puppet moved by clockwork; your clothes hang upon you as they were upon tenter-hooks; and you come into a room as you were going to steal away a pint pot. Get you gone in the country, to look after your mother's poultry, to milk the cows, churn the butter, and dress up nosegays for a holiday, ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... strong as anybody, when she's well—and he don't put 'em on the green paper work, because it's got arsenic in it, and it makes your head ache, and you're liable to blood poisonin'. One the girls fainted and had spasms, and as soon as he found it out he took her right off; and he's just like clockwork to pay. I think it'll do everything for S'tira to be along 'th me there, where I can ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... became routine, and proceeded like clockwork. Each patient ox voluntarily drew near, and stood, waiting to be yoked with his fellow and chained to his daily task. So well did each know his place by the side of his mate that the driver had only to place one end of the yoke on the neck of ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... what they like. It isn't the piano-tuner. It isn't the man who does the clocks. They know who it is. It isn't that Marriott man. I've found out something about him they don't know. He's got a false stomach. It goes by clockwork. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... roof and make sure that everything is in order. At ten minutes to twelve, I hoist into place the two arms to which our wires are secured, stretching them tight by means of the winch which we have provided, and then I at once start the clockwork. I then descend, make my way to the tram-station, and take a third-class ticket to Colmar, where I will await you at Valentin's cabaret. If you do not arrive by sundown, I am to go on to Paris ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... wasn't, Sergeant!" he cried angrily. "Look for yerself.— Didn't yer see, pardners? I was walking up and down like a clockwork himidge.—Sleep at my post? Me sleep at my post? Wish I may die if I do such a thing. It's the old game. Yer allus 'ated me, Sergeant, from the very first, and—Phew! Here! What's the matter? I've caught something, and it's got me in the nut. ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... the hands of a repairer. It was always so with Lloyd. Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... had never known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as though she did ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... makes our assurance surer. For uncounted centuries before ever hearing of Gravitation men knew of the sun that he rose and set, of the moon that she waxed and waned, of the tides that they flowed and ebbed, all regularly, at times to be predicted; of the stars that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... meat" and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... 'Our luckiest find,' Scott says, 'was perhaps the right sort of lamp in which to burn this oil. Fortunately an old Arctic explorer, Captain Egerton, presented me with a patent lamp in which the draught is produced by a fan worked by clockwork mechanism, and no chimney is needed. One can imagine the great mortality there would be in chimneys if we were obliged to employ them, so that when, on trial, this lamp was found to give an excellent light, others of the same ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... love with, I can tell that from your last letter. The pretty brunette had not intellectuality enough, had she? My dear fellow, as if that had anything to do with it! You were not ready, that was all. You fall in love by clockwork once every year; and it is time now. If you should see the P. B. again to-morrow, you'd be lost directly. As for me—I should think you would be tired of asking. No, I am not in love. No, I feel no inclination whatever ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... and another all day, but went for a walk after tea and saw over the No.— G.H. at the Casino—a splendid place, working like clockwork. Lots of bad cases, but they all look clean and beautifully cared ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... with clockwork attachment, giving apparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with clamps for binnacle. 36 inch size, only L2. 2. 0. (Invaluable for night work.) With A. B. C. certificate, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... nameless figure and be given instructions. At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron's ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... grown cattle, and the following morning the herd was corralled and the road-branding commenced. The cattle were uniform in size, and the stamping of the figure '4' over the holding "Lazy L" of Las Palomas, moved like clockwork. With a daybreak start and an abundance of help the last animal was ironed up before sundown. As a favor to Nancrede's outfit, their camp being nearly five miles distant, we held them the first ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going. Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without intermission, absorbed in its own business—buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... squadron's machines would leave the ground was remarkable. The twenty Sopwiths took the air at precise intervals, flew together in a V formation while executing difficult manoeuvres, and landed one after the other with the exactness of clockwork. The French pilots flew the Farman and Breguet bombardment machines whenever the weather permitted. Every one knew some big bombardment was ahead but when it would be made or what place was to be ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... surprise and reconciliation. But, as she afterwards observed, "there's times when you worrit along for days together, an' no seemin' good of it; an' then one mornin' you wakes up to find everything goin' like clockwork, an' yerself standin' by, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banks beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The big shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of smoke rose ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... silence was broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day. ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... diagrammatically. While current passes through M the armature is pulled towards it, the end P, carrying an inked wheel, rises, and a mark is made on the tape W, which is moved continuously being drawn forward off reel R by the clockwork—or electrically-driven rollers ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... last act three was finished it was ten o'clock and Nita gave a sigh of utter exhaustion. "If Madeline's rule holds," she said, "this play ought to go like clockwork to-morrow." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... they were getting their rations each night with the regularity of clockwork, they were beginning to appreciate properly the excellence of their fare. "Seeing," as the Senior Subaltern would say, "that we are on Active Service, I think the rations is ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... signal was given and everything followed like clockwork. One of the prisoners short-circuited the wires, shutting off the electric lighting system and the current in the wire fences. There was no moon, and the camp was left ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... looked as if she was as intelligent as any of them; but the sight was not an agreeable one to men accustomed to discipline. The contrast when the TAMERLANE came along an hour or so after was emphatic. Every man at his post; every order carried out with the precision of clockwork; the captain pacing the quarter-deck as if she were a line-of-battle ship—here the airs put on were almost ludicrous in the other direction. Although she was only "a good jump" long, as we say, whenever an order was given, it was thundered out ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... usual, but the deck-house was empty; a very subdued glow indicated where the binnacle was. And, answering these signs of existence, could be distinguished the red and green lights of steamers, the firm rays of lighthouses, and the red or white warnings of gas-buoys run by clockwork. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... liberty you don't know your privileges. If you don't like your habits, what hinders you from changin' 'em? But do you? Here I come back: here's th' old Town Quay same as ever it was; and here likewise you all be, runnin' on as I left 'ee, like a clockwork—a bit slower with age maybe—that's all. Whereby I conclude your ways ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... solitary who did not talk of ‘automata.’ To beat a dog was no longer a matter of any moment. The stick was laid on with the utmost indifference, and a great fool was made of those who pitied the animals, as if they had any feeling. They said they were only clockwork, and that the cries they uttered when they were beaten were no more than the noise of some little spring that had been moved, and that all this involved no sensation. They nailed the poor animals upon boards ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... everything, and more than Mary, with her young inexperience, could have thought of. She prepared the warm bath, and tried it with her husband's own thermometer (Mr. Jenkins was as punctual as clockwork in noting down the temperature of every day). She let his mother place her baby in the tub, still preserving the same rigid, affronted aspect, and then she went upstairs without a word. Mary longed to ask her to stay, but dared ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... to loving little Inna, in her endeavour to influence this big, strong, wilful cousin for good. Nay, she shamed him into industry and painstaking by her own application to studies, going to and from the Owl's Nest, "like clockwork, you little grinder!" as the boy expressed it, making his awkward admission to her on Christmas Eve, the two wreathing the house with holly and evergreens. This was something which Carlo and Smut the black cat thought it their duty to look into, to judge from the way they pryingly inspected ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield |
