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More "Bludgeon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be d——d to you!' cried the fellow, raising a heavy bludgeon, and dealing the poor Doctor a blow on the head which felled him senseless to the ground, ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... on Punch to pass the time of day, and get—very properly—knocked out for their pains. (Loud and prolonged laughter.) This is followed by the side-splitting incident in which a handy clown not only eludes the thirsty bludgeon, but surreptitiously steals the inevitable sausages. Exit clown. Punch, already irritated at having missed clown, misses sausages, and exit in high dudgeon. Re-enter Judy, followed by sausaged clown, who comforts her. (Oh, Judy!) Re-enter Punch. Justifiable tussle. Punch sees sausages and ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... experience, must be painful and odious, and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk little chap ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... were associated with Mr O'Brien in his policy of national reconciliation—he used to dub us "Factionists." It was not fair fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics. It was the base weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more legitimate ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered first, and, looking over the volume in Robespierre's ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with fear, The weapon all so ghastly did appear. The head became the stone to this strange sling, Of which the body was the potent string; And while 'twas brandished in a deadly way, The dislocated arms made monstrous play With hideous gestures, as now upside down The bludgeon corpse a giant force had grown. "'Tis well!" said Eviradnus, and he cried, "Arrange between yourselves, you two allied; If hell-fire were extinguished, surely it By such a contest might be all relit; From kindling spark struck out from dead King's brow, Batt'ring ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Latin Mimi, through the Italian Pullicenella. It was originally intended as a characteristic representation. The tale is this: Punch, in a fit of jealousy, strangles his infant child, when Judy flies to her revenge. With a bludgeon she belabors her husband, till he becomes so exasperated that he snatches the bludgeon from her, knocks her brains out, and flings the dead body into the street. Here it attracts the notice of a police officer, who enters the house, and Punch ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... In a private letter, just after the "battles of the Pyrenees," Wellington wrote, "I never saw such fighting as we had here. It began on the 25th of Jury, and, excepting the 29th, when not a shot was fired, we had it every day till the 2nd of August. The battle of the 28th was fierce bludgeon work. The fourth division was principally engaged, and the loss of the enemy was immense. I hope Soult will not feel any inclination to renew his expedition. The French army must have suffered considerably. Between the 25th of last month and the 2nd of this they were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Villon and Francois Villon I, To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie; "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!" He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuff-box and his cane— "Now back, my boon companions, to our bordel with our gain!" And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly, If I were Francois ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... something and would have fled as the spirits approached him. But those bandy legs tottered and before he could turn the awful visitants were upon him. One raised a round shot above his head, or so it appeared to be, and smote him full upon the crown. The other whirled a flat bludgeon and hit him on the jaw. With the smell of brimstone was mingled the pungent flavor of ripe cheese and salt-fish. Blackbeard measured his length, and the ghost of Jesse Strawn delayed an instant to dump a pot of ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... rough-and-tumbles with that sort, and I have never had the worst of it yet. It prevents bloodshed on both sides; for if you haven't no shooting-iron, there's few Englishmen, poachers or not, who will draw trigger on you; and as for a bludgeon, it's as likely to be in my hand as another's after the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... different: they are the majority—they know their strength, and insist on their privileges. They howl and growl then at their own discretion, fly at the accidental stranger with open mouth, attack him singly, charge him en masse, and nothing but a stout bludgeon, wielded by a strong arm, can save the passenger from feeling that he is in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... did not realize what awaited him, was about to be decided. But Prince Andrew did not see how it ended. It seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... startling suddenness as for a moment bereft me of speech or motion; then, wheeling about, I came face to face with a rough-clad, villainous-looking man who stood, powerful legs apart, hairy fists grasping a short, heavy stick or bludgeon, and evil head out-thrust to stare beyond me at the prostrate form of my companion who had merely lifted her head to watch us through ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Fish, wrote a letter to the New York "Herald," under the date of January 4, 1878, since reprinted as a pamphlet and entitled "Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement." Mr. Sumner was never successfully attacked when living,—except with a bludgeon,—and his friends have more than sufficiently vindicated him since his death. But Mr. Motley comes in for his share of animadversion in Mr. Davis's letter. He has nothing of importance to add to Mr. Fish's ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and their hats slouched on, sat in a corner smoking their pipes. They bore the exact appearance of being half poachers, and half tillers of the earth; fellows who, upon a pinch, would have no objections to take the road with a bludgeon—the very models of country blackguards. They were both in liquor—the shorter one so much so, that he had became quite obstreperous, and had once or twice interrupted the other vocalists; and now, as if unable to contain himself ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... cock, I suppose in a greater hurry than the rest, began to crow. I thought it was dawn and set out for Alimos.[223] I had hardly got beyond the walls, when a footpad struck me in the back with his bludgeon; down I went and wanted to shout, but he had already ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the blow and the sight of the fall both the old man and the young ran out from their place of concealment. Burt was standing over the body, his bludgeon ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stiff. Grifone was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So far well—he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger was looming; already he set her to decoy-work which the girl herself (Grifone could ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... groan to my lips and a bitter curse to those of Jem Belcher. Along the white surface of the dusty highway there was drawn a long smear of crimson, while beside this ominous stain there lay a murderous little pocket-bludgeon, such as Warr had ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fingers now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... and vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers, arrayed in the white topcoat and tied up in various shawls and handkerchiefs, issued forth in another chaise in another direction, taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong cord, and a stout labouring man; all provided and carried upon the expedition with the sole object of assisting in the capture, and (once caught) insuring the safe custody ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... skinned and black haired; wiry Frenchmen, quick to anger, and ever ready with cutlass or pistol; Malays and Lascars, half clad in gaudy colors, treacherous and sullen, with a hand ever on their glittering creeses; Englishmen, handy alike with fist, bludgeon, or cutlass, and mightily given to fearful oaths; negroes, Moors, and a few West Indians ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... as marked as was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... along with the dispatch case containing the Englishman's papers. It was cold enough to wear a greatcoat in comfort, so I wore mine, and in the right side pocket, where my prisoner couldn't reach, I put a little leaded bludgeon, and also a brace of pocket pistols. Hartenstein was going to furnish me a guard as well as a driver, but I said that I would take a servant, who could act as guard. The servant, of course, was my orderly, old Johann; I gave him my double hunting gun to carry, with ...
— He Walked Around the Horses • Henry Beam Piper
... foreign tongue. The latter place was near enough for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the window for the hundredth ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... pen like a bludgeon. Even at this distance of time Cheetham's "View of Aaron Burr's Political Conduct," in which is traced the Vice President's alleged intrigues to promote himself over Jefferson, is interesting and exciting. Despite ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... ferocious clamor about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... exaggeration, was of value, in its day, to prevent a recurrence to the old and discredited methods. But its work is done, and blind adherence to it without regard to the principles on which it rests tends to turn the art of war into mere bludgeon play. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... "It is impossible to go so! You must have a club! Wait a minute!" and he rushed back into the house to get me a bludgeon from his private armory. My driver, meanwhile, who evidently disapproved, on personal grounds, of this suggestion, laid his whip across his horses' backs with a cry of "Noo, rebatta!" ("Now then, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... rather extreme negligee of the early morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... afternoon about six, and to have driven home along the Falmer Road in his car an hour or so later. And in a copse close by to where the body of the murdered man was found had been discovered a thick bludgeon of a stick, broken it would seem by some violent act, into two halves. On the top half was rudely cut with a pen-knife M. ASSHE ... What was puzzling, however, was the apparent motive of robbery about the crime; it will be remembered that the ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... known to his friend, who told him, that having left his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he had disabled, in ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... novel, and the historical one that she had been touching up, and the detective tale that she had been copying afresh, and she had started feverishly upon a short story that she had entitled Hypocrites. And she had tried desperately to "lay about her with a bludgeon," and say biting, savage things of hypocritical human nature, and hold a relentless mirror up to its little faults. Kinross would have been convulsed could ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... noisy profession of his faith, an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy world ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... smite his servant with a rod."—The instrument used, gives a clue to the intent. See Numbers xxxv. 16, 18. It was a rod, not an axe, nor a sword, nor a bludgeon, nor any other death-weapon—hence, from the kind of instrument, no design to kill would be inferred; for intent to kill would hardly have taken a rod for its weapon. But if the servant dies under his hand, then the unfitness of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... minutes past eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... bludgeon to a nicety, I laid it by, and sat brooding, the knife betwixt my knees; now a beam of sun falling athwart the leaves lit upon the broad blade of the knife and made of it a glory. And beholding this and the hand that grasped it, I took pleasure to heed ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... injunction was of course disregarded, for when the man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' for Mr. Rarey. Phlegon and Vatican would also ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... West-Indian on our stage, Alone might check this stupid rage; 215 Fastidious yet—O! condescend To range with an advent'rous friend: Together let us beat the rounds, St. Giles's ample blackguard bounds: Try what th' accurs'd Short's Garden yields, 220 His bludgeon where the Flash-man wields; Where female votaries of sin, With fetid rags and breath of gin, Like antique statues stand in rows, Fine fragments sure, but ne'er a nose. 225 Let us with calmness ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell
... camp-bed when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said to Javert, in a voice ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you—watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... possible, considering that the law, finance, and politics are all concerned. As you are leaving," he added, giving his visitor the blunt hint that the interview was over, "I must draw your attention to the fact that if you bludgeon the Consolidated with a report like this it may be a long time before we can move in the matter. You'll only scare the banks and set the cranks to yapping. Just remember that you're a state officer and have a weighty responsibility to your party and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... scorpion with flame, would perish, self-stung, by her own venom. The legates of the great Anti-Civilization have colonized England, as England has colonized Botany Bay. They know the venal ruffianism of the fist and bludgeon, as well as that of the press. Fortunately, they are short of funds, or Mr. Beecher might have disappeared after the manner of Romulus, and never have come to light, except in the saintly fashion of relics,—such as white finger-rings and breastpins, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... shown by firm bars to the t, with a tendency to descend from left to right, bludgeon-like downstrokes to tailed letters, writing rather angular than rounded, and the final strokes finished by a heavy pressure. Straight, firm, downward strokes take the place of the tails to ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... be able to find the bread. In spite of being told not to do so, she bewailed her condition, and fidgeted about in her bed. It was stupid of her not to have managed to set the cloth, the pains had laid her on her back like a blow from a bludgeon. Her poor old man would not think it kind of her to be nursing herself up there whilst he was dining so badly. At least were the potatoes cooked enough? She no longer remembered whether she had put salt ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... perceived that he had only an unarmed man to deal with, appeared determined not to give up his hopes of plunder without a struggle, and, freeing his wrist by a powerful jerk, he aimed a blow at me with the bludgeon, which, had it taken effect, would at once have ended all my anxieties, and brought this veracious history to an abrupt and untimely conclusion. Fortunately, however, for "my gentle public" and their humble servant, I was able, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to the shelter of a big boulder, flung him close to it, and lay down on top of his body. In the next moment the blast went off, and the gust of fire and rocks and earth roared and whistled through the air above them. The sound struck them like a bludgeon, and they lay for a while, stunned and deafened, while pieces of stone slid and tinkled on the boulder that had sheltered ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the door. The key was in the lock, but he didn't have a chance to turn it before all three threw themselves on him. A scuffle followed which Judson brought to a quick stop by striking Jack a stunning blow on the head with his bludgeon. With a million stars dancing before him in a void of blackness, Jack ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... This was no doubt an extra item in the curriculum, but, on the other hand, there was something to show for it; all those who passed through his hands when they subsequently fell into the clutches of the Law could endure as many as five-and-twenty strokes from the hardest bludgeon without so much as wincing. They had been case hardened by their ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... phrase put in the paper morning by morning; and afterwards you can slay the slain with a solemn article in Finot's weekly. Indeed, if it is a matter of capital importance to you, Finot would allow you to bludgeon your man in a big paper with ten or twelve thousand subscribers, if you make ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver urged each gold-decked steed. Then forth the warrior's coursers sprang, And ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... had no effect; indeed, from the appearance of the fellows I had no doubt that their only object in attacking the carriage was for the sake of robbing the inmate. I had this time taken care to come out provided with a stout bludgeon and a sword. I knew pretty well the sort of coward hearts to be found in that sort of gentry, so telling Tom what I proposed doing, I sang out, "To the rescue! to the rescue!—off scoundrels, off!" and, drawing my sword, I rushed furiously at them, as if I had twenty ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Others. But they are worth noting, because in them, at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man—the only one in our annals—appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to any ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... descriptive of the thing itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the Constitution with a most remarkable medley of instruments. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... against a horse's kick And fear not shattered rib or jaw As risk a smash from Martin's paw. I've seen him in the days of yore His fist crash through a panel door. Martin soon ran his wild race out, For "Doctor" Whitney with a "clout" Of a great bludgeon laid him out Heady for post mortem and bier, Thus ended Martin's rough career. Ah! those were happy halcyon days, Well worthy of immortal lays. Here I must summon from the band Of the departed shadowy land George Parsons, and his name entwine In this ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... in Tebron's mind, and suddenly he was in the middle of the battle. There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps. Mind-voices shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in the wind. One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust with his sword; the warrior fell to one side ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... the usual form. It charged Laura Hawkins, in effect, with the premeditated murder of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel and in all other hotels and places wheresoever, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... a puppy, from the clutches of a malignant little villain in Nantucket who was leading him, with a rope around his neck, to the water; and the grown dog repaid the obligation, about three years afterward, by saving me from the bludgeon of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... he, nor with such a reach, above all, there was none whose rage made him cold and his anger merry. However they were, they could scarcely have faced the hard glitter of his blue eyes, the smile of his fixed lips. He could have carved with a dagger, with a bludgeon, a flail, or a whip. As it was, to a long arm was added a long sword, which whistled through the air, but through flesh went quiet. There had been blows at first from behind and at the side of him. The long mowing arms stayed them. It became a butchery of sheep before he was midway of ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and chins of most of them were decorated, gave to their physiognomies a manly and determined air, fully borne out by their unrestrained carriage and deportment. To a man, almost all were armed with a tough vine-wood bludgeon, called in their language an estoc volant, tipped and shod with steel—a weapon fully understood by them, and rendered, by their dexterity in the use of it, formidable to their adversaries. Not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... man-thing either longer fleeing, or idle. He too, creature of the wild, had sensed on the instant the truth of the miracle of his saving, and turning in his tracks, had leaped forward with raised bludgeon to Tarzan's assistance and Numa's undoing. A single terrific blow upon the flattened skull of the beast laid him insensible and then as Tarzan's knife found the wild heart a few convulsive shudders and a sudden relaxation marked ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ruled. In this more primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... seized me, and I do not love their kind attentions. Now and then I may defy them, when I need an excitement of that kind; but not to-night. To-night I mean to be clever, and show you how I can twist a cold-blooded Englishman round my finger. If you go, then I will scream—it is a woman's bludgeon, my child, as her tongue is her dagger. Bah! be quiet and listen to me. You shall not divorce me, for if you try I will accuse you of all sorts of things—basenesses that will blast ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... said Joe halting. "I shan't need this now," and he drew the piece of gas-pipe from his trousers pocket. "I'd have hammered the life out of Andy Gilmore!" he said, as he tossed the ugly bludgeon from him. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... turbulent. If Dublin is simmering, Belfast is boiling. The breed is different. The Northerner is not demonstrative, is slow to anger, but being moved is not easily appeased. The typical Irishman, with his cutaway coat, his pipe stuck in his conical caubeen, his "sprig of shillelagh," or bludgeon the Donnybrook Fair hero who "shpinds half a-crown, Mates wid a frind An' (for love) knocks him down" is totally unknown in these regions. The men who by their ability and industry have lifted Ireland out of the slough, given her prosperity and comparative affluence, marched hand in hand with the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... and cries were painful to hear, but his brother acted like a madman; rushing hither and thither, with a heavy bludgeon in his hand, with which he indiscriminately beat the fences and whatever came in his way, crying "Oh my brother, my poor brother! Who has murdered my ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in his hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his hands, and demanding, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... gunpowder. One of the "insides," an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig, is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on the great western ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... with leery eyes, ugly mouth, with one tooth gone, and an iron jaw like a hull-dog's. He was attired in a fur cap, brown corduroy jacket, with a blood-red handkerchief twisted about his throat, and he carried a bludgeon. When the double-dyed villain proceeded in the third act to pound the head of the lovely maiden to a jelly at the instigation of the base uncle, concealed behind a painted tree-trunk, and the lover rushed in and tried to save her, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... wish I could drive the fact into this head of yours that rudeness is not synonymous with wit. I shall not have lived in vain if I teach you in time to realize that the rapier of irony is more effective an instrument than the bludgeon of insolence.' ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... plain in the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... sickly in the mind is reality. Something real has to be felt or experienced. Life that is over-delicate and remote through something unbalanced in the mind is not life but decay. The knife, the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's remedies for those who fail to live. We are the earth's children; we have no business in limbo. Living in limbo is like living in the smoke from a crater: highly ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... To quarrel with them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... we've been free, Somewhat as madmen without keepers be; And such desire of Freedom has been shown, That both the parties wish'd her all their own: All our free smiths and cobblers in the town Were loth to lay such pleasant freedom down; To put the bludgeon and cockade aside, And let us pass unhurt and undefied. True! you might then your party's sign produce, And so escape with only half th' abuse: With half the danger as you walk'd along, With rage and threat'ning but from half the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around as ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... grove by a prodigious squeaking which I heard there. On reaching the spot I found it proceeded from a large hog which a number of natives were forcibly holding to the earth, while a muscular fellow, armed with a bludgeon, was ineffectually aiming murderous blows at the skull of the unfortunate porker. Again and again he missed his writhing and struggling victim, but though puffing and panting with his exertions, he still continued them; and after striking a sufficient number of blows to have demolished ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... extravagances and violences of the Slave Power. It is its conscious and admitted weakness that has made Texas and Mexico and Cuba, and our own Northwestern territory, necessary to be devoured. It is desperation, and not strength, that has made the bludgeon and the bowie-knife integral parts of the national legislation. It has the American Government, the American Press, and the American Church, in its national organizations, on its side; but the Humanity and the Christianity of the Nation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... people; which ought to have been a consolation, had she needed any. But this loss of the means of living had seemed a mere trifle beside her other griefs; indeed, it acted as a spur rather than a bludgeon. The same pride which had prompted her to continue to dance bade her bestir herself to make a living. Upon reflection, the plan of starting a school struck her as the most practicable. But it should be ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... all we could think of was to stand by the entrance and defend it as we best might. Ben with the long musket, and I with a brand, which I still clutched, but which no longer blazed, and could only be used as a bludgeon. Should these weapons fail, we would have to take out our knives, and make the best fight we could; but we knew that if the baboons once got inside, so as to surround us, we should ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... that I had bludgeon work to do. It is childish to grumble at the part Fate forces one to play. Sympathetic or otherwise, one can only enact one's rle to the utmost of one's ability. Mine was now essentially unsympathetic, but I was determined that it should ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... desolate island; but a mixed set of artists, musicians, verse-makers, novelists, critics—yea, even critics—contrive usually to make an unusually pleasant company. They are all so clever that the professional wit dares not raise his voice lest some wielder of the bludgeon should smite him; no long-winded talk is allowed, and, though a bore may once be admitted to the company, he certainly will never be admitted more than once. The talk ranges loosely from point to point, and yet a certain sequence is always ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... gone before him. It was a melancholy employment for an invalid, breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, which include some of his highest achievements, I must tell a story ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... are as honest, as sensible and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Stead had time to swing himself, armed with a stout bludgeon, up into the hermit's cave, and even to drag after him Growler, a very efficient ally. The contrasts of moonlight were all in his favour, the lights almost as bright as in sunshine, the shadows so very dark. He could see through the overhanging ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was one day with one of the most influential of the Whig party at New York, he was talking about their success in the contest—"We beat them, sir, literally with their own weapons." "How so," replied I. "Why, sir, we bought over all their bludgeon men at so many dollars a head, and the very sticks intended to be used to keep us from the poll were employed upon the heads of the Loco-focos!" So much for ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater than these gentlemen.' He freely criticized this and that in particular ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... heavy bludgeon with a nail-studded head. You thump Fritz on the head with it. Very handy at close quarters. The knuckle knife is a short dagger with a heavy brass hilt that covers the hand. Also very good for close work, as you can either ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... he drove himself out of the town, for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again, mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... characteristic; Johnson was as a rough but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him advice, sympathy, and applause, and at times criticised him pretty sharply, or brought down his conversational bludgeon upon his sensitive friend. "He has nothing of the bear but his skin," was Goldsmith's comment upon his clumsy friend, and the two men appreciated each other at bottom. Some of their readers may be inclined to resent Johnson's attitude of superiority. The ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death. 3. It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. 4. He even raises the aged arm that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and places it again over the wounds of the poniard. 5. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse. 6. He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... great metropolis." It was also resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive us at the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... than just calling attention to the nondescript gilt monster, with its riveted wings and forked tongue and tail, which glares down on us from its perch above the Town Hall, in the High Street; or to a "cigar" vane (over 2 ft. long and as thick as a bludgeon), large enough to give Verdant Green's famous "smoke" many points, hoisted over an enterprising tobacconist's a little lower down; or to the skewered and unhappy-looking weathercock on the Parish Church; or the blackened griffin in Earl Street, all head and tail, which ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... might have done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all control of myself," he said as he walked home. "It was brutal the way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with a bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... public how they look and feel, How eat and drink, how sleep and smoke and play. Murder's itinerary for a day, Set forth in graphic phrase by skilful pens, With pictures of its face, its favourite dens, Its knife or bludgeon, pistol, paramour, Will swell the swift editions hour by hour, More than high news of war or of debate, The death of heroes or the throes of state. From club-room to street-corner runs the cry After the newest fact, or latest lie: The hurrying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... financiering. It was galling and barren work. He had to ask favours of fellows whom he hated, and to stand their refusals, and pretend to believe their lying excuses, and appear to make quite light of it, though every failure stunned him like a blow of a bludgeon, and as he strutted jauntily off with a bilious smirk, he was well nigh at his wits' end. It was dark as he rode out by the low road to Chapelizod—crest-fallen, beaten—scowling in the darkness through his horse's ears along the straight black line of road, and wishing, as ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a blacksmith might envy) and when he has a duty to perform in his official capacity. It is in the latter instance that he rises magnificently to the dignity of his position. The majesty of the law in his hands becomes at once a bludgeon and a pandemonium. No one has ever been arrested in Radville, since Pete became sheriff, without the entire community becoming aware of it simultaneously. Pete's voice in moments of excitement carries like a cannonade. Legrand Gunn said that Pete had only ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... combatant; disputant, controversialist, polemic, litigant, belligerent; competitor, rival, corrival^; fighter, assailant; champion, Paladin; mosstrooper^, swashbuckler fire eater, duelist, bully, bludgeon man, rough. prize fighter, pugilist, boxer, bruiser, the fancy, gladiator, athlete, wrestler; fighting-cock, game-cock; warrior, soldier, fighting man, Amazon, man at arms, armigerent^; campaigner, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of "Spider" Kelley to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the habit of Johnson's mind which has always made the unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing theory to the test of fact. For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the final blow. We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but every man thinks he can understand facts and figures. The quickness of Johnson in ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... than its buoyant and glittering glee, which was so entirely and beautifully given by Ellen Terry. After Peg Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs. Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of Thespis, calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"—from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs. Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she became Mrs. Crawford. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... most of its sensuous and lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... vulgar companionship were noticeable; but one by one they disappeared. First went a gaudy neckcloth, with collars turned down; then a pair of spurs vanished; and lastly a diabolical instrument that he called a cane—but which, by means of a running bullet, could serve as a bludgeon at one end, and concealed a dagger in the other—subsided into the ordinary walking-stick adapted to our peaceable metropolis. A similar change, though in a less degree, gradually took place in his manner and his conversation. He grew less ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a German, blows in all senses are a normal part of living. His social habits indulge themselves in knocks, coarse attacks, unseemly abuse, as rather matters of course. He wields a bludgeon where more refined men would cut down with sarcasm or wither one with disdain. Blows are his natural method of instructing others and of getting himself instructed. "Good German blows" are what the Kaiser talked of loudly. To strike as well as to kick is a wholesome, ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the next bunk. "Three inches of deck! What's the use of it! Lord ha' mercy on me, what's the use of it? No more than an eggshell! We'll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man's skull under a bludgeon.... I'm no sailor, I'm not; I'm a baker. It isn't right I should ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the little daughter of Powhatan, a ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau was instantly in an uproar, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... as though to ward off a blow. "Don't bludgeon me, please." She sat down on the bench beside him. He was a nice boy, she thought, quite charming; and Gombauld's violent insistences were really becoming rather tiresome. "Why don't you wear white trousers?" she asked. "I like you ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... could not do so quick enough to prevent the stunning blow which brought him on his knees. His hat partially saved him, and he was on the point of rising, when Thady again struck him with all his power; this time the heavy bludgeon came down on his bare temple, and the young man fell, never to rise again. He neither moved nor groaned; the force of the blow, and the great weight of the stick falling on his uncovered head as he was rising, had shattered his brains, and he lay as dead as though he had been struck ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of 1793. He was now in open conflict with the whole trend of public opinion. In February 1795 he was again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burnt in the Theatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse doree, the young men whose mission it was to bludgeon Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators who were ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... fairly settled himself, and being nothing loath to make inquiry concerning the strange objects around him, which his host was equally ready, as far as possible, to explain, Lovel was introduced to a large club, or bludgeon, with an iron spike at the end of it, which, it seems, had been lately found in a field on the Monkbarns property, adjacent to an old burying-ground. It had mightily the air of such a stick as the Highland reapers ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was not resented, even at the height of the orgy. They were hard cases, rough, tough fighting men, but they gave the big fellow plenty of sea-room. No ruffling or swaggering in his direction. No gibes or practical jokes. The bludgeon-like wit of the house very carefully passed him by. For he was so plainly ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... Street. But the wily Whigs, barricading the door, slipped out a messenger at a back door, and sent to a mug-house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, for reinforcements. Presently a band of Whig bludgeon-men arrived, and the Whigs of Salisbury Court then snatched up pokers, tongs, pitchforks, and legs of stools, and sallied out on the Tory mob, who soon fled before them. For two days the Tory mob seethed, fretted, and swore revenge. But the report of a squadron of horse being ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his table, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Orleans, whither he had gone to sell his cotton, with the story that he had been knocked senseless and robbed of his wallet, and in proof of this he produced a newspaper account of the midnight outrage, and exhibited a wound on the head, inflicted by the bludgeon of the footpad. And with such drollery did he recite this story that the Major laughed at him, which meant, of course, that his tenure of the old plantation was not to be disturbed. The memory of this rascally trick came back to the Major as he sat there looking over ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... of a squat building in front of the Old Plaza. The man, whose gall had been slowly rising for want of drink, hurried them roughly off the car and across the sidewalk into a dark passage. Their feet lagged, and he shoved them before him, flourishing his bludgeon. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... cluster diamond pin, a sort of hen-and-chickens of his own, secured by a minute guard-chain on a ruffled shirt-front of snowiest linen, where clung dry crumbs of the "fine-cut" which puffed the lower side pockets of his gray alpaca sack coat. His gold-headed cane was almost a bludgeon. He had come aboard at Memphis, having reached that city but a few hours earlier by rail-way train from White Sulphur Springs, Va., where he had had the good fortune to find great relief from rheumatism. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Houston should be brought before the bar and reprimanded by the Speaker, which was done, although Mr. Stevenson's reprimand was really complimentary. That night a friend of General Houston, with a bludgeon and a pistol, attacked Mr. Arnold, of Tennessee, who had been active in securing the reprimand, but the latter soon got the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... attention, for the most part, to the worthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath their regard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even this is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow dull and that ridicule will restore the balance. They throw ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Nature. It is necessary to sound a loud alarm, to present the facts in very strong language, backed up by irrefutable statistics and by photographs which tell no lies, to establish the law and enforce it if needs be with a bludgeon. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... by experimenting with the weapon before the trial. There was one homicide in which a bullet perforated a felt cap and penetrated the forehead of the deceased. The defendant asserted that he was within three feet of his victim when he fired, and that the other was about to strike him with a bludgeon. A quantity of felt, of weight similar to that of the cap, was procured and the revolver discharged at it from varying distances. A microscopic examination showed that certain discolorations around the bullet-hole (claimed by the defence to be burns made by the powder) were, in fact, grease ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... up from the black stevedores of the far South when there landed in their midst a mighty band of black infantry, nearly 100,000 strong who, in a few short months had learned the use of powder and shot, of sword and broadsword, of bayonet and bludgeon, of trench knife and battle-ax. Cold steel or blackjack, smooth bore or sawed-off, machine gun or automatic, were all the same to them. It was a great experience for stevedore and infantryman. And the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... The robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... upon its youthful occupant. This individual appeared to be about two years of age, with its mother's eyes and a combative disposition. The latter was indicated by the manner in which it banged its own legs and the sides of its carriage with a wicker bludgeon that had once been a rattle. It looked earnestly at the young man, and gave the edges of its carriage a whack which knocked the bludgeon out of its hand. Lodloe picked up the weapon, and, restoring it to its owner, began to ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... find the bread. In spite of being told not to do so, she bewailed her condition, and fidgeted about in her bed. It was stupid of her not to have managed to set the cloth, the pains had laid her on her back like a blow from a bludgeon. Her poor old man would not think it kind of her to be nursing herself up there whilst he was dining so badly. At least were the potatoes cooked enough? She no longer remembered whether she had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... fencing formerly distinguished the gentleman, who then wore a sword as a part of his dress. He is now contented with a regular stand-up fight, and exhibits a fist like a knuckle-bone of mutton—hard, coarse, and of certain magnitude. The bludgeon hammer-headed whip, or a vulgar twig, succeeds the clouded and amber-headed cane; and instead of the snuff-box being rare, and an article of parade, to exhibit a beauty's miniature bestowed in love, or that of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... savage side. Nor was the man-thing either longer fleeing, or idle. He too, creature of the wild, had sensed on the instant the truth of the miracle of his saving, and turning in his tracks, had leaped forward with raised bludgeon to Tarzan's assistance and Numa's undoing. A single terrific blow upon the flattened skull of the beast laid him insensible and then as Tarzan's knife found the wild heart a few convulsive shudders and a sudden relaxation marked the passing ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the Old Plaza. The man, whose gall had been slowly rising for want of drink, hurried them roughly off the car and across the sidewalk into a dark passage. Their feet lagged, and he shoved them before him, flourishing his bludgeon. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... indefinitely, for Birotteau stood still, petrified. Every phrase was a calamity, like the blows of a bludgeon. He heard the death-bells tolling in his ears,—just as his eyes had seen, at the first word, the flames of his fortune. Alexandre Crottat, who thought the worthy perfumer a strong and able man, was alarmed at his paleness and rigidity. He was not aware that Roguin ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... other hand, there was something to show for it; all those who passed through his hands when they subsequently fell into the clutches of the Law could endure as many as five-and-twenty strokes from the hardest bludgeon without so much as wincing. They had been case hardened by ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... afraid to grapple with. He came up and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... metropolis." It was also resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive us at ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the entire body, altogether naked and showing in the candle-light a claylike yellow. It had, however, broad maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful lacerations; the skin was torn in ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... as to the fifth, Denis Halligan, that it was he who gave the fatal blow: "My lord, I saw Denis Halligan (that's in the dock there) take a vacancy (Irish word for 'aim' at an unguarded part) at the poor soul that's kilt, and give him a wipe with a clehalpin (Irish word for 'bludgeon'), and lay him down as quiet as a child." They were found guilty. The judge, sentencing the first four, gave them seven years' imprisonment. But when he came to Halligan, who really killed the deceased, the judge said, "Denis Halligan, I have purposely reserved the consideration of your case to ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... open air pitch out a fact or two—not too many—or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play—it's lost then—but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... anything, I shall speak my mind. I know you now perfectly. Last night I thought I might be mistaken about some things. Now I know that you have swindled your partner, and I am not surprised to find that you can handle a bludgeon as well ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, which include some of ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... as to which is the greater, Schiller or I; they ought rather to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater than these gentlemen.' He freely criticized this ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... inquisitors, Pedro Arbues, covered as usual with a coat of mail under his robes, and wearing a steel skull-cap under his hat—for he was every moment conscious of guilt and apprehensive of retribution—took a lantern in one hand and a bludgeon in the other; and, like a sturdy soldier of his peculiar Church, walked from his house to the cathedral of that same Saragossa, to join in matins. He knelt down by one of the pillars, setting his lantern on the pavement. His right hand held the weapon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... in its day, to prevent a recurrence to the old and discredited methods. But its work is done, and blind adherence to it without regard to the principles on which it rests tends to turn the art of war into mere bludgeon play. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... Kate felt she ought to bring the conversation to a close. She wondered what Jack would say if he saw her talking with a perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian franchise law must ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... may tell you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, not a single bullet or bayonet thrust of the soldiery, could have been spared. Nothing but just this discipline of failure, disappointment, and defeat on the part of the earlier reformers could have educated the people to the necessity of attacking the system of private ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... legs, and it is permitted to rear and kick as frantically as it can, until it drops to the ground exhausted and strangled. The Llanero immediately approaches the prostrate colt, and deliberately beats its head with a heavy bludgeon until it becomes quite senseless. He then places his saddle upon its back, adjusts a murderous bit in its clammy mouth, and seats himself firmly in the saddle at the moment when the animal recovers strength enough to rise. The fearful plunges, the wild bounds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... is but a feeble way of expressing the state of her mind. Although a lady of great moral courage, and accustomed from infancy to self-control, she felt, on first beholding her timid little daughter, strongly disposed to seize Fatma by the hair of the head, and use her as a bludgeon wherewith to fell her Algerine mother; but, remembering the dignity of her position as, in some sort, a reflected representative of the British Empire in these parts, and also recalling to mind ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Ireland the old oppressions have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide—by ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... were painful to hear, but his brother acted like a madman; rushing hither and thither, with a heavy bludgeon in his hand, with which he indiscriminately beat the fences and whatever came in his way, crying "Oh my brother, my poor brother! Who ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... up and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive. Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective. The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, taken unawares, was defenceless. He reminded you of a frightened sheep running aimlessly hither and thither. He was startled and amazed. At last the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... over fire in middle of orchard, brewing a charm in her caldron. Ogre stalks in, grinning frightfully, swinging his bludgeon in triumph. ...
— The Rescue of the Princess Winsome - A Fairy Play for Old and Young • Annie Fellows-Johnston and Albion Fellows Bacon
... breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau was instantly in an uproar, and the apartments ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... of the press it slowly but successfully banished from the South, dictated its own code of honor and manners to the nation, brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over Congressional debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs of patriotism, blotted out the testimonies of the fathers against oppression, padlocked the pulpit, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... only way is to fight for your home," she concluded. "Otherwise, the world would be to the bully and the heads of saints and philosophers and teachers would be egg-shells under his bludgeon." ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... often that he thought he would put her to the test, and he agreed he would do so. So he set her up by that wall, and took a heavy stick from the wood-pile, raised it as high as the room would permit, and then brought it down with great violence, burying the end of the bludgeon in the plastering. I suppose he came within three inches of her head, and she never winked. It was a very interesting experiment, as it illustrated the genuineness of her desire for death Otherwise the case ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... a typical cave man—squat muscular, and hairy, and of a type I had not seen before. His features, like those of all the primeval men of Pellucidar, were regular and fine. His weapons consisted of a stone ax and knife and a heavy knobbed bludgeon of wood. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Tebron's mind, and suddenly he was in the middle of the battle. There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps. Mind-voices shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in the wind. One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust with ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... assailants by the heels. It was a little man, a withered fellow scarcely five feet tall and literally dried up by the tropic heat. He was wrenched from his hold, heaved into the air, and then whirled about the head of McTee like a mighty bludgeon. As the sailors rushed again, that living club smashed against them and flung them back. Even to the herculean strength of McTee it was a prodigious feat, but the danger gave him for the moment the power of a madman. ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... the fellow reeling against the wall. But while he supported the outraged person who seemed fainting, the man recovered himself, and rushing on her champion, aimed a stroke at his head with an immense bludgeon, which the count, catching hold of as it descended, wrenched out of his hand. The horrid oaths of the ruffian and the sobs of his rescued victim collected a mob; and then the villain, fearing worse usage, made off and left ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... disregarded, for when the man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' for Mr. Rarey. Phlegon and Vatican would also be good ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... another. For the purpose of fortifying its usurpation, it learned to choose its men and to prepare its measures in advance. In 1884 it created an administration for its own purposes, and manned it to the same end. It forced its way into the House of Representatives and stood with a bludgeon behind the Speaker's chair. It entered every committee-room and dictated every successful bill. The people's bills all went one way. If by any chance one of the people's bills got before the House the subsidized press, owned by Wall Street, raised against it a chorus ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... calling attention to the nondescript gilt monster, with its riveted wings and forked tongue and tail, which glares down on us from its perch above the Town Hall, in the High Street; or to a "cigar" vane (over 2 ft. long and as thick as a bludgeon), large enough to give Verdant Green's famous "smoke" many points, hoisted over an enterprising tobacconist's a little lower down; or to the skewered and unhappy-looking weathercock on the Parish Church; or the blackened ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... resolution of driving them in by force, and gave orders to their sepoys to beat any one of the women who should attempt to move forward; the sepoys accordingly assembled, and each one being provided with a bludgeon, they drove them, by dint of beating, into the zenanah. The women, seeing the treachery of Letafit, proceeded to throw stones and bricks at the sepoys, and again attempted to get out; but finding that impossible, from the gates being shut, they kept up a continual discharge till about twelve o'clock, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... down, putting faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another? The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who will not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling back again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not in what holy name men war with violence on freedom ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... and shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver urged each gold-decked ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... pretty freely and had just fallen asleep, when a cock, I suppose in a greater hurry than the rest, began to crow. I thought it was dawn and set out for Alimos.[223] I had hardly got beyond the walls, when a footpad struck me in the back with his bludgeon; down I went and wanted to shout, but he had already made ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... exclaimed. "It is impossible to go so! You must have a club! Wait a minute!" and he rushed back into the house to get me a bludgeon from his private armory. My driver, meanwhile, who evidently disapproved, on personal grounds, of this suggestion, laid his whip across his horses' backs with a cry of "Noo, rebatta!" ("Now then, boys") and we dashed away from the house, just ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... of German diplomacy during these first days of the crisis, July 24 to 28, has already been revealed. At first inclined to bludgeon, it soon came to take things easily, even affecting a certain optimism, and by its passive resistance bringing to naught all the efforts and all the proposals of the London, Paris, and St. Petersburg Cabinets. To gain time, to lengthen out negotiations, seems ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... stick. It is a big chestnut some hundred and fifty feet beyond the point where the ravine turns west. It has a big enough trunk for a stick to stand upright against it, as was shown by Inspector Snow who had charge of this affair. But we are told that after demonstrating this fact with the same bludgeon which had done its bloody work in the Hollow, the prisoner showed a sudden interest in this weapon and begged to see it closer. This being granted, he pointed out where a splinter or two had been freshly whittled from ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Baron's Assistant Reader, "I have read your criticism in Longman's Magazine upon Mr. BARRY PAIN's In a Canadian Canoe. It's an ugly piece of bludgeon work, I admit, but not convincing to anyone who has read the book of which you speak. You tear away a line or two from the context, and ask your readers to say if that is wit or humour. How your admirers would have protested had any sacrilegious critic ventured to treat one of your own immortal ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the Hotel de Ville—how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful, how the members of the Government ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... chin, cheeks covered with grog blossoms, a large protuberance on his back, another on his chest; yet with these deformities he appeared uncommonly happy. This was Mr. Punch. He held in his right hand a tremendous bludgeon, with which he amused himself by rapping on the head every one who came within his reach. This exhibition seems very absurd, yet not less than one hundred were present—children, boys, old men, and even gentlemen ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... his pen like a bludgeon. Even at this distance of time Cheetham's "View of Aaron Burr's Political Conduct," in which is traced the Vice President's alleged intrigues to promote himself over Jefferson, is interesting and exciting. Despite its bitter sarcasm and torrent of vituperation, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... infinite patience, and remorseless zeal, a conquered people were struggling to turn his own weapon against their conqueror, and beat his brains out with the bludgeon he had placed in the hands ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... visited many of these sites, in company with Count Berchtold. As we were climbing about the ruins near the mosque, a sturdy goatherd, armed with a formidable bludgeon, came before us, and demanded "backsheesh" (a gift, or an alms) in a very peremptory tone. Neither of us liked to take out our purse, for, fear the insolent beggar should snatch it from our hands; so we gave him nothing. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... night the case is different: they are the majority—they know their strength, and insist on their privileges. They howl and growl then at their own discretion, fly at the accidental stranger with open mouth, attack him singly, charge him en masse, and nothing but a stout bludgeon, wielded by a strong arm, can save the passenger from feeling that he is in the kingdom of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... for reasons of high policy satisfactory to himself, had determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the little daughter of Powhatan, a girl ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... himself; he was known to have been at Falmer Park that afternoon about six, and to have driven home along the Falmer Road in his car an hour or so later. And in a copse close by to where the body of the murdered man was found had been discovered a thick bludgeon of a stick, broken it would seem by some violent act, into two halves. On the top half was rudely cut with a pen-knife M. ASSHE ... What was puzzling, however, was the apparent motive of robbery about the crime; it will be remembered that the victim's watch was missing, and that ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... a word to a clubman and a motion to the equipment, followed the whites, trailed in turn by his three companions of the forest. The clubman, after a curious inspection of the packs, stood on guard among them, his bludgeon grasped loosely but suggestively, ready to prevent any undue inquisitiveness by the rest. But soon he found himself alone, for the other tribesmen transferred their attention and themselves to the ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... Head a little more that way. I suppose you can't sit quiet, ma'am?—then never mind!" (This resignation was intended as a stinging reproach.) "Mr. Cibber, with his sneering snuff-box! Mr. Quin, with his humorous bludgeon! Mrs. Clive, with her tongue! Mr. Snarl, with his abuse! And Mr. Soaper, with his praise!—arsenic in treacle I call it! But there, I deserve it all! For look on this ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... the communist shall rebel with a bludgeon and a petroleum torch, or with a plow and a church, depends upon whether he has not or has faith in God—whether he is a religious being or not. If priestcraft and tyranny have sapped his faith and debauched his moral sense, then he will attack society as the French ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... to Lucifer or to a Titan blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. In this age we find it difficult to account for the prestige of Thurlow. His legal learning was far from profound, his speeches were more ponderous than powerful, and his attacks were bludgeon blows rather than home thrusts. Of the lighter graces and social gifts he had scant store. Indeed, his private life displayed no redeeming feature. Everyone disliked him, but very many feared him, mainly, perhaps, because of his facility for ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... it in a decent manner if I had not lost all control of myself," he said as he walked home. "It was brutal the way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with a bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good reason ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down the lawn, through ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Dennis, with an oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table with them, 'it does me good to think of. There was a opportunity! But it led to nothing. For my part, I don't know what would. There's no spirit among the people in these here times. Bring something to eat and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... things have come to a strange pass, and the question now is, what course to pursue. The miscreants hitherto have defied all vigilance, and Stirn recommends the employment of a regular nightwatch, with a lanthorn and bludgeon." ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing theory to the test of fact. For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the final blow. We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but every man thinks he can understand facts and figures. The quickness of Johnson in applying arithmetical ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... and I have never had the worst of it yet. It prevents bloodshed on both sides; for if you haven't no shooting-iron, there's few Englishmen, poachers or not, who will draw trigger on you; and as for a bludgeon, it's as likely to be in my hand as another's after the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... them came up. There were four of them: two before and two behind. The undaunted Henley severally knocked down the two fellows in front, and in an instant would undoubtedly have been far enough out of all reach; but, in the very act of striking the second rascal, he received a blow from a bludgeon, dealt by the blood-hound keeper, which levelled him with ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the bully's hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown off his coat to fall to work on the ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... by drawing a most formidable-looking bludgeon loaded with lead from his pocket, and switching it backward and forward several times, as if to test its weight and strength. Then he placed it without a word upon the seat beside him. Having done this, he drew up ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... and then at the other, and when he found he was bound hard and fast, his face turned as red as fire and he opened his mouth, whether to swear or yell I know not. I had already closed the door, and before the man had uttered more than a premonitory sound, David had clapped the end of his bludgeon against his mouth. ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... for the sickly in the mind is reality. Something real has to be felt or experienced. Life that is over-delicate and remote through something unbalanced in the mind is not life but decay. The knife, the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's remedies for those who fail to live. We are the earth's children; we have no business in limbo. Living in limbo is like living in the smoke from a crater: highly picturesque, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... the copse at the turning and struck at me with a bludgeon," said Mr. Juxon. "Knocked my hat off, into the bargain, and then ran away with Stamboul after him. If I had not come up in time there would have ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... elements of a batter pudding," cried S——th, "without the battering principle. Ay, you forget the head-battering bludgeon, the instantaneous pistol, or the cunning knife; none of all which would a man with a spark of courage in him use against an unarmed, defenceless traveller. Another thing you forget, the robber acts upon surprises. He produces confusion by his very presentation, fear by his demand of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... the remaining surface of the stone was clean bare and weather-beaten. The talus against the cliff was composed of loose fragments of stone and other products of wash and erosion. This was overgrown with a thicket of stunted shrubs, wry-necked goblin thistles and murderous devil's clubs. These bludgeon-shaped plants, thickly covered with sharp thorns, reared aloft their weapons as if in menace to all living things; the unstable ground and thorny thicket formed the only shelter where we could be ambushed in the rear, ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... her own, to say nothing of an arm a blacksmith might envy) and when he has a duty to perform in his official capacity. It is in the latter instance that he rises magnificently to the dignity of his position. The majesty of the law in his hands becomes at once a bludgeon and a pandemonium. No one has ever been arrested in Radville, since Pete became sheriff, without the entire community becoming aware of it simultaneously. Pete's voice in moments of excitement carries ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... suit such as my friend of the railroad. Objectors laid great stress on the word "practical;" than which, with all its most respectable derivation and association, I know none more frequently—nor more effectually—used as a bludgeon for slaying ideas. Strictly, of course, it means knowing how to do things, and doing them; but colloquially it usually means doing them before learning how. Leap before you look. The practical part is bruising your shins for lack of previous ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... Edenic transgression did not seem to be much, but it struck a blow which to this day makes the earth stagger like an ox under a butcher's bludgeon. To find out the consequences of that one sin, you would have to compel the world to throw open all its prison doors and display the crime, and throw open all its hospitals and display the disease, and throw open all the insane asylums and show the wretchedness, and open all the ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie; "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!" He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuffbox and his cane— "Now back, my boon companions, to our brothel with our gain!" And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly, ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... they swore they would level the house and make a bonfire of the timber in the middle of Fleet Street. But the wily Whigs, barricading the door, slipped out a messenger at a back door, and sent to a mug-house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, for reinforcements. Presently a band of Whig bludgeon-men arrived, and the Whigs of Salisbury Court then snatched up pokers, tongs, pitchforks, and legs of stools, and sallied out on the Tory mob, who soon fled before them. For two days the Tory mob seethed, fretted, and swore revenge. But the report ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... fancying he discovered a special purpose in the use of such equipments, Ben-Hur stepped into the street so close to the line of march as to bring every one of the company under view while passing. The torches and the lanterns were being borne by servants, each of whom was armed with a bludgeon or a sharpened stave. Their present duty seemed to be to pick out the smoothest paths among the rocks in the street for certain dignitaries among them—elders and priests; rabbis with long beards, heavy brows, and beaked noses; men of the class potential in the councils of Caiaphas ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... shake with horror and with fear, The weapon all so ghastly did appear. The head became the stone to this strange sling, Of which the body was the potent string; And while 'twas brandished in a deadly way, The dislocated arms made monstrous play With hideous gestures, as now upside down The bludgeon corpse a giant force had grown. "'Tis well!" said Eviradnus, and he cried, "Arrange between yourselves, you two allied; If hell-fire were extinguished, surely it By such a contest might be all relit; From kindling spark struck out from dead King's brow, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... he sought no farther; but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." "All training," he avers, "is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he had disabled, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... shall have to cast a glance into that unbeautiful Hungarian-Bohemian scramble, comparable to an "Irish Donnybrook," where Albert Achilles long walked as Chief-Constable. It behooves us, after all, to point out some of the tallest heads in it; and whitherward, bludgeon in hand, they seem to be swaying and struggling.—Courage, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... his most despondent moments he had never doubted that, simply because it had never occurred to him to doubt it. However, he was not without some notion of what good acting should be, and he felt something like a murderous bludgeon blow when, at the end of five minutes, it began to be forced on him that she had not even the least glimmer of instinct ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... turn a laugh on a hostile bungler, but never cruel; prompt in returning a serious thrust, but never venomous. Many of his speeches were masterpieces in their way of handling opponents. An attack which Bismarck would have met with a bludgeon, Bulow parried with weapons infinitely lighter, but in some cases really more effective. A very good example was on an occasion when the old charge of "Byzantinism" was flung at the present regime, to which he ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... past eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the two looked over his head and seemed no whit disconcerted. A little further ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... the keepers of them. Now, suppose Judge Enderby runs afoul of our interests, as he is bound to do sooner or later. Little Weaselfoot gets on his trail—probably is on it already—and he'll spend a year if necessary watching, waiting, sniffing out something that he can use as a threat or a bludgeon or a bargain." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Bowler, alias Ditcher, surrendered himself, but it took some weeks to get upon the track of Gabriel. He was finally captured at Norfolk, on board a schooner just arrived from Richmond, in whose hold he had concealed himself for eleven days, having thrown overboard a bayonet and bludgeon, which were his only arms. Crowds of people collected to see him, including many of his own color. He was arrested on September 24th, convicted on October 3d, and executed on October 7th; and it is known of him further only, that, like almost all leaders of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... work. He had to ask favours of fellows whom he hated, and to stand their refusals, and pretend to believe their lying excuses, and appear to make quite light of it, though every failure stunned him like a blow of a bludgeon, and as he strutted jauntily off with a bilious smirk, he was well nigh at his wits' end. It was dark as he rode out by the low road to Chapelizod—crest-fallen, beaten—scowling in the darkness through his ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... intent upon discovery and vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers, arrayed in the white topcoat and tied up in various shawls and handkerchiefs, issued forth in another chaise in another direction, taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong cord, and a stout labouring man; all provided and carried upon the expedition with the sole object of assisting in the capture, and (once caught) insuring the safe ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... letter as this was like a blow from a bludgeon. The insolence, the contempt, and the hardness of it were such as no self-respecting woman could endure. It put an end to their acquaintance, as Swift undoubtedly intended it should do. He would have been less censurable had he struck ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... seems to me that, in the final analysis of reason, the great criminals of the world are not these wild beasts, who break through all laws, whose selfishness takes the form of the bloody knife, the firebrand, or the bludgeon; but those who, equally selfish, corrupt the foundations of government and create laws and conditions by which millions suffer, and out of which these murderers and robbers ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... not apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his table, and who listened ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given place to the bludgeon. For sarcasm to be effective, the user of it must be met half-way. His hearer must appear to be conscious of the sarcasm and moved by it. Mike, when masters waxed sarcastic towards him, always assumed an air of stolid stupidity, which ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... wounded, fell to his knees and was dispatched. The Englishman was hit by a billet of wood and dazed. Marteau and the other Russian were still unharmed. But it was going hard with them. In fact, a fierce blow on his blade from a bludgeon shivered the weapon of the Frenchman. A sword was aimed at his heart. There was a blinding flash, a detonation, and the man who held it staggered back. The Countess, the last pistol almost touching the man's body, had pulled the trigger. Marteau seized the sword of the man who had menaced him. ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... eyes, ugly mouth, with one tooth gone, and an iron jaw like a hull-dog's. He was attired in a fur cap, brown corduroy jacket, with a blood-red handkerchief twisted about his throat, and he carried a bludgeon. When the double-dyed villain proceeded in the third act to pound the head of the lovely maiden to a jelly at the instigation of the base uncle, concealed behind a painted tree-trunk, and the lover rushed in and tried ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... end of his stick for the face of another of the boarding strangers. The fellow strove to protect his face, and would have guarded easily enough, but, instead, the other end of Tom's bludgeon struck him in the pit of his stomach, depriving him ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... 1917. All in me that is spiritual, reasonable, all that was once hopeful, revolts at this actuality and its meaning. But there is another side, that dark one, which revels in anticipation. It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay. I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades. I fancied that I alone had suffered a retrogression. I have a deep consciousness of baseness that is going to keep me aloof from them. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... their attention, for the most part, to the worthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath their regard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even this is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... prejudices into moral principles; both of them irritable and sensitive, both able to give instantaneous and elaborate expression to their vaguest thoughts,—Carlyle himself with eloquence which he wielded like a bludgeon, and Mrs. Carlyle with incisiveness which she used like a sharp knife—Carlyle with too much to do, and Mrs. Carlyle with less than nothing to do—each passionately attached to the other as soon as they were separated, and both ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ranting—but everybody clapped and applauded—only the man next to me said it was politics instead of reform—and then he went on to talk about that ordinance 147, and what it really meant, and how they were going to use it like a bludgeon over the heads of wrong-doers, and all that sickening sort of thing—and the more he talked the more I kept thinking.... My dear, all that ordinance says—at least, all they claim it says—is that we can't keep open on Sunday for profit, ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... toils are done. Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, While round the hut are in disorder laid The tools and booty of his lawless trade; For force or fraud, resistance or escape The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape; His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards, And the filched lead the church's roof affords— (Hence shall the rector's congregation fret, That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.) The fish-spear barbed, the ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... glanced at the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered first, and, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... perhaps a touch of insanity, which made it painful to look at him. As he never accepted money or anything but food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's Park dandy compared with my hermit. He wore a pair of gigantic shoes, about a foot ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of "Spider" Kelley to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... shut the brutes out; and all we could think of was to stand by the entrance and defend it as we best might. Ben with the long musket, and I with a brand, which I still clutched, but which no longer blazed, and could only be used as a bludgeon. Should these weapons fail, we would have to take out our knives, and make the best fight we could; but we knew that if the baboons once got inside, so as to surround us, we should not ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... him by the collar, he dragged him to the shelter of a big boulder, flung him close to it, and lay down on top of his body. In the next moment the blast went off, and the gust of fire and rocks and earth roared and whistled through the air above them. The sound struck them like a bludgeon, and they lay for a while, stunned and deafened, while pieces of stone slid and tinkled on the boulder that had sheltered ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... police force of this capital is as able a body of men as are to be found in all Western China. Probably the Metropolitan police of dear old London could not be re-forced from their ranks, but disciplined and well-ordered they certainly are withal. Swords seem to take the place of the English bludgeon, and a peaked cap, beribboned with gold, is substituted for the old-fashioned helmet of blue; and if the time should ever come, with international rights, when Englishmen will be "run in" in the Empire, the sallow physiognomy and the dangling pigtail alone will be unmistakable proofs ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession of his faith, an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... whatever had occurred, and I sprang around and helped him to a couch. He would not lie down but sat up, staring and passing his hand over his head. It was rapidly growing lighter, and I saw a purple and black streak across his temple where a bludgeon of some ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... told with tiresome iteration that we are "put here" for some purpose (not disclosed) and have no right to retire until summoned—it may be by small-pox, it may be by the bludgeon of a blackguard, it may be by the kick of a cow; the "summoning" Power (said to be the same as the "putting" Power) has not a nice taste in the choice of messengers. That "argument" is not worth attention, for it is unsupported by either evidence or anything remotely resembling ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... suddenly, the Prohibition movement was seen to be advancing by leaps and bounds. Two clergymen, the Rev. Leonard Isitt and the Rev. Edward Walker, were respectively the voice and the hand of the Prohibitionists. As a speaker Mr. Isitt would perhaps be the better for a less liberal use of the bludgeon, but his remarkable energy and force on the platform, and his bold and thorough sincerity, made him a power in the land. Mr. Walker had much to do with securing tangible results for the force which Mr. Isitt's harangues aroused, and in which the Liberal Party was to a large extent enrolled. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... from his hand on to the pavement with a bump and a rattle. Stooping swiftly, the Kid picked it up, and handed it to Psmith. His fingers closed upon it. It was a short, wicked-looking little bludgeon, the black-jack of ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... thousandth time in the agonies of death; over and over again, she acts the bloody scene, and, while he turns restless and feverish upon his pillow, still holds the picture bleeding fresh to fancy's wearied gaze, and as in Macbeth, presents the dagger, while "on its blade and bludgeon are drops of blood that were not so before." Crimes of dye not so deep, are conjured up to harrow up the breast and rack the brain, and render the victim of a disapproving conscience ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... my bludgeon to a nicety, I laid it by, and sat brooding, the knife betwixt my knees; now a beam of sun falling athwart the leaves lit upon the broad blade of the knife and made of it a glory. And beholding this and the hand that grasped it, I took pleasure ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be to see or hear or smell the hunter. Gaff or paddle in hand, the Aleut leaps from rock to rock, or dashes among the tumbling beds of tossed kelp. A quick blow of the bludgeon; the otter never knows how death came. This is the club hunt. But where the shore is honeycombed with caves and narrow inlets of kelp fields, is a safer kind of hunting. Huge nets now made of twine, formerly of sinew, with wooden floaters above, iron sinkers below, are spread athwart the kelp fields. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... for elbow-room in Mardi and for all our parks an gardens, wherein we are wont to expatiate. Come on, then, plague, war, famine and viragos! Come on, I say, for who shall stay ye? Come on, and healthfulize the census! And more especially, oh War! do thou march forth with thy bludgeon! Cracked are, our crowns by nature, and henceforth forever, cracked shall they be by ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... themselves in vain. They backed, they writhed, they twisted in a bow. With his huge hands he was choking them, choking them to death, using them as a shield against the other three. Then slowly he worked himself into a sitting position. He hurled one of the dogs to the tent door. He swung bludgeon blows at the others. They fled yelping and howling. He still held the Mackenzie River bitch. Getting his knee on her body, he bent her almost into a circle, bent her till her back broke with ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... first seized hold of a good bludgeon, feigned dead. Then the foxes arrived, and spoke thus: "Panaumbe! You are to be pitied. Were you frozen to death, or were you starved to death?" With these words, all the foxes came up close to him, and wept. Thereupon Panaumbe brandished his bludgeon, struck all the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... Mr. Prigg down with a feather, certainly with a bludgeon; such a shock he had never received at the hands of a client in the whole course of his professional experience. He rose and drew from his pocket an envelope, a very large official-looking envelope, such as no man twice in his life would like ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... pointed beards with which the lips and chins of most of them were decorated, gave to their physiognomies a manly and determined air, fully borne out by their unrestrained carriage and deportment. To a man, almost all were armed with a tough vine-wood bludgeon, called in their language an estoc volant, tipped and shod with steel—a weapon fully understood by them, and rendered, by their dexterity in the use of it, formidable to their adversaries. Not a few carried at their girdles the short ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... revealed by black magic, fair, sweet, generous Dorothy, standing piteously upon Bowling Green hillside. Over her drooping form there hung in air a monster cloudlike image of her father holding in its hand a deadly bludgeon. So black, so horrid was this shadow-demon that I sprang from my chair with a ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... miserably, he drove himself out of the town, for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again, mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... of "The Low-backed Car" in the hope that the lilting notes would still further serve to inculcate in the lurking enemy the impression that he was a lover returning well content from his tryst. As he sauntered along, he held his bludgeon in readiness while his keen eyes searched—and presently he ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk little ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... "Factionists." It was not fair fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics. It was the base weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more legitimate ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... only to say to me, 'Lousteau, let us put an end to So-and-so,' and we will kill him by a phrase put in the paper morning by morning; and afterwards you can slay the slain with a solemn article in Finot's weekly. Indeed, if it is a matter of capital importance to you, Finot would allow you to bludgeon your man in a big paper with ten or twelve thousand subscribers, if you ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... A bludgeon was suddenly hurtling toward him, and he ducked it, his blood thick in his throat and his ears ringing with the same pressure of fear he'd always known just before he was kayoed in the ring. Then he selected what he ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... of Nature. It is necessary to sound a loud alarm, to present the facts in very strong language, backed up by irrefutable statistics and by photographs which tell no lies, to establish the law and enforce it if needs be with a bludgeon. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... taking him prisoner," replied the rat, "the object of that bludgeon is to me a matter of mere conjecture. However, it is easy enough to see you have changed your mind; and it may be barely worth mentioning ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... something," he replied. "The thing—stick, bludgeon, whatever you like to call it, some foreign article—with which Marbury was struck down was found ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... came up and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and killed him. ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... effect, with the premeditated murder of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel and in all other hotels and places wheresoever, on the thirteenth day of March and all ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... on earth was he to hide it? how to keep it safely, secretly? What if he were robbed of it in some sly way! O, thought of utter wo! it made the fortunate possessor quiver like an aspen. Or what, if some one or more of those blustering boon companions were to come by night with a bludgeon and a knife, and—and cut his throat, and find the treasure? or, worse still, were to torture him, set him on the fire like a saucepan (he had heard of Turpin having done so with a rich old woman), and make him tell them "where" in his extremity of pains, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... through his hands with the point of a dagger. He then had a cord tied round his middle, and was led through the streets with a soldier on each side of him. At every turning the soldier on his right hand side cut a gash in his flesh, and the soldier on his left hand side struck him with a bludgeon, both saying, at the same instant, Will you go to mass? will you go to mass? He still replied in the negative to these interrogatories, and being at length taken to the bridge, they cut off his head on the balustrades, and threw both that and his ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... light fell suddenly upon something which brought a groan to my lips and a bitter curse to those of Jem Belcher. Along the white surface of the dusty highway there was drawn a long smear of crimson, while beside this ominous stain there lay a murderous little pocket-bludgeon, such as Warr had described in ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tell you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... have done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all control of myself," he said as he walked home. "It was brutal the way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with a bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good reason to ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... does, is it? I wondered what it was that did it. I hear you fight him still—but with a bludgeon, and he dodges it." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... day with one of the most influential of the Whig party at New York, he was talking about their success in the contest—"We beat them, sir, literally with their own weapons." "How so," replied I. "Why, sir, we bought over all their bludgeon men at so many dollars a head, and the very sticks intended to be used to keep us from the poll were employed upon the heads of the Loco-focos!" So much ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... pictures—that Powhatan, for reasons of high policy satisfactory to himself, had determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the bed, they were startled by footsteps on board. They knew instantly that it was a gang of negroes come to rob and perhaps murder them. Allen, thinking to frighten the negroes, called out, "Bring guns, Lincoln, and shoot them!" Abe came without the guns, but fell among the negroes with a huge bludgeon and belabored them most cruelly, following them onto the bank. They rushed back to their boat and hastily put out into the stream. It is said that Lincoln received a scar in this tussle which he carried with him to his grave. It was on this trip that he saw the workings of slavery for the first ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said to Javert, in a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... through the doorway. Yuara, with a word to a clubman and a motion to the equipment, followed the whites, trailed in turn by his three companions of the forest. The clubman, after a curious inspection of the packs, stood on guard among them, his bludgeon grasped loosely but suggestively, ready to prevent any undue inquisitiveness by the rest. But soon he found himself alone, for the other tribesmen transferred their attention and themselves to the interior ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... foot-soldier. But Jackson's partiality for his own arm was as marked as was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... "I never saw such fighting as we had here. It began on the 25th of Jury, and, excepting the 29th, when not a shot was fired, we had it every day till the 2nd of August. The battle of the 28th was fierce bludgeon work. The fourth division was principally engaged, and the loss of the enemy was immense. I hope Soult will not feel any inclination to renew his expedition. The French army must have suffered considerably. Between the 25th of last month and the 2nd of this they were engaged seriously ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... against the weather and against exercise. Beneath her chin were firmly knotted the strings of her sober bonnet; a short skirt hid nothing of the stout boots she had donned; her hand grasped the knob of a bludgeon-like umbrella. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... such as my friend of the railroad. Objectors laid great stress on the word "practical;" than which, with all its most respectable derivation and association, I know none more frequently—nor more effectually—used as a bludgeon for slaying ideas. Strictly, of course, it means knowing how to do things, and doing them; but colloquially it usually means doing them before learning how. Leap before you look. The practical part is bruising your ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... LANG," writes the Baron's Assistant Reader, "I have read your criticism in Longman's Magazine upon Mr. BARRY PAIN's In a Canadian Canoe. It's an ugly piece of bludgeon work, I admit, but not convincing to anyone who has read the book of which you speak. You tear away a line or two from the context, and ask your readers to say if that is wit or humour. How your admirers would have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... Feemy, who was still insensible, upon the path; but he could not do so quick enough to prevent the stunning blow which brought him on his knees. His hat partially saved him, and he was on the point of rising, when Thady again struck him with all his power; this time the heavy bludgeon came down on his bare temple, and the young man fell, never to rise again. He neither moved nor groaned; the force of the blow, and the great weight of the stick falling on his uncovered head as he was rising, had shattered his brains, and he lay as dead as though he had ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the window for the hundredth time, and brandishing ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... As Constance heard this, it seemed as if a bludgeon were falling on her to make her defeat complete. And so, even if she should now let Denis, in his turn, kill himself, another Froment was coming who would replace him. There was ever another and another of that race—a ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from knocking me down with a bludgeon, why he should not be authorised to interfere to save me from a typhus fever; and if he can prevent boys from endangering the lives of passengers by firing guns on the high roads, why he should not also be enabled to forbid the open sewers and other nuisances, which, if not so noisy, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... himself known to his friend, who told him, that having left his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he had ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... shelter of a big boulder, flung him close to it, and lay down on top of his body. In the next moment the blast went off, and the gust of fire and rocks and earth roared and whistled through the air above them. The sound struck them like a bludgeon, and they lay for a while, stunned and deafened, while pieces of stone slid and tinkled on the boulder that had sheltered them. At last ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... filled with monuments of those who were once dear to me, with no insincere wish that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. My pains were those of the heart, and had something flattering in their character; if in the head, it was from the blow of a bludgeon gallantly ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... his stick for the face of another of the boarding strangers. The fellow strove to protect his face, and would have guarded easily enough, but, instead, the other end of Tom's bludgeon struck him in the pit of his stomach, depriving him ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... to that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian franchise law must accept all the consequences ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... lined yourself up with the labor unions irrevocably for an eight-hour day, as against the railroads who wish to arbitrate the necessity for putting in an eight-hour day immediately, and irrespective of the additional cost to the railroads. They say that the men are attempting to bludgeon the railroads into granting their demand which has not been shown to the people to be reasonable. This demand is that the men should have ten hours pay for eight hours work or less. They say that if this question cannot be arbitrated, the railroads must yield on every question and that freight ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... the city streets have long been the more perilous because of her defiance of the rights of others. Here she runs true to type. She is her father's own daughter. In the light of his character and career, of his use of the bludgeon in business, of his resort to foul means when fair would not serve, of his brutal disregard of human rights in order that his own power might be enhanced, of his ruthless and crushing tyranny, not alone toward his employees, but toward all labor in its struggle for better conditions, we can but ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... escaped unscathed. Three of our followers had been slain outright, while a fourth was lying stunned from a blow. Buyse and Sir Gervas were much bruised. Saxon was cut on the right arm. Reuben had been felled by a bludgeon stroke, and would certainly have been slain but for the fine temper of Sir Jacob Clancing's breastplate, which had turned a fierce pike-thrust. As to myself it is scarce worth the mention, but my head sang ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ever had apology or excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man—the only one in our annals—appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to any other ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... not observing that rule. In the open air pitch out a fact or two—not too many—or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play—it's lost then—but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he squirms round to pull it off. And, mind you, there'll be no walking over, ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... all our parks an gardens, wherein we are wont to expatiate. Come on, then, plague, war, famine and viragos! Come on, I say, for who shall stay ye? Come on, and healthfulize the census! And more especially, oh War! do thou march forth with thy bludgeon! Cracked are, our crowns by nature, and henceforth forever, cracked shall they ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... pursed his lips and whistled softly the opening bars of "The Low-backed Car" in the hope that the lilting notes would still further serve to inculcate in the lurking enemy the impression that he was a lover returning well content from his tryst. As he sauntered along, he held his bludgeon in readiness while his keen eyes searched—and presently he made out the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... each bank in the Union. The cashier's own bank testified its gratitude by endeavoring to show (but humiliatingly failed in it) that the peerless servant's accounts were not square, and that he himself had knocked his brains out with a bludgeon to escape detection ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table with them, 'it does me good to think of. There was a opportunity! But it led to nothing. For my part, I don't know what would. There's no spirit among the people in these here times. Bring something to eat ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... to Mr. Choate's profession and exactly descriptive of the thing itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... blow on the head from a bludgeon would have given me less pain and astonishment. The Countess saw the look of hesitation ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... reticence who was misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession of his faith, an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy world in which ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... humor, quick to turn a laugh on a hostile bungler, but never cruel; prompt in returning a serious thrust, but never venomous. Many of his speeches were masterpieces in their way of handling opponents. An attack which Bismarck would have met with a bludgeon, Bulow parried with weapons infinitely lighter, but in some cases really more effective. A very good example was on an occasion when the old charge of "Byzantinism" was flung at the present regime, to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... door, thrust the barrel of his gun in the fireman's ribs, effectually curtailing the process of respiration practically at once. From the other side of the door the chief engineer stepped out and wagged his bludgeon ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... or viscous matter."—Johnson's Dict. "Whurr, to pronounce the letter r with too much force."—Ib. "Flipp, a mixed liquor, consisting of beer and spirits sweetened."—Ib. "Glynn, a hollow between two mountains, a glen."—Churchill's Grammar, p. 22. "Lamm, to beat soundly with a cudgel or bludgeon."—Walker's Dict. "Bunn, a small cake, a simnel, a kind of sweet bread."—See ib. "Brunett, a woman with a brown complexion."—Ib. and Johnson's Dict. "Wad'sett, an ancient tenure or lease of land in the Highlands of Scotland."—Webster's Dict. "To dodd sheep, is to cut the wool ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the two looked over his head and seemed no whit disconcerted. A little further ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... could think of was to stand by the entrance and defend it as we best might. Ben with the long musket, and I with a brand, which I still clutched, but which no longer blazed, and could only be used as a bludgeon. Should these weapons fail, we would have to take out our knives, and make the best fight we could; but we knew that if the baboons once got inside, so as to surround us, we should ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... his servant with a rod."—The instrument used, gives a clue to the intent. See Numbers xxxv. 16, 18. It was a rod, not an axe, nor a sword, nor a bludgeon, nor any other death-weapon—hence, from the kind of instrument, no design to kill would be inferred; for intent to kill would hardly have taken a rod for its weapon. But if the servant dies under his hand, then ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... at the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered first, and, looking over the volume ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and a cruel uncle who wanted her property. And there was a particularly brutal villain with leery eyes, ugly mouth, with one tooth gone, and an iron jaw like a hull-dog's. He was attired in a fur cap, brown corduroy jacket, with a blood-red handkerchief twisted about his throat, and he carried a bludgeon. When the double-dyed villain proceeded in the third act to pound the head of the lovely maiden to a jelly at the instigation of the base uncle, concealed behind a painted tree-trunk, and the lover rushed in and tried to save her, every pair of hands except Oliver's ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... half-consumed wood, with which he aimed at McDermot's head, broke across the bludgeon which was raised to ward the blow. Debriseau closed; and, clasping his arms round his neck, tore him with his strong teeth with the power and ferocity of a tiger, and they rolled together in the dust, covered with the blood which poured ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... you are expected to pay, whether you use it or not. Some of these fellows have a truly ruffianly aspect, and waylay you in secluded lanes and narrow pathways; and carrying a broom-stump, which looks marvellously like a bludgeon, no doubt often levy upon the apprehensions of a timorous pedestrian a contribution which his charity would not be so blind as to bestow. The whole of this tribe constitute a monster-nuisance, which ought to be abated by the exertions ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... little sunny room, felt bruised by that bludgeon word—which, as it happened, was not accurate, for Maurice, by this time, had gained a maturity of thought and patience that put him practically out of boyhood. When Eleanor repeated her caller's remarks to him, she left that one word out; "Auntie ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... the sickly in the mind is reality. Something real has to be felt or experienced. Life that is over-delicate and remote through something unbalanced in the mind is not life but decay. The knife, the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's remedies for those who fail to live. We are the earth's children; we have no business in limbo. Living in limbo is like living ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding him of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the rest of the theatrical scaffolding, for which nevertheless I have to plan as carefully as if I were the head carpenter as well as the author. But even at the risk of talking ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... them did so for a bad motive, and exalted their own whims and prejudices into moral principles; both of them irritable and sensitive, both able to give instantaneous and elaborate expression to their vaguest thoughts,—Carlyle himself with eloquence which he wielded like a bludgeon, and Mrs. Carlyle with incisiveness which she used like a sharp knife—Carlyle with too much to do, and Mrs. Carlyle with less than nothing to do—each passionately attached to the other as soon as they were separated, and both capable of saying the sweetest and ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... blows in all senses are a normal part of living. His social habits indulge themselves in knocks, coarse attacks, unseemly abuse, as rather matters of course. He wields a bludgeon where more refined men would cut down with sarcasm or wither one with disdain. Blows are his natural method of instructing others and of getting himself instructed. "Good German blows" are what the Kaiser talked of loudly. To strike as well as to ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... extreme negligee of the early morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to the genii of the old East, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... him prisoner," replied the rat, "the object of that bludgeon is to me a matter of mere conjecture. However, it is easy enough to see you have changed your mind; and it may be barely worth mentioning that I have ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... "I hate to have to tell you, but I hear, and I'm afraid it's true, that Archelaus is starting bush-beating on the estate again. I met John-Willy Jacka coming back from the direction of the wood late one night with a suspicious-looking sack and a bludgeon, and next day I asked John-James if he knew anything. He didn't give anyone away, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Christian critics of this species have, perhaps, stung Freethought lecturers into hot resentment, when it would have been far preferable to keep cool, and continue using the rapier instead of seizing the bludgeon. It is always a mistake to lose one's temper, but it becomes excusable (although not justifiable) under intense provocation. On the whole, it is safe to say that Christians have received more courtesy than they have shown in their ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... system of commercial control, and other casual and territorial dues lay in the right of the Crown. From 1820, therefore, the Assembly's main aim was twofold—to obtain control of these remaining sources of revenue, and by means of this power to bludgeon the Legislative Council and the Governor into compliance with its wishes. The Colonial Office made concessions, offering to resign all its taxing powers in return for a permanent civil list, that is, an assurance that the salaries of the chief officials ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk little ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... not you see that the Marquise is the tool of that tall lean man who never uttered a word? There is a strain of Cain in him, but of the Cain who goes to the Law Courts for his bludgeon, and there, unluckily for him, we keep ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... from father to daughter, and smiled. "Pardi!" said he. "I am between bludgeon and dagger. If I escape with my life, I shall be fortunate. Why, then, since you pin me to the very wall, I'll tell you what I should do. I should go back to the original and help ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... relies, And on that crowded "Corner" keeps his eyes. With straightening shots ENTELLUS threats the foe, } But DARES dodges the descending blow, } And back into his Corner's prompt to go. } Where bludgeon, knuckleduster, knotted sticks, Foul sickening blows and cruel coward kicks Are in his interest on ENTELLUS rained At every point that plucky boxer gained. ("Oh!" groaned SAYERIUS. "And this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... eyes. Kate felt she ought to bring the conversation to a close. She wondered what Jack would say if he saw her talking with a perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A great seal-ring bore an elaborate monogram, while the little finger ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Meredith—whose earliest novel, "Richard Feverel," was published about this date—broke many a lance against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for his countrymen, took a bludgeon to ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... hasty breakfast, Squeers started forth in the pony-chaise, intent upon discovery and vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers issued forth in another chaise and another direction, taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong cord, and a ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... mad scramble he was aware that the color sergeant flinched suddenly, as if struck by a bludgeon. He faltered, and then became motionless, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... its men and to prepare its measures in advance. In 1884 it created an administration for its own purposes, and manned it to the same end. It forced its way into the House of Representatives and stood with a bludgeon behind the Speaker's chair. It entered every committee-room and dictated every successful bill. The people's bills all went one way. If by any chance one of the people's bills got before the House the subsidized press, owned by Wall Street, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... placed him on his feet 'Neath Covent Garden dome. Sudden a sound, As of the bricklayers of Babel, rose: Horns, rattles, drums, tin trumpets, sheets of copper, Punches and slaps, thwacks of all sorts and sizes, From the knobb'd bludgeon to the taper switch, {39} Ran echoing round the walls; paper placards Blotted the lamps, boots brown with mud the benches; A sea of heads roll'd roaring in the pit; On paper wings O. P.'s Reclin'd in lettered ease; While shout and scoff, Ya! ya! off! off! Like thunderbolt on Surya's ear-drum fell, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... having first seized hold of a good bludgeon, feigned dead. Then the foxes arrived, and spoke thus: "Panaumbe! You are to be pitied. Were you frozen to death, or were you starved to death?" With these words, all the foxes came up close to him, and wept. Thereupon Panaumbe brandished his bludgeon, struck all the foxes, and killed ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... of value, in its day, to prevent a recurrence to the old and discredited methods. But its work is done, and blind adherence to it without regard to the principles on which it rests tends to turn the art of war into mere bludgeon play. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... covered it with hay, carried it to Wenham, kept it till after the murder, and then burned it. After securing the will, he gave notice to Crowninshield that all was ready. In the evening of that day he had a meeting with Crowninshield at the centre of the common, who showed him a bludgeon and dagger, with which the murder was to be committed. Knapp asked him if he meant to do it that night; Crowninshield said he thought not, he did not feel like it; Knapp then went to Wenham. Knapp ascertained on Sunday, the 4th of April, that ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... not account how he could get at such a Distance, as he was when he fell, the Soldier firing so soon. Others swear that he was leaning on his Stick when he fell, which certainly was not a threatning posture. It may be supposd that he had as good Right to carry a Stick, even a Bludgeon, as the Soldier who shot him had, to be armd with Musquet & ball; & if he at any time lifted up his Weapon of Defence, it was surely not more than a Soldiers leveling his Gun at the Multitude chargd with Death - If he had killed a Soldier, he might have been hangd ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... seeing the chapel so very near, we pursued the even tenour of our way, but just as we were about sliding between two crates, so as to pass on into the chapel, a strong man, top-coated, muffled up, and with a small bludgeon in his hand, moved forward and said "Can't go." "Why?" said we; "Folks isn't allowed in this here place now," said he. "Well, but this is the town's property and we pay rates," was our rejoinder, and his was "Don't matter a cuss, if you were Lord Derby I should send you back." We accused ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... batter pudding," cried S——th, "without the battering principle. Ay, you forget the head-battering bludgeon, the instantaneous pistol, or the cunning knife; none of all which would a man with a spark of courage in him use against an unarmed, defenceless traveller. Another thing you forget, the robber acts upon surprises. He produces confusion by his very presentation, fear by his demand of life ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... Heaven were bluffed with the fires of Hell. The old priesthoods were crushed and kings became the sworn defenders of the new faith, even propagated it with the sword—dispensed saving grace with gallows' ropes and with the bludgeon drove heaven- inspired precepts into the heads of unbelievers. Wisdom could not withstand such logic—the philosopher yielded to the unanswerable argument of the Inquisition. As no one could disprove the comforting doctrine of eternal damnation, and there is a strong vein ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie; "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!" He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuff-box and his cane— "Now back, my boon companions, to our bordel with our gain!" And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly, If I were Francois Villon ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... in all conscience. Alas, young outlander, who call yourself a king! you carry the bludgeon of a highwayman, and I am ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... said one, retreating. "And the jolly marksman who beat Nick Alwyn," said the other, lowering his bludgeon, and doffing his cap. "Gentle sir, forgive us, we knew not your quality. But as for the girl—your ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... supple-jack surpasses bull-dogs in its fashion of assisting the master; for when once at it, the clownish-looking thing reflects upon him creditably, by developing a refined courtliness of style, while in no way showing a diminution of jolly ardour for the fray. It will deal you the stroke of a bludgeon with the playfulness of a cane. It bears resemblance to those accomplished natural actors, who conversationally present a dramatic situation in two or three spontaneous flourishes, and are themselves again, men of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... intensified with perhaps a touch of insanity, which made it painful to look at him. As he never accepted money or anything but food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's Park dandy compared ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... with horror and with fear, The weapon all so ghastly did appear. The head became the stone to this strange sling, Of which the body was the potent string; And while 'twas brandished in a deadly way, The dislocated arms made monstrous play With hideous gestures, as now upside down The bludgeon corpse a giant force had grown. "'Tis well!" said Eviradnus, and he cried, "Arrange between yourselves, you two allied; If hell-fire were extinguished, surely it By such a contest might be all relit; From kindling spark struck out from dead King's ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... keep quiet if you don't want a rap over the head with this," he said, exhibiting a heavy bludgeon. ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... seized the youth by the ankles and swung him like an animate bludgeon over his head. The attacking party was too precipitate to halt in time and the yelling weapon swung round, horizontally mowing down the foremost pair of men like wooden pins. The weight of the boy, more than the force of the blow, jerked him from ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... rather than remain with him on a desolate island; but a mixed set of artists, musicians, verse-makers, novelists, critics—yea, even critics—contrive usually to make an unusually pleasant company. They are all so clever that the professional wit dares not raise his voice lest some wielder of the bludgeon should smite him; no long-winded talk is allowed, and, though a bore may once be admitted to the company, he certainly will never be admitted more than once. The talk ranges loosely from point to point, and yet a certain sequence is always observed; the men are freed from conventions; they like ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the push cart a little to one side of the road. Then they ran for trees, but every member of Dick & Co. retained his hold on his bludgeon. ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... when he found he was bound hard and fast, his face turned as red as fire and he opened his mouth, whether to swear or yell I know not. I had already closed the door, and before the man had uttered more than a premonitory sound, David had clapped the end of his bludgeon against his mouth. ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... as the spirits approached him. But those bandy legs tottered and before he could turn the awful visitants were upon him. One raised a round shot above his head, or so it appeared to be, and smote him full upon the crown. The other whirled a flat bludgeon and hit him on the jaw. With the smell of brimstone was mingled the pungent flavor of ripe cheese and salt-fish. Blackbeard measured his length, and the ghost of Jesse Strawn delayed an instant to dump a pot ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... of "this great metropolis." It was also resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... away the money I had worked for. But his open contempt of them was not resented, even at the height of the orgy. They were hard cases, rough, tough fighting men, but they gave the big fellow plenty of sea-room. No ruffling or swaggering in his direction. No gibes or practical jokes. The bludgeon-like wit of the house very carefully passed him by. For he was so plainly a ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... advancing by leaps and bounds. Two clergymen, the Rev. Leonard Isitt and the Rev. Edward Walker, were respectively the voice and the hand of the Prohibitionists. As a speaker Mr. Isitt would perhaps be the better for a less liberal use of the bludgeon, but his remarkable energy and force on the platform, and his bold and thorough sincerity, made him a power in the land. Mr. Walker had much to do with securing tangible results for the force which Mr. Isitt's harangues aroused, and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... fresh-looking and upstanding young man; he had removed his helmet and was carrying it by the chin strap. He had no bludgeon, no revolver, yet he impressed Jones almost as much as he ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... mustaches and pointed beards with which the lips and chins of most of them were decorated, gave to their physiognomies a manly and determined air, fully borne out by their unrestrained carriage and deportment. To a man, almost all were armed with a tough vine-wood bludgeon, called in their language an estoc volant, tipped and shod with steel—a weapon fully understood by them, and rendered, by their dexterity in the use of it, formidable to their adversaries. Not a few carried at their girdles the short rapier, so celebrated in their duels and brawls, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... attentions. Now and then I may defy them, when I need an excitement of that kind; but not to-night. To-night I mean to be clever, and show you how I can twist a cold-blooded Englishman round my finger. If you go, then I will scream—it is a woman's bludgeon, my child, as her tongue is her dagger. Bah! be quiet and listen to me. You shall not divorce me, for if you try I will accuse you of all sorts of things—basenesses that will ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Edward snapped his fingers now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... rest-day; Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... him about what means they should take. They came to a resolution of driving them in by force, and gave orders to their sepoys to beat any one of the women who should attempt to move forward; the sepoys accordingly assembled, and each one being provided with a bludgeon, they drove them, by dint of beating, into the zenanah. The women, seeing the treachery of Letafit, proceeded to throw stones and bricks at the sepoys, and again attempted to get out; but finding that impossible, from the gates ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... the usher of the court for the time being—a hoarse-voiced man in top-boots with a huge saber buckled to his side, and a bludgeon in his hand. "Silence for the Citizen President!" he reiterated, striking his bludgeon ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... modifications. How he used to roar in the Gazette against the opposite party, and yet I never heard anything from him myself but what was diffident and tender. He had acquired, as an instrument necessary to him, an extraordinarily extravagant style, and he laid about him with a bludgeon, which inevitably descended on the heads of all prominent persons if they happened not to be Conservative, no matter what their virtues might be. One peculiarity, however, I noted in him. Although he ought every now and then, when the subject was uppermost, to have flamed out in the Gazette ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... law!—leaving the victims to die unhelped, and then, when the fever and the tyranny has done its work, in thy sanctimonious prudishness, drugging thy respectable conscience by a "searching inquiry" as to how it all happened—lest, forsooth, there should have been "foul play!" Is the knife or the bludgeon, then, the only foul play, and not the cesspool and the curse of Rabshakeh? Go through Bermondsey or Spitalfields, St. Giles's or Lambeth, and see if there is not foul play enough already—to be tried hereafter at a more awful ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... this when Seth Barker himself came panting down the hillpath, and, what was more remarkable, he carried an uncouth sort of bludgeon in his hand. I could see that there had been a bit of a rough and tumble on the way, but it ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of beauty, or enjoyment of Nature. It is necessary to sound a loud alarm, to present the facts in very strong language, backed up by irrefutable statistics and by photographs which tell no lies, to establish the law and enforce it if needs be with a bludgeon. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... enterprise the danger of mutiny always looms large and the bludgeon of blackmail lies ready to the hand of the mutineer. Therefore the actual handling of the money had been a matter of extreme care to Lute and those in his closest confidence. When the leader had taken most ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... was of no use with this man; a bludgeon was the only instrument, yet it might wound, and she only wanted to prick. Had the creature never seen Olive sketching, nor noted ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hand. Down came the portcullis. The flying plunderers were entrapped. Close behind them came the excited burghers—their antique Belgic ferocity now fully aroused—firing away with carbine and matchlock, dealing about them with bludgeon and cutlass, and led merrily on by Haultepenne and Elmont armed in proof, at the head of their squadron of lancers. The unfortunate patriots had risen very early in the morning only to shear the wolf. Some were cut to pieces in the streets; others climbed the walls, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Marion stuck her great arms upon her haunches, and held the whole room in play. This country girl possessed in perfection that rude and ready humour which looks mean and vulgar on paper, but carries all before it spoken: not wit's rapier; its bludgeon. Nature had done much for her in this way, and daily practice ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... crossed the sacred boundary which the law had forbidden war to enter. In a few hours Sulla was the absolute master of Rome. Marius and Sulpicius fled. It was the conservative party which exchanged the bludgeon for the sword. Sulla at once made null the Sulpician laws, punished their author and his adherents, as Sulpicius had feared. The gray-haired conqueror of the Cimbri fled, and found his way to the coast and embarked ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... talked on indefinitely, for Birotteau stood still, petrified. Every phrase was a calamity, like the blows of a bludgeon. He heard the death-bells tolling in his ears,—just as his eyes had seen, at the first word, the flames of his fortune. Alexandre Crottat, who thought the worthy perfumer a strong and able man, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Poor Otis! The bludgeon of a ministerial myrmidon paralyzed his brilliant intellect, and he was not allowed to participate in the scenes of the Revolution which ensued. Just as the white banner of peace began to wave over his country, after a struggle of twenty years to which he gave ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... keg, which might indifferently contain "genuine Nantz" or gunpowder. One of the "insides," an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig, is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
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