"Tinkering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abominable, low, cunning craft that ignorance and idleness can devise, they practise. In some instances these things are carried out to such a pitch as to render them more like imbeciles than human beings endowed with reason. Chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking are in many instances used only as a 'blind;' while the women and children go about the country begging and fortune-telling, bringing to their heathenish tents sufficient to keep the family. The poor women are the slaves and tools for the whole family, and can be seen very ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... our own history," he continued, in a tone which had in it a shade of melancholy, "you see from 1823 to the eve of 1848 the Diet had been tinkering at reform in a half-hearted sort of way, but the Paris revolution let loose the whirlwind, and events were precipitated. I need not tell you there was a standing quarrel between us and the reactionary rulers in Vienna. It was the deceitful policy of Austria to bring about a temporary show of agreement ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... upon the French border so tremendous an army that resistance would be impossible. The antecedents of the Franco-Prussian War had been clearly thought out by the German masters at a time when Louis Napoleon was still tinkering with his quixotical Empire ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... upon a perfect rhyme, as if it was a cog in a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, or suggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get it into a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkering and verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call the man who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit an artist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... naturally kind-hearted, active, and intelligent, he lacked strength of will to resist temptation, and had therefore fallen a victim to intemperance. He had lost his place as foreman of the great machine-shop, and what money he now earned came from odd jobs of tinkering which he was able to do here and there at private houses; for Tom was a genius as well as a mechanic, and when his head was steady enough, he could mend a clock or clean a watch as well as he could set up and regulate a steam-engine, and this latter he could do better ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... searchlight to show me the way down, I haven't felt that we were safe here. Therefore I say all aboard just as soon as we can be loaded in — what is that?" as a sharp staccato of shocks rose from Brodno's machine, the result of his tinkering with his air-exhaust. Even as he made haste to stop them, time being all important, Byers was placing the two women ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... Tinkering, doctoring, shifting, deranging, Urged by a constant satiety on, Ever the new for the newer exchanging, Hazarding ever ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... not better become in reality what I had hitherto been merely playing at—a tinker or a gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker, than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain; for I could only expect ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... moon. At Dade's invitation they all went down to the bunkhouse. In spite of the dilapidated appearance of its exterior, the interior of the building was in comparatively good condition—due to the continual tinkering of Malcolm, who liked to spend his idle hours there—and Malcolm lighted a candle, placed it on the rough table, took a deck of cards from the shelf, and the three played "pitch" for two hours. At the end of that time ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four small industries—a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... My unfortunate workman, having blundered on for certain millions of years tinkering and patching and improving his dismal colony, will give the thing up; and God will laugh and show him the mistakes and then blot the essay out, as a master runs his pen through the errors in a pupil's exercise. The earth grows cold at last, and the herds of humanity die, and the countless ages ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... been talking he had been tinkering with the motor, which was having a little balky spell. At his last words Jerry spoke ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working class movement and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... defect—they would not reap. An ingenious English actor had developed a contrivance which would cut imitation wheat on the stage, but no one had developed a machine that would work satisfactorily in real life. Robert McCormick spent the larger part of his days and nights tinkering at a practical machine. He finally produced a horrific contrivance, made up of whirling sickles, knives, and revolving rods, pushed from behind by two horses; when he tried this upon a grain-field, however, it made ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... an hour I conclude to face the elements and take my chances of finding some other shelter farther ahead rather than endure their vociferous onslaughts any longer. They all three come out to see what is going to happen, and I am not ashamed to admit that I stand tinkering around the bicycle in the pelting rain longer than is necessary before mounting, in order to keep them out in it and get them wet through, if possible, in revenge for having practically ousted me from the culvert, and since I have a water-proof, and they have nothing of the sort, I partially succeed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... that I do not expect to confine myself to tinkering forever. I should have abandoned it long since, for hundreds of fine men here in town have said to me, "Herman von Bremen, you ought to be something else." It was only the other day that one of the burgomasters let fall these words in the council: "Herman ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... before, but Uncle Henry never could learn the astonishing fact. He was more interested in his machines than he was in his business, by far; and spent all his spare time in tinkering with them. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... said the woman, speaking English. "The man is a good man, and he will do us no harm. We are tinkers, sir; but we do many things besides tinkering, many sinful things, especially in Wales, whither we are soon going again. Oh, I want to be eased of some of my sins before I go into Wales again, and so do you, Tourlough, for you know how you are sometimes haunted by devils at night in those dreary ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... is simply this," she said: "I've been tinkering with that machine gun most of the day, and my conviction is that it will work. You simply turn a handle like a hand sewing machine. As soon as you hear me starting it you leave the church by that shell hole at the back and go ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mysterious tinkering and rose from his dusty job to brush off his clothes, he remarked, "There, now you may have your heart's desire, Dillon, if all you want to do ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... had various attractions. Among them was Charlie's "maginary." It was a box covered with white cloth, a piece of workmanship at which Charlie had been secretly tinkering for two days. It was labeled "A Distant Cousin of the White Elephant of Siam. Price to see, three cents, and don't tell when you've ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... matron's eyes Saw, in the tinker, a most likely prize To win, as husband, for her daughter fair; But surely they must be mistaken there! This family's standing was considered good; WILLIAM, amongst the very poorest stood: And, in his tinkering garb, was not a match For that fair girl, whom many strove to catch. Let this be as it might; he left the house Without proposing to make her his spouse. Yet not without the strongest inclination To make short ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... Edinburgh.' (12mo, 1760.) There is yet a fourth bastard: The Prince of Angola, by one J. Ferriar, 'a tragedy altered from the play of Oroonoko and adapted to the circumstances of the present times.'[4] (Manchester, 1788.) It must be confessed that all this tinkering with an original, which does not require from any point of view the slightest alteration or omission, is most uncalled for, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... to the Aegis hangar, where he found Grimshaw tinkering over a broken airplane wing. Mr. King had a desk in one corner of what ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... assorting and stowing the bales of cloth and the other goods in the Jenks two wagons, watering the animals and staking them out anew, tinkering with the equipment and making various essays with the bull whip, I found occupation enough; nevertheless there were moments of interim, or while passing to and fro, when I was vividly aware of the scenes and events transpiring in ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... we get hold of a watch which has thin pallet arms, or stones, if they are exposed pallets, and the escape was designed for pallets with thick arms. There is no sort of tinkering we can do to give such a watch a good motion, except to change either the escape wheel or the pallets. If we know enough of the lever escapement to set about it with skill and judgment, the matter is soon put to rights; but otherwise we can look and squint, ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... Several bills tinkering at the patent laws are before Congress, and one of these (House Bill, No. 3,370) passed the House on the 30th ult. It has one section that may be made to work great harm to inventors, as it prevents infringers being sued for more than one year's damages previous to notice of infringement ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... tube-tinkering with tompions, stays, plugs, plates, and wedges, to the distraction of the ship's carpenter and blacksmith, steam was coaxed up; and, at 9.15 a.m. (February 7th), we ran northwards through the deep narrow channel, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"—which Wordsworth thought exquisite—they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... hang thy head down. Hauskuld will tell them all not to meddle nor make with Huckster Hedinn, saying he is a rude unfriendly fellow. Next morning thou must be off early and go to the farm nearest Hrutstede. There thou must offer thy goods for sale, praising up all that is worst, and tinkering up the faults. The master of the house will pry about and find out the faults. Thou must snatch the wares away from him, and speak ill to him. He will say, 'twas not to be hoped that thou wouldst behave well to him, when ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... Nice piece of impudence! Here am I, who have devoted half my life to the tinkering up of damaged soldiers, and know to a tittle how much a man can bear, all wrong, of course! And you, a young jackanapes of a subaltern, a mere boy, tell me to my face that you ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... is working all right now," said Frank. "How about it, Bob? You know we haven't been up for two or three weeks, Jack. Bob's been tinkering with it. When I last saw him at work, he seemed to have the engine entirely dismantled. Looked to me as if he had enough parts for three planes. Did you get it ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... in the wagon when I was tinkering with it," said Scott. "We've only two horses, you know, and I want you women ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... toughened by experience is one who lets his rational brain have control. He ranks next to the stalwart knight of the eraser, because he has the courage to arrest the endless tinkering of design in order to get something done. He will not let the family freeze while he is thinking up some grand scheme of sawing ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... said, Let me a little open that scripture to you: 'As every man hath received the gift'; that is, said he, as every one hath received a trade, so let him follow it. If any man have received a gift of tinkering, as thou hast done, let him follow his tinkering. And so other men their trades; and the divine ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... call the present accepted system the Copernican system, as it is really due to Kepler, half a century after the death of Copernicus, but much credit is due to the latter for his successful attempt to provide a real alternative for the Ptolemaic system, instead of tinkering with it. The old geocentric system once shaken, the way was gradually smoothed for the heliocentric system, which Copernicus, still hampered by tradition, did not quite reach. He was hardly a practical astronomer in the observational ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... constructed for the last two hundred years: it goes of itself, and all that the driver has to do is to watch the movements, and from time to time to screw up a nut and oil the joints. It is not like Saint-Nicholas, for instance, where the machine was never allowed to go by itself. The driver was always tinkering at it, running first to the right and then to the left, peering in here and altering a wheel there, not knowing or remembering that the best mounted machine is the one which requires the least attention from the man who sets it in motion. The great advantage which I enjoy ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... you boobs, and let a regular fellow talk," chided Bob. "What I was going to say was that while I was tinkering with the set I disconnected the ground wire. Of course I thought that would put the receiver out of business for the time, and I was almost knocked silly when I found that I could hear the concert that was going ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... "Nay, think it or thole it I cannot, That thou, a young fir of the forest Enwreathed in the gold that thou guardest, Shouldst be given to a tinkering tinsmith. Nay, scarce can I smile, O thou glittering In silk like the goddess of Baldur, Since thy father handfasted and pledged thee, So famed as thou art, to ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... the wagon-body he was tinkering and waved a wrench toward the window behind Stratton. Turning quickly, the latter saw that it looked out on the rear of the ranch-house, where there were a few stunted trees and a not altogether successful attempt at a small ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... of power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen, generals. John Kay, the ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... the use of tools, and the further fact that I have no ambition in the direction of mechanical endeavor has doubtless saved me many a bruised thumb and a vast amount of hard labor. When I see my neighbors tinkering away at their storm windows and garbage boxes and grape vine trellises and dog kennels and window screens and front gates, I do not neglect to thank heaven that Alice has the best of reasons for not asking me to engage in similar odd jobs ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Running fine—I'm just tinkering the catch on the door, for even Richard Parsons cannot coax things into wearing forever. ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... rooms, oat and feed bins, a small room where the former owner had done his "tinkering and odd jobs," and many other places where someone might have hidden. But no one could be found. No farm animal had made the noise, that was evident, for Sandy could account for all the larger stock on the place, and it must have been a body of considerable ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... are criticizing the courts, and there are courts which are criticizing business enterprises that they don't understand. There are so-called experts—mere college professors—who are tinkering the tariff. There are over-zealous executives who are currying favor with the crowd by enforcing laws which are well enough on the statute books, but which were never meant to go further. As if matters were not bad enough already, there are ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... that he fled from London "from fear of consumption," that he must do something or go mad, so, having a knowledge of smithing that enabled him to acquire the tinkering craft, he became a sort of Petulengro himself. A few days after pitching his tent in Mumper's Dingle, near Willenhall, as he slept against an ash tree, a voice seemed to cry in his ear Danger! Danger! and he awoke to see Leonora, a pretty gypsy girl ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... controlled strong feeling. Lenore saw Jake's hand go to her father's shoulder. "Boss," he whispered, "we can't ketch thet car now." Anderson resigned himself, averted his face so that he could not see Nash, who was tinkering with the engine. Lenore believed then that Nash had deliberately stalled the engine or disordered something, so as to permit the escape of the strange car ahead. She saw it turn off the long, straight road ahead and disappear ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Wade had surprised Jack Belllounds in the blacksmith shop. The meetings were accidental, yet Wade ever remembered how coincidence beckoned him thither and how circumstance magnified strange reflections. There was no reason why Jack should not be tinkering in the blacksmith shop early of a morning. But Wade followed an uncanny guidance. Like his hound Fox, he never split on trails. When opportunity afforded he went into the shop and looked it over with eyes as keen as the nose of his dog. And in the dust ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... the habits of Salmon, and superintending a mill driven by water-power which employs nearly a thousand people; so that if a bill like yours could be worked in a satisfactory manner here, on so small a stream as the Ribble, it may anywhere in the kingdom. But if you make a tinkering job of it, and ask for too little, you will rouse your opponents and discourage your friends. By all means go for a free passage for the fish every night from sunset to sunrise in all cases where this does not interfere ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... also assumed responsibility for the condition of the boat, and did it so thoroughly that nothing in the little cutter was ever found wanting. And when, for any reason, his presence was in demand, the first place to look for him was—in the boat, and there, too, he was usually found, tinkering away with sheets, sails, or rudder and ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Akenside lashes with unsparing energy. He committed afterwards an egregious blunder in reference to this production. He frittered it down into a stupid ode. Indeed, he had always an injudicious trick—whether springing from fastidiousness or undue ambition—of tinkering and tampering ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... home to Laindon, dropped a log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up. The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his business, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... said. "This is the first real intellectual puzzle I've had to contend with in years. Tinkering with machinery ... that's easy. You know what you want, all you need is to make the machinery perform properly. But this ... I'm afraid I'm too old to handle a real ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... turbine is simple in design and construction and does not require constant tinkering and adjustment of valve gears or taking up of wear in the running parts, it is like any other piece of fine machinery in that it should receive intelligent and careful attention from the operator by inspection of the ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... his digging and returned to the Ford, still determined to carry on the bluff and pretend that much tinkering was necessary before he could travel further. With a great show of industry he rummaged for pliers and wrenches, removed the hood from the motor and squinted down at ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... importance of the difference; but if the rich man plunders the community by exorbitant profits, or speculation with other people's money, while the gipsy adds a fowl or two to the produce of his tinkering; or, once again, if the gipsy is as honest as the honest citizen, which is not so rare a case by any means as people imagine, I return to my question: Wherein, I say, is the warm house, the windows hung with purple, and the table covered with fine linen, more divine than the tent or ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... looking for another case like your father, sitting penniless around the house, tinkering on inventions up to the day ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... of that kind, Adultery. I do not suppose that they expect to lessen it; but, to be sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... choice which such men are so willing to make; namely, the choice between wealth and a modest competency, when that modest competency is to be combined with a scientific career, and the means of advancing knowledge. I do not believe that all the talking about, and tinkering of, medical education will do the slightest good until the fact is clearly recognized, that men must be thoroughly grounded in the theoretical branches of their profession, and that to this end the teaching of those theoretical branches must be ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the station. It takes a soldo to get in, and Luigi has but few of them, but he is always there. His gondola is moored to the landing steps outside—a black swan of a boat, all morocco cushions and silk fringes; the product of a thousand years of tinkering by the most fastidious and luxurious people of ancient or modern times, and still to-day the most comfortable conveyance ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... view of the management of the public debt, approving all the important suggestions of the secretary of the treasury, and recognizing the proper protection of American industry. He is in favor of the great interests of labor, and opposed to such tinkering with the tariff as will make vain the toil of the industrious farmer, paralyze the arm of the sturdy mechanic, strike down the hand of the hardy laborer, stop the spindle, hush the loom, extinguish the furnace-fires, and degrade all independent toilers to the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the Innkeeper he was called, and no reproach was coupled with the name. His son Hayyim succeeded to the business, but later he took up the glazier's trade, and developed a knack for all sorts of tinkering, whereby he was able to increase his ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... of consideration must be on a scale commensurate with the evil, which it proposes to deal with. It is no use trying to bale out the ocean with a pint pot. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... assistance of the lantern set to work upon the lock again, in the hope that he might be able to complete his skeleton key and let himself out before the Governor returned to carry out his threat. But this was a more difficult matter than he had anticipated; and after about two hours of ineffective tinkering he was ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... suddenly disappeared; he was brighter, sharper, more talkative than at any time within the previous five years. The almost worn-out machinery of his life seemed to have been mysteriously repaired, whether by Dr. Deane's tinkering, or by one of those freaks of Nature which sometimes bring new teeth and hair to an aged head, neither the son nor the daughter could guess. To the former this awakened activity of the old man's brain was not a little annoying. He had been obliged to renew ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... a run down to Bluewater Bill's myself to-night," he said to himself as he prepared to go to work on the aeroplane, at which Le Blanc had been busy tinkering during ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... I was telling you about my ranch. I'm going to have one some day. Do you think I'd live here all my life with the old gentleman and the old lady, and nothing to do but tinkering round flowers and cars? I ain't ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... came back a little sooner than we expected, and as soon as I got near the house I heard your signal. I knew what it was in a moment. There were Mrs. Baggert and Garret talking away, and when I asked them why they didn't answer your call they said they thought you were merely tinkering with the machinery. But I knew better. It's the first time we ever had ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... was getting the diningroom ready for the new carpet. Therefore, although she heard the noise upstairs, she gave herself no concern about it; supposing that Larry was merely amusing himself, for he was continually tinkering at one ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... through, With her twelve Young Ladies, two and two, Looking, as such young ladies do, Trussed by Decorum and stuffed with morals - Whether she listened to Hob or Bob, Nob or Snob, The Squire on his cob, Or Trudge and his ass at a tinkering job, To the "Saint" who expounded at "Little Zion" - Or the "Sinner" who kept the "Golden Lion" - The man teetotally weaned from liquor - The Beadle, the Clerk, or the Reverend Vicar - Nay, the very Pie in its cage of wicker - She gathered such meanings, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... replaced the leg in the stool, and sat on it looking innocent as only a gypsy tinker could,—calm as a summer morning. I commend the subject for a picture. Very recently, that is, in the beginning of 1881, a man of the same tinkering kind, and possibly of the same blood as Honest John, confined in the prison of Moyamensing, Philadelphia, did nearly the same thing, only that instead of making his stool leg into a musical pipe he converted it into a pipe for tobacco. But when the watchman, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... damaged, and even on the day of her greatest conquest she behaved badly. The test was made on October 1, 1901. The aeronaut had rounded the Tower finely and was making for home when the motor began to miss and threatened to stop altogether. While Santos-Dumont was tinkering with the engine, leaving the steering wheel to itself, the balloon drifted over the Bois de Boulogne. As usual the cool air from the wood caused the hydrogen in the balloon to contract and the craft dropped until it appeared the voyage would end in the tree tops. Hastily shifting his weights ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified. ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... grace of God, Mr. John Bunyan, was born at Elstow, a mile side of Bedford, about the year 1628. His father was mean, and by trade a mender of pots and kettles, vulgarly called a tinker, and of the national religion, as commonly men of that trade are, and was brought up to the tinkering trade, as also were several of his brothers, whereat he worked about that country,[6] being also very profane and poor, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... known that Abercromby was coming. Even then Montcalm and his regulars were ready, but nothing else was. Every one knew that Ticonderoga was the key to the south of Canada; yet the fort was not ready, though the Canadian engineers had been tinkering at it for two whole summers. These engineers were, in fact, friends of Bigot, and had found that they could make money by spinning the work out as long as possible, charging for good material and putting in bad, and letting the gang plunder the stores on the way to the fort. ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... to put it together. When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing—although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come to her that the men tinkering with the car wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the programme she had ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... to bed that night, Blix sought out her father, who was still sitting up tinkering with the cuckoo clock, which he had taken all to pieces under the pretext that it was out of ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... real vehicle of improvement is education. It is by education that the American is trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and with which even bad ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... her up and she'll be all right, eh?" said Chamberlain, but Hand kept on tinkering. The sudden neighing and plunging of Little Simon's poor tormented horse gave warning of the sheriff, crashing from the underbrush directly into ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... slumbering in the tomb; but Christ is soon coming into his kingdom. Then the thief will be remembered, be raised from the dead, and be with Christ in that paradise into which he will then introduce all his people. Thus all is as clear as a sunbeam, when the text is freed from the bungling tinkering of men. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... in which even moderate Socialists already contemplate the freedom of the individual may be seen from an address on Sweated Labour which Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., delivered in Glasgow in autumn 1907. He said: "There was no use tinkering with the problem. Personally, he was not in favour of home work at all. To eliminate it might seem a cold-blooded way of dealing with sweating, but it was the only way that would give definite and ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... happened to see him, he began talking about doctors, and, by Jove, didn't he abuse them! He says they stand more in the way of the development of the spiritual forces in man than any other body of people. He denounced them all as low materialists, immersed in the tinkering of the flesh. 'What does the flesh matter?' he said. 'It is nothing. It is only an envelope. And the more tightly it is fastened together, the more it stifles the spirit. I would like to catch hold of some men's bodies and tear them in pieces to get at their souls.' ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... twittering; and now it reposed by the roadside helpless. This was the reckless, handsome boy who had set her guests laughing on an occasion requiring a measure of decorum, since the bishop honored her house with his presence; who now, with every appearance of impotent anger, was tinkering with the vitals of a hot engine, dirty and perspiring. Miss Herron admired the idea which grew before her imagination as she would have admired a ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... to several we have considered. Once more I am convinced of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immorality of our views. Nor do I find great improvement to-day over yesterday. There is much talk and some tinkering, but though our judgments are less harsh, still we are choked with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine egoism. We fail to attack ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... found wanting. With a quantity of written and uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one sinks fairly dumb to estimate! A kind of comfort it is, however, to see that "Imposture" has fallen openly "bankrupt," here as everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human tinkering, with all the Parliamentary Eloquence and Elective Franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go many yards more; but that its goings and currencies in this Earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of tinkering and trying, they did succeed in making two paddle wheels. They were very rough and crude, but strong and serviceable. They fastened each of these wheels to the end of an iron rod which they passed through the boat ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... deserted, save for a labourer and his wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the pond before her, she noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... was impossible to say, but nothing that Everard could do would induce the car to start. He examined everything which his rather limited knowledge of motorology suggested might be the cause of the stoppage, but with no result. After half an hour's tinkering, he was obliged ruefully to acknowledge himself ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both. 'The lion shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be tinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him change your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, a piece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into a vat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and is taken out tinged ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... had damaged one of the control levers beyond the possibility of repair outside a machine shop; but after considerable tinkering, Carthoris was able to propel his wounded flier at low speed, a rate which could not approach the rapid gait of the thoat, whose eight long, powerful legs carried it over the ochre vegetation of the dead sea-bottom at ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as to that. But he does not look to me like a hard proposition. If I can only reach the boat without being seen, the rest will be easy. Now is the proper time, while he is busy tinkering with the engine. You ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... English, Spanish and a smattering of Portuguese, to say nothing of dozens of other subjects. You graduated in the upper tenth of your class with a B.S. in both Transportation and Criminology which is why you're riding patrol and not punching a computer or tinkering with an engine. You'd think with all that education that somewhere along the line you'd have learned to think with your head instead ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... Thorndyke, "do we find you waiting like a Peri at the gates of Paradise? Polton is upstairs, you know, tinkering at one of his inventions. If you ever find the nest empty, you had better go up and bang at the laboratory door. He's always there ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... does he want to do with it? If the thing works all right, what's the sense of tinkering ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... worthy was a well known Sussex character and is immortalized by Lower. Newhaven has little to show the visitor beyond the small Norman church which has a chancel apse at the east of the tower. This portion is interesting but the nave has suffered from ignorant tinkering under the alias of "restoration." In the churchyard is a monument to those who perished in the wreck of the "Brazen" sloop of war in 1800 off the harbour, and another to a local brewer of the one-time famous "Tipper" ale, made from brackish water. The town was once called Meeching; this ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... tribunal, in case it decided against the United States, was to draw up regulations for the protection of the seal herds. These regulations when drafted did not prove entirely satisfactory, and bound only the United States and Great Britain. It required many years and much tinkering to bring about the reasonably satisfactory arrangement that is now in force. Yet to leave to an international tribunal not merely the decision of a disputed case but the legislation necessary to regulate an international property was in itself a great step in the development of ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... was Ramrod. He knew a little of most mechanical things and was for ever tinkering at something or other, useful or otherwise as the case might be. He could also "doctor" a sick cow or dog, and was even known to have successfully set the broken leg of an ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... of Dunstans, Brunos and Bernards, the monastic institution keeps on crumbling. The edifice will not stand much more propping and tinkering. While we admire this display of moral force, this commendable struggle of fresh courage and new hope against disintegrating forces, the conviction gains ground that something is radically wrong with the institution. There is something in it which fosters greed and ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere, and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with. Look what Stanley said the other day—that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we can ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them for the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkering with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... less effective or less lasting than the skill acquired in sewing yards of stitches or sawing yards of board just for "exercise" in a class? On the contrary, other things being equal, arithmetic and authors and sewing and tinkering can be made both more effective and more lasting when associated with pleasurable feelings than when performed under strain, compulsion and resentment. If it is only a question of "learning" this or ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... eye to their motives if one MUST read them), concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-immoral?) In the end, they all want English morality to be recognized as authoritative, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... commission, chosen for their conversancy with the subject, and having employed years in considering and digesting the particular measure: it can not be passed, because the House of Commons will not forego the precious privilege of tinkering it with their clumsy hands. The custom has of late been to some extent introduced, when the principle of a bill has been affirmed on the second reading, of referring it for consideration in detail to a select committee; but it has not been found that this practice causes ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... remarks had a mysterious quality. "I'm a free trader, but I'm not a Democrat. Tariff tinkering is not free trade, and I don't believe the Democrats would do any more than the Republicans, but that aint the question. The question is whether the farmers should ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... played about in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the surface with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge, and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labor, it fell, it never failed to fall ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... ran, Crusoe and the Honorable Cuthbert at my heels. There in the midst of the camp Mr. Tubbs stood, the center of a group who were regarding him with astonished looks. Mr. Shaw and the captain had left their tinkering, Cookie his saucepans, and Aunt Jane and Violet had come hurrying from the hut. Among us all stood Mr. Tubbs with folded arms, looking round upon the company with an extraordinary ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... they were ready to submerge again. Zimby Cox joined the crew. Bud suggested taking along hydrolungs in case of any need for tinkering with ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... turning into Arabs mounted on camels, capered joyously into the house, to escape the sand-storm of the desert. Mr. Merryweather, who was spending a day or two in camp, came in from the boathouse, where he was tinkering boats as usual. The whole party sat down, wet and dishevelled, and drew breath as they looked ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... knife, ruthlessly chopped it off to the right length. Then she bored a new hole with her scissors for the tongue of the buckle to pass through, and, going to Willie's tool box, found a short piece of wire with which—it seemed but the other day—he had been tinkering something about the house. With the wire she fastened the license securely to the collar. But before David could be found worthy of such decoration, he was subjected to a pretty severe bath in an old tub ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... must, my dear Mr. Wylder, make an effort. It won't do peddling and tinkering in such a case. You will be in a worse position than ever, unless you boldly raise a thousand pounds—if I can manage such a transaction upon a security of the kind. Consolidate all your liabilities, and keep a sum in hand. You are well connected—powerful ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... carried by the blood into all parts of the body and stop where they are needed to do any kind of work. They may be compared to the men who go around to mend old umbrellas, and to do other kinds of tinkering. It is thought that the white corpuscles turn into red ones when ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... here, hopelessly frozen on its way up the canal. On its deck a woman, with arms akimbo, stood over a man seated and tinkering at a kettle. She nodded ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... old woman, dressed not so much like a gipsy as like any of that medley race of vagabonds who tramp about the country, begging, and stealing, and tinkering, and weaving rushes, by turns, or all together, had been observing the lady, too; for, as she rose, this second figure strangely confronting the first, scrambled up from the ground—out of it, it almost appeared—and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... distance between the two boats made it possible to distinguish the disabled speeder more clearly, Orme saw that the Japanese was still tinkering with the motor. He was busying himself as though he realized that he had no hope of escape unless he could ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... push the machine out into the open, and watched intently while he tested the steering gear and tried the ignition. After some further tinkering, Fritz finally took his seat, pulled a lever, and, after skimming the ground for a few rods, the machine rose ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... when he sees what's going on. Why, the Government's going to turn everything inside out, with some blessed new law about elections. Registration Bill, they call it, or something of that sort. Just as if we hadn't had enough tinkering and pottering lately. It's all through this confounded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... the first parchment, refused to let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be—the tinkering of a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas himself. And there were scholars who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... is an admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... car suddenly and got out. Ruth looked ahead with curiosity. The road seemed rather smooth and quite unoccupied. There was a group of trees, tortured by gunfire, which hid a turn in the track and what lay beyond. Charlie was tinkering with ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... strengthened, soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar, melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very little, as people in general regarded this "tinkering" as a pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon had lost two stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works, it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... grunted when he had finished his tinkering, "he's paralyzed from the waist down. Let this one try and get away ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... vermiform appendix and portions of the intestines upon too little provocation, Sir W. Macewin, M.D., F.R.S. (B. Medical Jrn., 1904, 2 p. 874) says:—"Is this human body of ours so badly constructed that it contains so many useless parts and requires so much tinkering? Possibly I may be out of fashion with the times, as I cannot find such imperfections in the normal human body as are alleged. On the contrary, the more one looks into the human body and sees it work, the better one ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... short-cut and across the bridge that humps its back over the P. R. R. like a cat in unsocial mood, and on through Caledonia out along the beach sands past the old iron hulls about which Panamanian laborers are always tinkering under the impression that they are working. This time we walked. I don't recall now whether it was quarter-cracks, or the Lieutenant hadn't slept well—no, it couldn't have been that, for the Lieutenant never let his personal mishaps trample on his good nature—or whether "Bish" had decided ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... younger man understood that in a hinterland of this size there might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... on the vicar and ask if anything were wanted; and if a bell was cracked, or if a new one was desired, he would dig a mould in a neighbouring field, build a fire, collect his metal and perform the task on the spot. Waylett's business might be called the higher tinkering. Sussex has some forty of his bells. He cast the Steyning peal in 1724, and earlier in the same year he had made a stay at Lewes, erecting a furnace there, as Benvenuto Cellini tells us he used to do, and remedying defective peals all around. Among others he recast the old treble ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... an electric battery. He uses it for rheumatism; but I haven't seen him work it yet. He said it was out of order, and he's tinkering with it the last few ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... But sometimes, if she starts missing, the way she did when we were up there, you can fix things and avoid a lot of trouble by a little timely tinkering. I was up once when my engine began missing that way, and I didn't pay any attention to it. Then, about twenty minutes later, she went dead on me while I was over the water, and I had to drop, whether I wanted to or not. The water was cold, too, ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... deepened by providential escapes from accidents which threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford river"—the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt of danger, he tore out, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... awakened by what he thought was gunfire. He bounded out of bed and ran to the window. Day was breaking. In the dawnlight he saw Welborn and Landy tinkering with the old model that had brought them so valiantly through the mountains. She was backfiring her protests but presently settled down to her accustomed smoothness. Davy hustled into his clothes. Mrs. Gillis knocked on the door. "There is a pan and water right here on the bench," she said. ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... something a great deal more than either social or intellectual, or still more, material or political betterment of man's condition. The disease lies so deep, and so great are the destruction and loss partly experienced, and still more awfully impending over every soul of us, that something else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as self-culture does, with man's understanding or, as social gospels do, with man's economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear. Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social Christianity by all means, an applied Christianity, for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... are exceptional, and we hope they will be final. We take no delight in tinkering the constitution. The mechanism of government we recognize to be only a means; the test of the statesman is his power to govern. And remaining, as we do, inaccessible to that gospel of liberty of which our opponents have had a special revelation, we find in the existing state of England much ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... and studies he gives the following account: "I get the Evangelical, Scottish Congregational, Eclectic, Lancet, British and Foreign Medical Review. I can read in journeying, but little at home. Building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending, farriering, wagon-mending, preaching, schooling, lecturing on physics according to my means, beside a chair in divinity to a class of three, fill ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... performing functions similar to the yard-stick in measuring, and the great statesmen are wrangling over the problem of what particular material that convenience shall be made. And our nation, through Congress and the President, is ever tinkering, changing, altering, and reversing regulations concerning this "value measurer"—this convenient representative of property, and the basis of all commerce, gold, silver, copper, nickel, and paper to-day, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... "Vicenti has told Rojas, and in an hour Pedro will arrive, and then we start. Go get something to eat, and send my dinner out here. I've some tinkering to ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... on," she said. "But you'll probably be insulted at what I have to offer. The men start out after the horses to-morrow. I want a man to stay here and do tinkering jobs round the ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... There was the wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon the crooked thoroughfares; the slight ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... These things—tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in the orchard and among the poultry—filled our evenings fairly full. Yet these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples either. They were ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... States, we ought to have regard to every express or implied limitation upon our power imposed by that great instrument. When gentlemen object to amending the Constitution, when they talk sneeringly about tinkering with the Constitution, they do not remember that it is one of the express provisions of that instrument that Congress shall have power to propose amendments to the Legislatures of the several States. Do gentlemen mean, by the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... Margaret in Crowne's Henry VI, the First Part with the Murder of Gloucester, an adaption of Shakespeare's I Henry VI, suggested by the great success of his previous alteration. She also played Regan in Tate's foolhardy tinkering with King Lear; Sempronia in Lee's powerful Lucius Junitis Brutus; and in December, Marguerite in the same author's excellent The Princess of Cleves. In 1682 she acted another Roman role, Tarpeia, in an anonymous tragedy, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn |
