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More "Butt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been christened the Robert Bullmer, and her first act when the dog-shores had been knocked away was a bull charge down the launching slip, resulting in the bursting of a hawser, the washing over of a boat and the drowning of two innocent spectators; her next was an attempt to butt the Eddystone over in a fog, and, being unbreakable, she might have succeeded only that she was going dead slow. She drifted out of the Bullmer line on the wash of a law-suit owing to the ramming by her of a Cape boat in Las Palmas harbour; engaged herself in the fruit ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... thou gain the butt of sack And salary that Pye has, Would it not cheer thy visage black, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... affection. Is it love I feel? Can I, Felix, who have had but one thought, known but one enthusiasm, retain in this breast of iron a spot however secret, however small, which any woman, least of all his daughter, could reach? Never! I am the prey of frenzy or the butt of devils. Yet only the inhabitants of a more celestial sphere brighten around me when I think of those half-raised eyes, those delicately parted lips, so devoid of guile, that innocent bearing, and the divine tenderness, mingled ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... grimly, with his bald head sunk between his huge shoulders, he gazed after the departing riders. "Eyah! 'tis best so!" he murmured softly, "a showdown—wid no ould shtiff av a non-com like meself tu butt in. . . . An', onless I am mistuk that same will come this very morn, from th' luks av things. . . . Sind th' young wan is as handy wid his dhooks as Brankley sez he is! . . . Thin—an' on'y thin will there be peace ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... watched the maneuvering with interest, and no sooner did the gun begin to shift than three leaped forward, snarling angrily. One snapped at the barrel of the piece, one at the butt, and a third at the trigger. An instant later came the report heard by the Rovers ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... their party, (which, till he found attractions elsewhere, was generally the case,) their more elevated subjects of conversation were almost always put to flight by the strange sallies of this eccentric young man, whose vanity made him a constant butt for Lord Byron's sarcasm and merriment. The son of a highly respectable Italian gentleman, who was in early life, I understand, the secretary of Alfieri, Polidori seems to have possessed both talents and dispositions which, had he lived, might have rendered ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... unless some change in height had to be made to fit a gun port or embrasure. To prevent cannon from pushing shutters open when the ship rolled in a storm, lower tier carriages let the muzzle of the gun, when fully elevated, butt against the sill ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... When his breathing showed him fast asleep indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand close to the butt of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... reformation, which he had such an eminent hand in erecting and building up, but also to find himself at the king's mercy, for his accession to the same. He knew, that next to the marquis of Argyle, he was the butt of the enemies malice, and he had frequently applied for his majesty's grace, but was as often refused; so that the violent courses now carrying on, and the plain invasions upon the liberties and religion ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and bruised, put them into a clean butt, and start your mild brown, or pale beer upon them, so as to fill up the vessel, about the beginning of November, and let it stand till the next season; and ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... American football suit—that's what you'll want. Well, good-bye. I'll have the answer for you here on Wednesday morning—if he ever deigns to answer you. He is a violent, dangerous, cantankerous character, hated by everyone who comes across him, and the butt of the students, so far as they dare take a liberty with him. Perhaps it would be best for you if you never heard from the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... invariable answer: "I don't know!" So confused was she that these words were the only ones she could utter, even when she knew the correct answer, or would have done so if she could have collected her wits. By the end of the hour, Peggy was entirely convinced that she was the dunce and butt of the school; that she knew nothing, and never would ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. I never saw such a figure as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs. Cornely's balls, at Carlisle House, Soho. But that the stories connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable tales in the world, I could tell tales ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ear of his chief clerk. On some matters, however, others have spoken since his book appeared. He is very precise about the trial for an agrarian murder in Monaghan, giving details from his own actual observation. Mr. Butt, Q.C., who was engaged in the case, has published a letter, stating that Mr. Trench was quite mistaken in his account. It seems strange that he did not refresh his memory by looking at a report of the trial ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... form of government rests; but it is strange to see what Daedalian complications, and wheels within wheels, we have contrived to work into the superstructure. A modern ward heeler in New York could have taken up the whole frame of government in Seventeenth Century New England by the butt end, and cracked it like a whip—provided of course the Pilgrim fathers had allowed ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... warning! Perhaps this is the last time you shall have an opportunity to take it! I will not always be the butt of your simplicity and inexperience, nor suffer your weakness to triumph over my strength! Why do you trifle with me? You little suspect the extent of my power. At this moment you are enclosed with the snares of my vengeance unseen by you, and, at the instant that you flatter yourself ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... see his old acquaintance, and inquiring by name for every person whom he could recollect at Sydney; and among others for a French cook, one of the governor's servants, whom he had constantly made the butt of his ridicule, by mimicking his voice, gait, and other peculiarities, all of which he again went through with his wonted exactness and drollery. He asked also particularly for a lady from whom he had once ventured to snatch a kiss; and on being told that she ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... conqueror to die sword in hand, making a tomb for his body of his enemies on the field of battle, than to be hated of his own and poniarded by the hands of his nearest and dearest, or to die of poison or of drowning in a wine-butt." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... am that clumsy butt Of your nursery tales—aloud Will I shout that name forever Through the ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... were hauled and pushed down the steep, winding path to where the camels were waiting below. The Frenchman waved his unwounded hand as he walked. "Vive le Khalifa! Vive le Madhi!" he shouted, until a blow from behind with the butt-end of a Remington beat ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... just declared that he finds nothing amiss in him; but the rabble cry out, all the more, "crucify him." While ardently loved by a devoted few in that tumultuous crowd, he is, to all the rest, an object of severest scorn, the butt of ribald jest. Wearing his crown of thorns, he is made to bear, till he faints under his burden, the very instrument of his torture. His Roman executioners, giving to him the punishment accorded to thieves ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... a butt, as a butt should be strod, I gallop the brusher along; Like a grape-blessing Bacchus, the good fellow's god, And a sentiment give, or a ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of your "lean-to" lay a thick layer of the "fans" or branches of balsam fir or hemlock, with the convex side up, and the butts of the stems toward the foot of the bed. Now thatch this over with more "fans" by thrusting the butt ends through the first layer at a slight angle toward the head of the bed, so that the soft tips will curve toward the foot of the bed, and be sure to make the head of your bed away from the opening of the "lean-to" and the foot toward the opening. Over this bed spread your rubber blanket ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... when they suddenly heard a rush in the jungle, and in another instant two elephants charged out upon them. Wortley and Palliser both fired, but without effect—the gun-bearers bolted,—an elephant knocked one man over, and tried to butt him against the ground; but two more shots from both Palliser and Wortley turned him; they were immediately obliged to run in their turn, as the other elephant charged, and just grazed Palliser with his trunk behind. Fortunately, they doubled ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... said Harry. "Hold the butt close against your shoulder. Take your time, and aim right at the ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... greater. Few its end regret. Surely not the Waiter. He his finger had In the pie—or gravy. Did he? Well, 'tis sad. He must cry "Peccavi!" But whoever mixed, Or whoever boiled it, Our opinion's fixed, He, or they, quite spoiled it. 'Tis the general scoff, Butt of chaff and rudeness. Irish Stew is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... attempts to air his grievances to passing members touching the question of the expectant Jorrocks and the missing purse. Beyond, however, eliciting many sallies of wit from the younger spirits, for it was part of the major's policy to lay himself open to be a butt, his laudable perseverance was entirely thrown away. At last he gave it up in disgust, and raising his stick hailed a passing 'bus, into which he sprang, taking a searching glance round to see that no one was following him. After a drive which brought ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with his legs apart, bent a little at the knees, as if he intended to make a jump. His right hand was near the butt of his gun, his fingers were clasping and unclasping, as if he limbered them for action. Taterleg slipped up behind him on his toes, and jerked the gun from Jim's scabbard with quick and sure hand. He backed away with it, presenting it with determined mien ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... heavy butt of a Winchester rifle descended on my head and I fell to the ground. Rough hands seized me and angry men bore me ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... to her and spoke low. "Your ladyship makes a butt of me," he said. And 'twas so ordained by Fate, at this moment when the worst of him seethed within his breast, and was ripest for mad evil, Sir Christopher Crowell came bustling into the apartment, full of exultant ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the best of their judgment 2000 miles. The gale then ceasing they turned back, and were seventy days in getting to the aforesaid Cape Diab. The ship having touched on the coast to supply its wants, the mariners beheld there the egg of a certain bird called Chrocho, which egg was as big as a butt.[3] And the bigness of the bird is such that between the extremities of the wings is said to be 60 paces. They say too that it carries away an elephant or any other great animal with the greatest ease, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... my holding my rifle with one hand, while I endeavoured to free myself with the other, I could not point the muzzle at my assailant, and my only way of clearing myself from his hold was by battering his head with the butt end of the weapon with my right hand, while he still clung round my left side. At last I disengaged myself, and he let go suddenly, and slipped instantly behind one of the thick acacia bushes, and got away, just as ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... mony ane, And, lassie, ye're but young ye ken; Then wait a wee, and cannie wale, A routhie butt, a routhie ben: There's Johnie o' the Buskie-glen, Fu' is his burn, fu' is his byre; Tak this frae me, my bonnie hen, It's plenty beets the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... thinkin ye're no just a here-a-wa man, by your tongue," said she; "an', if I'm no mista'en, ye've seen better days; for, when I was bringin butt your wet claes to get them dried, though your bit jacket an' your breeks were just corduroy, I couldna help noticin that there is no a bit bonnier linen inowre our door than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... covet before their eyes. Then, I can never count change even when my mind is tranquil, and she knows that, and swoops threateningly upon me in booking offices and stationers' shops. When I am dodging cabs at crossings she will appear from behind an omnibus or carriage and butt into me furiously. She holds her umbrella in her folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff, and with as deadly effect. Sometimes she discards her customary navy blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with bead trimmings, and goes and hurts people who ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... was beyond me. I could have emptied a water-butt, laid down and gone to sleep, or melted ice with a touch of the finger, but I could not speak. The conversation was opened by the other man, in whose restraining hand Aunt Elizabeth now lay, outwardly resigned but inwardly, as I, who knew her ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... so. Few of the creeks ran half a mile from their heads. The country is rent with deep chasms, made still deeper by vast torrents that pour down them during times of heavy rains." There were found petrified trees. One of them was 210 feet long and another was over five feet across the butt, this in a land where not a tree or bush was found growing. Holmes fervently observed, "However, I do not know whether it makes any difference whether the country is barren or fruitful, if the Lord has a work to do in it," ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... clarinets, or oboes and horns, it forms part of a rich and beautiful combination. There is a very telling quality in the upper notes of the bassoon of which composers have made use. Structurally, a bassoon consists of several pieces, the wing, butt, long joints, and bell, and when fitted together, they form a hollow cone of about eight feet long, the air column tapering in diameter from three-sixteenths of an inch at the reed to one and three-quarter inches at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... also were the wisest leaders, as the stark elder Stone- face, and the tall Hall-face, and his father of the unshaken heart, and above all Folk-might, fierce in his wrath, but his anger burning steady and clear, like the oaken butt on the hearth of ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... utter shiftlessness. With square miles of woodland all about them, they had prepared no billets of suitable size. The man had merely cut down two small trees, lopped off their branches, and dragged them into the room. Their butt-ends were placed together on the hearth, whence the logs stretched like the legs of a compass to the two further corners of the room. Amy, in the uncertain light, had nearly stumbled over one of them. As the logs burned away ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... "I hate to butt into a man's meditations," I said, looking him straight in the eye, "but there's a limit to everything, and you've played right up to it. You've had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough more to keep you ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... Nautilus men gave me a simple gun, the butt end of which, made of steel, hollow in the centre, was rather large. It served as a reservoir for compressed air, which a valve, worked by a spring, allowed to escape into a metal tube. A box of projectiles in a groove in the thickness of the butt end contained about twenty of these ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of the school to butt in?" warned Jess. "Then keep quiet, can't you? Much taffy you'll get if Rachel catches us. Your only chance is to lie low, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... an instant; and, almost as he caught sight of it, the rifle went up to his shoulder. For a moment the foresight wavered across the indistinct form, and then his numbed hands grew steady, and, trusting that nothing would check the frost-clogged action, he pressed the trigger. He felt the jar of the butt, a little smoke blew in his eyes, and he could make out nothing on the crest of the ridge. It seemed impossible, however, that he had missed, and the next moment he heard a heavy floundering in the snow among the rocks above. He went up the ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... a small oblong object from his pocket, lighted the end of it with the glowing butt of one of my Corona Coronas, and placed it underneath the car. In a few moments all that remained of my three-thousand-guinea ten—cylinder twelve-seater was one small nut, which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... to the woman, or to me, would be my being beaten to death by five men there on the bank of the Susquehanna? I once saw a man hanged, and though my whole soul cried protest, my mouth cried not. Had it cried, I should most likely have had my skull crushed by the butt of a revolver, for it was the law that the man should hang. And here, in this gypsy group, it was the law that ...
— The Road • Jack London
... lad whose sunburned face already bore the stamp of self-indulgence was stationed behind the butt with Lisle, and the latter was not favorably impressed with his appearance ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... they cooled your fever. They were a great team, and they pulled you through. Seems as if they'd pulled you through a knot-hole, but they were on to their job. And you weren't one bit grateful—seemed to think they had no business to butt in." ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... temperate, scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all society? What ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... on the shoulder of the nearest man and succeeded in winging the fugitive at the first shot, the other going wild. Then, frantic with rage and anxiety, he beat his way through the crowd, hammering mercilessly at heads with the butt of his Colt, and ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... cottage, with a thatched roof and overhanging vines, about which I have serious doubts, and fully expect some day to see Columbine appear on that pistache-green balcony (where the magpie is hanging in a wicker cage), and, taking Arlequin’s hand, disappear into the water-butt while Clown does a header over the half-door, and the cottage itself turns into a gilded coach, with Columbine kissing her hand ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... know about the ghosts," replied the caretaker, "but I really was getting a little bit nervous when you boys arrived. You know," he continued, "that we all feel a little shivery when we butt into ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... close, termination; desinence^, conclusion, finis, finale, period, term, terminus, endpoint, last, omega; extreme, extremity; gable end, butt end, fag-end; tip, nib, point; tail &c (rear) 235; verge &c (edge) 231; tag, peroration; bonne bouche [Fr.]; bottom dollar, tail end, rear guard. consummation, denouement; finish &c (completion) 729; fate; doom, doomsday; crack of doom, day of Judgment, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... cultivation. Yet the growth of trees and bushes was heavy, and Harry decided to keep in the middle of it, as long as it continued northward in the direction in which he was going. He found a narrow path among the trees, and with his hand on a pistol butt he ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and on crossing a large flat creek I observed two new trees or shrubs (they are both) from one I obtained some seeds like beans, and rather a nice tree; the other, when large, at a distance looks like a shea-oak, having a very dark butt and long, drooping, dark-green, narrow leaves, and did not appear to have any seeds at present. Started at 7.17 till twenty-two minutes to 10, nine miles, on a bearing of from 100 to 105 degrees; at 8.18 sighted a large timbered creek, distant one mile, for about seven miles, 360 to 140 ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... and was as little precise in its aim as a hailstorm, but the light foreign pistol which, shot as true as a musket. Weir had learned his trade in Italy, and was a neat craftsman, so I employed him to make me a pistol after my own pattern. The butt was of light, tough wood, and brass-bound, for I did not care to waste money on ornament. The barrel was shorter than the usual, and of the best Spanish metal, and the pan and the lock were set after my own device. Nor was that all, for I became an epicure ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... me with fury. As he did so, I took the spade and held it on a level with my waist, resting the butt end on the ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... many ways butt down upon this, and they are crooked and wide. But thus thou mayest distinguish the right from the wrong, the right only being straight ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... and rushed in every direction, but the other soldier came behind the Prince and knocked him down with the butt of his gun. Then he tied his legs with another rope, and, seeing him thus bound, the crowd of monkeys, which had scattered and fallen over one another in their efforts to escape, came creeping timidly back, and looked on him ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... "I am the butt of everybody's joke," she said, complacently. "That is what makes me so popular. You see, you skinny girls are scarcely noticed. It is me the men-folk ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... mechanism set ready for firing. In the stock of the gun is the cylinder, in which an accurately fitting and hollow piston moves. A powerful helical spring, turned out of a solid bar of steel, is compressed between the inside end of the piston and the upper end of the butt. To set the gun, the catch is pressed down so that its hooked end disengages from the stock, and the barrel is bent downwards on pivot P. This slides the lower end of the compressing lever towards the butt, and a projection on the guide B, working in a groove, ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well- fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly fed one, a pitiful ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... is a lie, a damned, infernal lie!" Max Breuck was maddened now. "Another jest Of your befuddled wits. I know not why I am to be your butt. At my request You'll choose among you one who'll answer for Your most unseasonable mirth. Good-night And good-by,—gentlemen. You'll hear from me." But Franz had caught him at the very door, "It is no lie, Max Breuck, and for your plight I am to ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... though deserted, made a gallant stand. The Life Guards attacked them on the right, the Blues on the left; but the Somersetshire clowns, with their scythes and the butt ends of their muskets, faced the royal horse like old soldiers. Oglethorpe made a vigorous attempt to break them and was manfully repulsed. Sarsfield, a brave Irish officer, whose name afterwards obtained a melancholy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... watching the man shudder and close his eyes, watching the blood seep out along a crooked seam, then gush over the face and fine, black hair and silken mustache. A bloody flood streamed there while he watched. Then Fenn wiped dry the butt of his revolver. He felt of the gash in the forehead, and found that the bone was not crushed. He was sober, and an unnatural calm was upon his brain. He could feel the tears in his eyes. He stood looking at the face ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... walked, perhaps, six miles, when again I saw the red speck ahead of me. It was the post-boy—a post-boy returning on foot, of all miracles. He came straight up to meet me, and then stood in the road, barring my path, and tapping his riding-boot with the butt of his whip—a handsome young fellow, well proportioned ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... man, stamping the butt of his rod in the water. "There, I've done with you both. You are a pair of young ravens, sons of the old ravens, who have their nests up on the stony cliffs, and you'll both grow up to be as bad and bitter as your fathers, and take to punching out the young lambs' eyes with your beaks. ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... faith in prayer was not unmixed with a desire for action of a very vigorous and immediate variety, seized an old rifle hung from a nail on the wall. She had no idea whether there were any loads in it, but she had made up her mind to use the butt-end on the first man who entered the room. In the meantime, the axe had crashed through one of the thick, hardwood panels, making a slit broad enough ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... 'scape? How cam'st thou hither? swear by this bottle how thou cam'st hither—I escaped upon a butt of sack, which the sailors heaved overboard, by this bottle! which I made of the bark of a tree, with mine own hands, since I ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... of the arrow shot into its place appointed or intended, in the shooting of this arrow of pride there be divers purposings and appointings. For the proud man himself hath no certain purpose or appointment at any mark, butt, or prick upon earth, at which he determineth to shoot and there to stick and tarry. But ever he shooteth as children do, who love to shoot up cop-high, to see how high their arrow can fly up. But now doth the devil intend and appoint a certain mark, surely set in a place into which he ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... still keep harping on it. The kitchen hearth had an old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness, far within which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree, with the moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends. It was now half an hour beyond dusk. The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks, rendered more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... leader of the little company of Irish Home Rulers that had appeared in Parliament in the early '70's was Isaac Butt. His repeated attempts to have the subject considered were as often rejected with derision. In his own party he was opposed by an element which desired to resort to aggressive measures to compel the English to heed Ireland's demand for local self-government. Prominent in ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... snouts of the multitude, and grunts and squeals were loud and frequent as a frisky party of younglings in their play would heedlessly bump up against some short-tempered old boar, who in his turn would angrily butt a too venturesome rival in the wind and send him, expostulating noisily, down ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... was burnt, As I too have learnt; But, as you will read, She jumped into the water-butt before you could count, ONE, TWO, ...
— The Nine Lives of A Cat - A Tale of Wonder • Charles Bennett
... was named Guayaquerita, so they told me. 'Not for me,' says I. 'It'll be little old Hilldale or Tompkinsville or Cherry Tree Corners when I speak of it. It's a clear case where Spelling Reform ought to butt ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... leaving on the table the letter of sale which he had signed. In a moment, Mathias de Gorne had seen the advantage which he could take of my slip: he could keep his property, keep his wife ... and keep the money. Quick as lightning, he tucked away the paper, hit me over the head with the butt-end of his gun, threw the gun on the floor and seized me by the throat with both hands. He had reckoned without his host. I was the stronger of the two; and after a sharp but short struggle, I mastered him and tied him up with a cord which I found lying in a corner ... Mr. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... only present at the murder of Noonan; now, was it not you who knocked down the unfortunate man with the butt-end of a blunderbuss?—Yes, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... possessed of an idea that made him the butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone. Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one cause—a shortness ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... ire he rose to mete out justice to this highwayman. Had the butt of his whip hit Shelby he would have seen more stars than twinkled overhead. But it didn't. It was caught in one hand, given a dexterous twist and sent flying into the road as Shelby ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... "I didn't butt in," said Charlotte. "I turned round an' come straight home. An' the next day they rode by, as budge as you please, she with the baby in her lap. Baby had on a nice white coat. I didn't go ag'in. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... was diving to the right, breaking his fall with the butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly toward the cover of a rock, and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was wrong. The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the ravine, what he had smelled had been lubricating oil and petrol, and the leaves ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... he said, with his eyes on Mosby, and slightly accenting the pronoun with a tap of his revolver butt on the bar. "Ye don't ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... him, even as he pushed his jacket back to reveal the butt of his own weapon. He made no attempt to ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of the king. This made me impatient, and by degrees deprived me of my natural gaiety. One day when the king was with me, he perceived my want of spirits. "What ails you?" said be, with the greatest solicitude. "What ails me!" replied I, "I wish I were dead, rather than see myself the butt of all the scandal of the foul-mouthed gossips of your court." The king, suspecting the confidence I was about to repose in him, was sorry he had asked for it, and was silent. He began to play a tattoo with his fingers on the chimney-piece. At this ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... up the bank of the stream toward a huge sycamore that leaned lovingly over the water. An ancient wild grape vine, its butt four inches through and its roots fairly in the water, had a strangle-hold upon this decrepit forest monarch, its tendrils reaching the sycamore's ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... of livin', how I do gabble! My grandmarm used to say my tongue was loose at both ends and hung in the middle, and I guess she wa'n't fur off the course. Good-by. Take care of yourself. You can put what's left of that mock mince pie on the top shelf in the butt'ry and you'd better heave a dish towel or sunthin' over it to keep the ants out. There's more ants in this house than there is dollars, a good sight. Betsy B., she's got a plan for keepin' of 'em out by puttin' sassers of brimstone round the shelves, but I told her, s' I, 'THEM ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... flotilla—that from Lumberton—was a hilarious start indeed. Poor Prettyman Sweet was the butt of everybody's laughter. The glare of rage he threw now and then at the ridiculous dog in the bow of the Duchess sent the boys into ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... take refuge in a squirrel-hole in a tree. Hark! Is that the hound, or doth expectation mock the eager ear? With open mouths and bated breaths we listen. Yes, it is old "Singer;" he is bringing the fox over the top of the range toward Butt End, the Ultima Thule of the hunters' tramps in this section. In a moment or two the dog is lost to hearing again. We wait for his second turn; then ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... to shoot a cigarette from a lady's lips. One could see that he was entire master of the rifle, and a trick which always brought rounds of applause was the hitting of a target while standing with his back to it, simply by the aid of a mirror held at the butt ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... Diomede slept, "their spears were driven into the ground erect on the spikes of the butts" (X. 153). Aristotle mentions that this was still the usage of the Illyrians in his day. [Footnote: Poctica, 25.] Though the word for the spike in the butt (sauroter) does not elsewhere occur in the Iliad, the practice of sticking the spears erect in the ground during a truce is mentioned in III. 135: "They lean upon their shields" (clearly large high shields), "and the tall spears are planted by their sides." No butt-spikes have been found in ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... and seventh centuries, but never, to my knowledge, with any of a later age. They may, in fact, be considered as characteristic appendages, or accompanying features, to the ecclesiastical structures of those times. There is one at Rathmichael, near Dublin, where there is the butt of a round tower. I have seen many of them in various states of preservation, and I think all were about 4 feet both in breadth and height. They were, however, never arched, but roofed with large flags, laid horizontally, and their upper surface ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... his hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly as if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the soldier assigned to their home bang on the door with the butt of his rifle, fled to the kitchen, where she stood listening and watching. She nearly cried out when the soldier thrust the bayonet of his rifle at her father, and all the resentment of her race at such injustice rose ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... The sail which they are now just hoisting is, in shape, like a right-angled triangle, with a parallelogram below its base; the hypothenuse or head of the sail is secured to a yard, like an enormous fishing-rod; the halyards are secured to it about a third of the way from the butt-end, and it is hoisted close up to the head of the mast. A tackle brings down the lower end of the yard to the deck, and serves to balance the lofty tapering point, while the sheet is secured to the lower after-corner of the sail. Though many of the smaller dhows ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... company had contented themselves with going in "domino." At the Circolo ball a very large proportion of the dancers were in costume. The Conte Leandro Lombardoni,—lady-killer, Don Juan, and poet, whose fortunes and misfortunes in these characters had made him the butt of the entire society, and had perhaps contributed, together with his well- known extraordinarily pronounced propensity for cramming himself with pastry, to give him the pale, puffed, pasty face, swelling around a pair of pale fish-like eyes, that distinguished him,—the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... shells that burst while I was there, but likewise from those of the French. One of the largest of their shells bursted within nine or ten yards of me: there was a single rock close by, about the size of a butt; and I got instant shelter under it in time to avoid the fury of the shell. Where it burst the earth was torn in such a manner that two or three butts might easily have gone into the hole it made, and it threw great quantities of stones and dirt to a considerable distance. Three shot ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... falls in love with a widow who has already promised her hand to a man infinitely Ralph's superior. Ralph, however, unable to understand why she should not want him, persists in his wooing. She makes him the butt of her jokes, and he finds himself in ridiculous positions. The comedy amuses us in this way until her lover returns and marries her. The characters of the play, which is written in rime, are of the English ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... knew no other way of passing his life than in dangling about women. He was generally tolerated as a butt, and being impervious to contempt, supposed that his fascinations procured him immunity. He did—it must be reckoned the first of his two accomplishments—he did know a pretty woman from a plain one, and therefore as soon as he knew Alison much resorted to her. His other accomplishment ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... of blue light were moving. And a man had died. He lay on the rock, his flesh blackened jelly, with a rope of glowing light running from the metal of his gun butt to the metal buttons on ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... we speak of the independence of the country? We mean something beyond price, something that is the indispensable condition of true manhood in any country, something without which a country is poor in the present and a butt for the world's scorn in the future. There are men, or things that look like men, who say that as long as we put money in our purse, nothing else counts. How that class of men must have laughed some centuries ago at a fool ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... him as much out of sight as possible, as a wool-gathering[26] and discreditable member of the family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately passed him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept him as a butt for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles. If, as was his usual ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... criticism, playful and otherwise, of others. There are people in whom the adversely critical spirit is so highly developed that they find it hard to praise any one or to hear any one praised—their criticism leaps to the surface in one way or another, in the sneer, in the "butt," in the joke, in the gibe, in the openly expressed attack. This way of being superior may be direct and open, more often it is disguised. Many a woman (and man) who denounces the sinner receives from her contemplation of that sinner the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... fly-fishing is impossible, he has become a stout-hearted apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most singular. It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line unbelievably ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... saw, too, the crouching figure of a native, armed with a gun, in the shadow of the undergrowth. Without hesitation the brave fellow rushed out, fell upon the native before he could dart away, wrenched the gun from him, and brained him with the butt. A cry of the utmost horror rang out upon the air, and, uttering it, another native bounded out from a hiding-place close to where the first had been killed, and flew zigzagging across the open, where Cedric was. ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... ill-luck which one can bear, not indeed without grumbling, but without rancour. The man who is unlucky to experience these things at least has the consolation of other people's sympathy; but the man who is the butt of inanimate things has no one's sympathy. We may be on a motor bus which overturns and nobody will say that it is our fault, but if our collar deliberately and maliciously squeaks, everybody will say that we ought to buy ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... heavy black belt about his waist. Attached to the belt were at least a dozen weapons: several grenades, a pistol, another pistol with a flaring muzzle, a long knife, a glassy looking tube fitted to a pistol-butt, and a blue-black ugly thing which was ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... to remove it. The doctor hinted that the heart clasped the bit by strong muscular exertion, with a view to his own private use; but this being speculative merely, I only mention the fact. As he was now nearing the water rapidly, a rope was slipped round the butt of the helm, a quick turn made around a stiff sapling on the bank of the river, and all hands made fast to the rope. At this moment, just as they were all braced, the alligator made his plunge into the water, and the sapling, I don't remember ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... me; called me into his dining-room, locked the doors, then ordered me to pull off my shirt. I told him no, sir, I wouldn't; right away he went and got the cowhide, and gave me about twenty over my head with the butt. He tore my shirt off, after I would not pull it off; he ordered me to cross my hands. I didn't do that. After I wouldn't do that he went and got his gun. and broke the breech of that over my head. He then seized up the fire-tongs and struck me over the head ever so often. The next thing he took ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... only to Galloway folk of the ancient time, in the word "cuif." It conveys at once the ideas of inefficiency and folly, of simplicity and the ignorance of it. The cuif is a feckless person of the male sex, who is a recognized butt for a whole neighbourhood ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... myself, I lifted my head slyly up, and with horror I beheld that the wolf had ate his way into the horse's body; it was not long before he had fairly forced himself into it, when I took my advantage, and fell upon him with the butt-end of my whip. This unexpected attack in his rear frightened him so much, that he leaped forward with all his might; the horse's carcass dropped on the ground; but in his place the wolf was in harness, and I on my part whipping him continually, we both arrived ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... a moment turned faint and dizzy, then, setting the butt of his rifle on to the stone, he leaned upon the barrel till his brain cleared. It was well for him that he had not known what lay beneath when, but now, he thrust his foot into vacancy, for then his senses ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... and of strife which must have reached even this hallowed spot, had fled into the more remote portions of the palace, or mayhap had even joined the throngs in the Forum, on the principle that 'tis better to form an unit in an angry crowd, rather than to be its butt. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... look of terrified anxiety leapt into Vasilovich's eyes as the professor produced the handsome little weapon; but the placid manner of the latter as he tendered the pistol for examination seemed to reassure him, and grasping the butt, he looked ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... ye, where didst thou purchase that rich Canary we drank to-day? Tell me, that I may adore the Spigot, and sacrifice to the Butt: the Juice was divine, into which I must dip my Rosary, and then bless all things that I would have bold ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... democracy of Leigh Hunt, the unhappy lapse of Hazlitt, the drunkenness of Lamb. Assumptions so open to ridicule, and so disparaging to far abler men, told as disadvantageously upon his fame as upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... in bed, and lights out, than I was favoured with all sorts of missiles pitched over the partitions on either side with extraordinary accuracy. A book from Langrish hit me on the ear, and a wet sponge from Trimble moistened my cheek. And when I sought shelter under the sheets, the butt-end of a fishing-rod in the ribs drew me from my hiding-place, and a clever cast with a hooked pin by Langrish relieved me of my outer covering altogether. The footsteps of the monitor on duty deprived me of the privilege of making an audible ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... moved by something that was not myself, I gradually got the gun into position, grasping it firmly and pressing the butt home, while I carefully sighted the monster, wondering a little what the consequences would be if I missed, whether I should be attacked, and whether I should have time to get away. But directly after every sense was concentrated ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,—to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,—I leave the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the court-fool was generally not a wit, but a naive blockhead, who believed all that was said, and was therefore a butt for jests. He only placed a letter in Cercas' hand, and disappeared. When Cercas had read the letter, she changed colour and seemed to become a different being. Overcome with rage, she ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... hunting on the 23d of February, when a pack of about twenty wolves attacked him. He jumped upon a big rock, which was soon surrounded, and there he fought the savage beasts off with the butt of his gun until he got a sure shot, when he killed one, and while the others fought over and devoured the carcass, he made the best of the opportunity to get back into camp. It was a most fortunate escape, as he ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... out, and drives the butt of his spear into the earth, and throws himself into the ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... him and went on, but none of them noticed that Tom Ross, who was last, turned softly aside from the path, and then swung the butt of his rifle with all his might. But all heard the impact and the sound of a fall, and, as they whirled around, ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rude and offensive. Those who wished to go to her house were forced to put up with Ferdishenko. Possibly the latter was not mistaken in imagining that he was received simply in order to annoy Totski, who disliked him extremely. Gania also was often made the butt of the jester's sarcasms, who used this method of keeping in ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... kindly touch—has become an uncourteous monster of 35 heads and 3 appendices—I see no early end of it. The British Foreign Office has a lot of lawyers in its great back offices. They and our lawyers will now butt and rebut as long as a goat of them is left alive on either side. The two governments—the two human, kindly groups—have retired: they don't touch, on this matter, now. The lawyers will have the time of their lives, each smelling ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... noon arrived, Jack stopped short. The largest tree thus far encountered confronted them. Just what size butt it had I should be afraid to say, for fear I might not be believed, but it ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... of the farm-houses, whose owner, a Pennsylvanian, has made himself a most beautiful place in a little valley hidden by the mountains which butt on the lake, I saw the culture of silk going on in that way in which only, as I believe, it can be made successful in California. He had planted about twenty-five hundred mulberry-trees, built himself an inexpensive but ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... wine-cask; he lives to keep his body well soaked—that it may be the nicer, or the nastier for the worms. Cosmo, my son, don't you learn to drown your soul in your body, like the poor Duke of Clarence in the wine-butt." ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... over the partitions on either side with extraordinary accuracy. A book from Langrish hit me on the ear, and a wet sponge from Trimble moistened my cheek. And when I sought shelter under the sheets, the butt-end of a fishing-rod in the ribs drew me from my hiding-place, and a clever cast with a hooked pin by Langrish relieved me of my outer covering altogether. The footsteps of the monitor on duty deprived me of the privilege of ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... were completely riddled. A few of the old soldiers opposed them, and were wounded; but it fortunately happened that they were, to an inconceivable degree, ignorant of the right use of firearms—holding their muskets in their hands when they discharged them, without allowing the butt-end to rest against their shoulders or any part of their bodies. This fact accounts for the comparatively little mischief they did in proportion to the quantity of ammunition ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... exploring his pockets for other lethal weapons and finding nothing but three loaded clips ready to be inserted in the hollow butt of the pistol already confiscated. "Now what 'm I going to do with you, you blame' ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... The heavy butt of the weapon landed plumb in the middle of the German's forehead. He had opened his mouth to shout, but no sound came forth. The rifle fell from his hands and he went ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... meaning, apparent only to Galloway folk of the ancient time, in the word "cuif." It conveys at once the ideas of inefficiency and folly, of simplicity and the ignorance of it. The cuif is a feckless person of the male sex, who is a recognized butt for a whole neighbourhood to sharpen ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the end of a long ilex-avenue, and was the butt for all the slings and arrows of the day,—poor helpless State, blinded ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... began to probe with the end of a staff among the ivy. For some time he was met by the solid ground, but presently the butt of the staff went through suddenly, pitching him on his head, amidst a ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... to benefit by it couldn't take," he said. "The few who have decided that a real miracle occurred have also decided that I'm in league with the devil, and that witches are for burning. Mostly Witch is the butt of every joke that can be dreamed up by every cub reporter in the nation. Saxton has started laying the groundwork for making Witch a political issue. There is ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... intentions towards you, when the arrival of the Moors happened in time to frustrate them. Should he, however, learn that you are at Granada, where your presence may throw invincible impediments in his way, the knowledge would be perhaps attended with disastrous results. I am a poor man, a butt to sustain my master's ill humors, but I will not so far dishonor my feelings as to permit the possibility of your being exposed a second time to the dreaded manoeuvres of Gomez Arias. Fly, lady, ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... logic-jargon tir'd, An' in the depth of science mir'd, To common sense they now appeal, What wives and wabsters see and feel. But, hark ye, friend! I charge you strictly Peruse them, an' return them quickly, For now I'm grown sae cursed douce I pray and ponder butt the house, My shins, my lane, I there sit roastin', Perusing Bunyan, Brown, an' Boston; Till by an' by, if I haud on, I'll grunt a real gospel groan: Already I begin to try it, To cast my e'en up like ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... favourable," and he arranges his defences, not forgetting to lay in a large stock of water. The savages return in force, and then—this is most important—at the most thirsty moment of the siege it is discovered that the water is all gone! Generally a stray arrow has pierced the water-butt, but in Masterman Ready the insufferable Tommy has played the fool with it. (He would.) This is the Hero's great opportunity. He ventures to the spring to get more water, and returns with it—wounded. Barely have the castaways wetted their lips with the precious fluid when the attack breaks out ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. At last I ventured a home thrust. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box—just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was NOT altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the "peculiar shape of THAT box—,"and, as I spoke the words, I smiled knowingly, winked, and touched him gently ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... was returned; and ere the smoke rose a cheer rang through the ravine, and Riley fell with a swoop on the intrenchments. With bayonet and butt of musket, the Second and Seventh drove the enemy from his guns, leaping into his camp and slaughtering all before them. Up rushed Smith's own brigade on the left, driving a party of Mexicans before them, and charging with the bayonet straight at Torrejon's cavalry, which was drawn ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... hand closed on the fat wrist of the gambler. His other hand tore the revolver away from the slack grasp. The gun rose and fell. Miller went into unconsciousness without even a groan. The corrugated butt of the gun had ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... order to borrow money from the merchants of that city, he was too profligate to remain. He came back with Charles II., and was Master of the Revels, or King's Jester, as the court considered him, though without any regular appointment, during his life: the butt, at once, and the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... shrewd clout behind the ear with the butt of the dog whip stretched the animal in the snow, quivering softly, a yellow slaver ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... them; and frankly gave her notice that, as his utmost efforts could scarcely maintain their existing family, if she ventured to present him with any more, either single, or twins, or triplets, or otherwise, he would most assuredly drown him, or her, or them in the water-butt, and take ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... couple of forty-foot scaffolding poles, stoutly bound and corded together, the base of one to the top of the other, so that they stood at right angles. Five or six feet of the butt of the horizontal one was projected beyond its lashings, and to this three lengths of rope were fastened, and trailed long ends in the dust as the structure was held aloft and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... to use the most scientific method. We have gone at the matter of butting through evil without thinking enough. Less butting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not try any longer to butt a whole planet when we try to keep one man ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby, or on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, for—either because the flour ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... acts as the condition on which their success in life depends, whether in war, love, hunting, or any other employment. These "medicines," as they are called in that country, which are usually communicated in dreams, are often absurd enough. Some Indians will strike the butt of the pipe against the ground every time they smoke; others will insist that everything they say shall be interpreted by contraries; and Shaw once met an old man who conceived that all would be lost ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... LAVARCHAM. We are lonely women. What is it you're wanting in the blackness of the night? NAISI. We met a young girl in the woods who told us we might shelter this place if the rivers rose on the pathways and the floods gathered from the butt of the hills. [Old Woman clasps her ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... Axel Larson!' I cried chokingly, as I thought of all the insults he had heaped upon her in her presence, all the sneers and vile jocosities of which she had been the butt behind her back, in return for the care she had lavished upon his comfort, for her pinching to make both ends meet without the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... butt into a man's meditations," I said, looking him straight in the eye, "but there's a limit to everything, and you've played right up to it. You've had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you've been given ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... twelve sons in double military rank, "I fought under good King Henriot, and can play at sword and pistol as well as the worthy 'ligueurs';" and shaking his head he leaned against a post, his knotty staff between his crossed legs, his hands clasped on its thick butt-end, and his white, bearded chin resting on his hands. Then, half closing his eyes, he appeared lost in recollections of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... conveyed to the colonies only at intervals: some in the spirit of hostility, and others because they were idle, delighted to depict the enthusiastic Maconochie as the subject of delusion, and the butt of ridicule among those he reformed; but the climax ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... history of the Conquest, we must doubt the history of all the miracles of the Church, for all of them rest on the like untenable grounds. I did not wonder at finding the country abounding in unbelief. Now that the fires of the Inquisition have ceased to burn, the priesthood are made the butt and laughing-stock of those who are educated. Still, the national mind does not run toward the pure Gospel, which is here unknown and prohibited, but to infidelity and socialism. A sincere Protestant can have ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... her course and headed for the fence between the orchard and hen house, near the spot where Edith was standing. She had placed her right foot on the second board of the fence just ready to jump, when Jerry arrived just in time to take advantage of the opportunity presented. With one strong butt he hoisted her clear of the fence, landing her on all fours on the soft, plowed ground on the other side. She jumped up quickly, spitting out a mouthful of the soft earth she had scooped up. Bob and Edith were ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... he carried in a closet partly filled with rubbish. Then he flashed his light around carefully. Adam Adams got down out of sight and placed his hand on the butt of his pistol. He was resolved to take no more ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... ye're no just a here-a-wa man, by your tongue," said she; "an', if I'm no mista'en, ye've seen better days; for, when I was bringin butt your wet claes to get them dried, though your bit jacket an' your breeks were just corduroy, I couldna help noticin that there is no a bit bonnier linen inowre our door than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... two mirrors attached to the gun by a metal frame in such manner that one mirror is above the range of vision and reflects the image to be fired at upon the other mirror below the stock or butt of the gun. The attachment enables the soldier sitting in a trench or shelter to accurately aim his gun and conveniently shoot while his head is kept below the safety line, or top of the parapet, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... hate you all!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I can understand Jimmy, because he likes me to drive him all the time, but you others, who aren't regular clients at all, why you should butt in and try to spoil my chances, I can't think. Mr. Wingate is just my conception of the ideal fare—generous, affable, and with trans-Atlantic notions about tips. I shall send you my card, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mind, I'll butt in a moment," he said. "How are you, Mallett? How are you?" giving Grandcourt an impertinent look; and added: "Do you, by any chance, expect your friend Dysart in ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... he, a colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. He was a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took measures [with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumour went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to the Staff Corps had many and varied trials to endure. However, a regiment had just as much right to its own ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... rebounding lock, walnut pistol-grip stock, patent fore end, rubber butt, and pistol-grip cap, nickel frame, choke-bored, twist-steel barrel. 12 or ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 39, August 5, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of oak or other hard wood. Fig. 1 represents it opened for use; in Fig. 2 it is closed for transportation. A is a stout canvas, forming the back and seat; b, b, b are iron butt-hinges; c, c are leather straps, one inch and a quarter wide, forming the arms; d is an iron rod, with nut ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... into the casemates. The Lackawanna then kept away, making a circuit to ram again. She had her stem cut and crushed from three feet above the water-line to five below, causing some leakage, and the Monongahela had her iron prow carried away and the butt ends of the planking started on both bows; but the only damage caused to the Tennessee, protected by her sponsons, was a leak at the rate of about six inches an hour. The flag-ship now approached to ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... to have an intuitive perception that danger was approaching, for it turned abruptly round just as the missile left the seaman's hand, and received the butt with full force close to ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... measured at the wall-plate, averaged about 19 ft. for the 141/2-ft. circular sewer and 191/2 ft. for the 15-ft. sewer. The arch timber segments in the cross-section were 10 by 12-in. North Carolina pine of good grade, with 2 in. off the butt for a bearing to take up the thrust. They were set 5 ft. apart on centers, and rested on 6 by 12-in. wall-plates of the same material as noted above. The ultimate strength of this material, across the grain, when dry and in good condition, as given by the United States ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... recall only a remembrance of smoke, red flashes, yells, and a confusion of men striking and thrusting. A big Hessian caught me a smart thrust in the left leg—no great hurt. Another with his butt pretty nearly broke my left arm, as I put it up to save my head. I ran him through, and felt ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... proper functionary the flour was obtained, and the raisins; the beef-fat, or "slush," from Old Coffee; and the requisite supply of water from the scuttle-butt. I then went among the various cooks, to compare their receipts for making "duffs:" and having well weighed them all, and gathered from each a choice item to make an original receipt of my own, with due deliberation and solemnity I proceeded to business. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... came a train bearing baskets loaded with the fruit, in its different degrees of perfection and of every shade of color. Youths holding staves topped with miniature representations of the various utensils known in the culture of the grape, such as the laborer with the tub on his back, the butt, and the vessel that first receives the flowing juice, followed. A great number of men, who brought forward the forge that is used to prepare the tools, closed this part of the exhibition. The song and the dance again succeeded, when the whole disappeared at a signal given by ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... corral ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls, Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them. Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... Kirstie and the credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so; and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides of the grave. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fishing in the river Irvine, attended by a boy who carried his basket, when some English soldiers, belonging to the garrison of Ayr meeting him, insisted on seizing his trout. A fray took place, and Wallace killed the foremost Englishman with a blow from the butt of his fishing-rod, took his sword, and put ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... on the cob five minutes. Cold-dip. Cut the corn from the cob, cutting from tip to butt end. Add the corn to the other vegetables. Add no water. Pack the mixed vegetables into clean glass jars; add one level teaspoonful of salt to every jar; partially seal; cook one hour and a half in wash-boiler or other homemade outfit. ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... want to buy me a tombstone, an' I don't want it. I want the money. Here, stop it! Dye hear?" The words were wrung from him by the action of the president, who, after eyeing him doubtfully during his remarks, suddenly prodded him with the butt-end of one of the property spears which leaned against his chair. The solidity of Mr. Blows was unmistakable, and with a sudden resumption of dignity the official seated himself and ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... to the door. Pete Reeve darted past him with noiseless steps and paused a moment at the threshold of the jail. Plainly he was ready for fight or flight, and his right hand was toying constantly with the holstered butt of his gun. Bull ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to draw—would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she, would find some more chivalrous ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Bourbons, and in which he indulged as freely after he became the Minister of Louis XVIII. as when he was the Minister of Bonaparte. It was universally known that in his conversation the Bourbons were the perpetual butt for his sarcasms, that he never mentioned them but in terms of disparagement, and that he represented them as unworthy of governing France. Everybody must have been aware that Fouche, in his heart, favoured ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Gan. Butt I confes it, & the sorcerrer That made it I did murder conynglye, And at her deathe had I recompast it, I had beene kynge of Fraunce. Thys noble knave Was pryvie ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... bruised body; a fellow sufferer in the foc'sle of a dreaded ship, mere dirt beneath the officers' feet. Such a fall! Keenly as I had disliked the man yesterday, to-day I was sorry for him. The more sorry because I felt that the Jocose Swede had come near having me as the butt of his little joke, instead ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... employee good, or make him work three times as hard for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural counties, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... no reply, but began to laugh softly, as though pleased at the curious turn which the conversation was taking; and Prasville felt a vague misgiving at observing that fit of merriment. He grasped the butt-end of his revolver and wondered whether he ought not to ring ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... fawn-coloured Kerman woollen-stuff, fell in folds over the large red leather boots in which his legs were cased: by his side hung a crooked scymetar in a black leather scabbard, and from the holsters of his saddle peeped out the butt ends of a pair of pistols; weapons of which I then knew not the use, any more than of the matchlock which was slung at his back. He was mounted on a powerful but jaded horse, and appeared to have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... has decided in favour of one of his sons, the conqueror visits the hut in which his father's body lies in state. He approaches the corpse, and standing by its side, he sticks the butt-end of his spear in the ground, and leaves it thus fixed near the right hand of the dead king. This is ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... present my friends!" so the driver he shook hands with us and says, "Any friend of Billy's on your meal ticket! Where you crowd of sand skinners headed for?" So, after some talk, he understood. "You want a town," says he. "Well," p'inting with the butt of his whip, "eighteen miles over yonder you'll find your place, if you're looking to make the sidewalks stand perpendicular; and twenty mile over there, if you want to find some of the nicest people outdoors. Pretty girls there, bet cher life. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... explained to me that she was a free-lover; she told me all about free love. I told her I didn't believe in it, but you know, Sadie, when Jennie believed in anything, she would stand by it and act on it. So I felt certain it wouldn't do any good for me to butt in." ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... made. To this practice, at least, I am safe in attributing the rarity, if not the positive absence, with the Indian, of that unhappy condition of bow-leggedness, of not too slight prevalence with us, and which renders its victim often a butt for not very charitable or ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... them, and the day was lost. Tilly fled, wounded, and narrowly escaped capture. A captain in the Swedish army, who was called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol. A staff officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief. Twilight fell upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead, two-thirds of them the flower of the Emperor's army. Blood-stained and smoke-begrimed, ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... the explosion had cleared away I saw Lieverle lying outstretched at the foot of the rock, and the woman fainting in the arms of the young man. Sperver, pale with concentrated rage and excitement, and eyeing the young baron darkly, dropped the butt of his gun to the ground, his features discomposed, and his eyes half-hid in ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... grand (or, at worst, au petit) serieux. The fun—and there were some very pleasant touches—was not so much the fun of a huge and preposterous joke, but rather the humour of character or incidental detail. The part of Lord Glandeville, who might have been made the most ridiculous butt of imposture, was treated quite solemnly. Indeed, our sympathies were provoked for a man whose finest instincts had been trifled with; who had been suffered to fall in love with the poet-soul of a girl only to find that she was the tool of a gang of rogues. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... the place; and, going to my cabin door, he slipped a wedge under it, serving the other doors around the big cabin in the same way. The success seemed to please him; he chuckled softly, and came again to the ladder, where, with a quick motion, Dan brought his pistol-butt (for I had armed him) full upon the fellow's forehead, and he went down like a dead thing at the foot of ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Naliele on the 13th of August, and, when proceeding along the shore at midday, a hippopotamus struck the canoe with her forehead, lifting one half of it quite out of the water, so as nearly to overturn it. The force of the butt she gave tilted Mashauana out into the river; the rest of us sprang to the shore, which was only about ten yards off. Glancing back, I saw her come to the surface a short way off, and look to the canoe, as if to see if she had done much mischief. It was a female, whose young one had been ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... comfort of motion to the occupant; and the improvement consists in securing the inner ends of the spokes to rim plates, to form a fixed and solid connection therewith, the rim plates being loosely secured to the butt flanges and box of the hub, so that it is free to move in a vertical plane, but prevented from moving laterally and limited in its vertical movement by an elastic packing interposed between the inner ends of the spokes ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... elder sister living in the city, an old maid who had withdrawn from the world, and in happier times had been the butt of the family's sarcasms. She did nothing all day but go to church, say her prayers, and caress her cat; and whenever she and her cronies came together they would gossip and abuse the younger generation, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the costard with the hilts of thy sword, and then throw him in the malmsey-butt in ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sooner than his huge wolf-dog, which never left his side. It was only on the morning of the third day, that we discovered something calculated to diminish our confidence in our new comrade. This was a number of lines and crosses upon the butt of his rifle, which gave us a new and not very favourable insight into the man's character. These lines and crosses came after certain words rudely scratched with a knife-point, and formed a sort of list, of which the following ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... thought, known but one enthusiasm, retain in this breast of iron a spot however secret, however small, which any woman, least of all his daughter, could reach? Never! I am the prey of frenzy or the butt of devils. Yet only the inhabitants of a more celestial sphere brighten around me when I think of those half-raised eyes, those delicately parted lips, so devoid of guile, that innocent bearing, and the divine tenderness, mingled with strength, by which she commands ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Singularly disposed, he ever after treated these gifts with virulent ridicule, and never was heard to utter any serious remarks concerning this transaction. The clairvoyant after this event was the butt of his satire and jests, and received them without revenge so long as Henry remained, which was about five years—a reckless, abandoned, evil-minded person, eventually severed by that same power which he strove incessantly to ridicule. All these strange operations ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... was ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up the hollow butt. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... then stopped whirring for half an hour and I sat and ate my frugal meal, listening eagerly to the talk going on about me. Sometimes the girls made me the butt of their jests, for they were envious of me, because of my easy job, and hinted that I was not getting this snap for nothing. All of this I did not in the least understand, for I was not much ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... beard against grey beard for a million!'—and fired: I slapped at him, and I believe hit him, for he staggered; but rallied again, and was clearing the bank between him and me, when Pugh ran up, and with the butt end of his firelock knocked him down again, jumped after him, and battered his brains out, just as he was opening a clasp knife to defend himself.'"—The ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... follow his comrades. He had his pistol in his hand. He went noisily, muttering oaths, feeling that something was wrong but not being able to divine exactly what. Marteau heard him coming. He put the candle down, concealed himself and, as the man came, struck him heavily over the head with the butt of his remaining pistol. He fell like a log. Leaving the candle where it was, the young officer, dispossessing his victim of his pistols, entered the hall and, instead of entering the great room by the door by which he had left it, ran along the hall to the main entrance and thus ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of the Lord and of Gideon!" shouted Gifted Gilfillan, nothing daunted. And he was proceeding to lay about him stoutly, when the pedlar, snatching a musket, felled him to the ground with the butt. The scattered Whig party hurried up to support their leader. In the scuffle, Edward's horse was shot, and he himself somewhat bruised in falling. Whereupon some of the Highlanders took him by the arms, and half-supported, half-carried ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Bucephalus to butt the door down, however, as one of the men with Rollins had been captured, and was forced to open ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... down, a tumbling flurry of wings, like Satan's fall from Heaven. When I ran out to possess myself of his Satanic body he was only wounded, however, and was ready to show fight. Then I saw red again. I clubbed him with the gun-butt, going at him like fury. I was moist with perspiration when I got through with him. He was a monster. I nailed him with his wings out, on the bunk-house wall, and Olie shouted and called Dinky-Dunk when they came back from rounding up the horses, which ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... the trees,—then the rustling and tugging of the creatures, in getting the fallen trees out of the water,—and, finally, the surging and splashing with which they came swimming towards the ground-work of the dam, with the butt end of those trees in their mouths. The line of the dam they had begun, passed with a curve up stream in the middle, so as to give it more strength to resist the current; across the low-water bed of the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... say she hasn't left." He rapped sharply on the door with the butt of his stun gun. "Miss Ravenhurst! Is there anything ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... lightning, whose powerful glare was truly awful. Our people told us, that these formidable animals frequently upset canoes in the river, when every one in them was sure to perish. These came so close to us, that we could reach them with the butt-end of a gun. When I fired at the first, which I must have hit, every one of them came to the surface of the water, and pursued us so fast over to the north bank, that it was with the greatest difficulty imaginable we could keep before them. Having fired a second time, the report of my gun was followed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... of the other. But if horror was the first thing they felt, amazement was the next. For Dan Barry sat bolt erect in his chair, staring in an astonishment too great for words. His right hand hung poised and moveless just above the butt of his gun; his whole posture was that of one in the midst of an action, suspended there, frozen to stone. They waited for that poised hand to drop, for the slender fingers to clutch the butt of the gun, for the convulsive jerk that would bring out the gleaming barrel, the explosion, ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... of a Hoplite.—The hoplites have donned their armor. Now they assume their offensive weapons. Every man has a lance and a sword. The LANCE is a stout weapon with a solid wooden butt, about six feet long in all. It is really too heavy to use as a javelin. It is most effective as a pike thrust fairly into a foeman's face, or past his shield into a weak spot in his cuirass. The sword is usually kept as a reserve weapon in case the lance gets broken. It is not ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... soldier; but he is made too good for this world and somewhat too innocent, too transparently a child of nature. Warrington, with all his sense and honesty, is rough; Pendennis is a bit of a puppy; Clive Newcome is not much of a hero; and as for Dobbin he is almost intended to be a butt. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any idea of who's telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it, and the Lord knows that Ellen's too good a cook and too much needed in this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings with investigating any of Mrs. O'Hern's yarns. Just you refuse ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... presented a blunderbuss, and in all probability would have shot him on the spot, had not he, the nephew, rode up, and assured them the gentleman was non compos. That, notwithstanding his intimation, all the three attacked him with the butt-ends of their horsewhips, while the coach drove on, and although he laid about him with great fury, at last brought him to the ground, by a stroke on the temple. That Mr. Clarke himself then interposed in defence of his kinsman, and was also severely beaten. That two of the servants, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... depth and singleness of her love. While she wanted nothing but him, he wanted and took so much else. He perceived this but dimly, as part of that feeling that he could not break through, of the irritable longing to put his head down and butt his way out, no matter what the obstacles. What was coming? How long was this state of things to last? He got up and began to pace the room, his hands clasped behind him, his head thrown back; and every now and then he shook that head, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... out from Mott like a handful of crooked, rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath elevated trains, where men, burned down to the butt end of soiled lives, pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors—a veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... sighing whisper, "O Peregrine—watch Jessamy—watch!" And as she spoke the big fellow rushed. On he came, head lowered, mighty fists whirling, to butt and smite, but Jessamy moved also, slightly, but enough, and as his terrible assailant blundered past, smote him lightly on the crown ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... avow that I had also a certain degree of pride which prevented me from making advances when unfairly treated. I had always lived in an atmosphere of confidence, love, and goodwill,—perhaps I had been a little spoilt by the kindness of my friends, and now it seemed hard to be a butt for ill-natured sarcasms. These shafts, however, were seldom, if ever, let loose in the presence of my husband, who would not have tolerated it; the want of welcome being as much as he could bear. Still, there was no doubt that matters had slightly mended since our first visit, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... "Yo' butt me, yo' horned scalawag!" gasped the old colored man, when once safe on the outside of the pen, "an' I won't gib yo' nottin' ter chew on but an old rubber boot fo' de ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... being the dupe of Fashion. Her fashionable follies are paraded in every public print; her dry-goods propensities are talked of in every circle where she is not truly respected, and in many where she is; her Parisian proclivities are made the butt of very general ridicule, and the dignity of her character is not a little lowered by her too great intimacy with fashion plates and dandy shops. Though, perhaps, man is as much to blame for this as woman—for she seeks to please ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... his tent and a moment later reappeared with a blanket, which he spread close against the butt of a big spruce within half a dozen feet of the fire. When he turned toward her, the colonel's wife had thrown off her coat and turban and stood before him, a slim and girlish figure, bewitchingly ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... them shot at him, then?" I insisted. "No, I beat him up with the butt of my gun for shootin' ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... that of a hunter, standing as though he had just delivered a shot, and was peering to see the effect. The butt of his gun projected behind him, and as Dr. Warren moved the statue into the light of the jewelry store chandeliers, they all saw, clinging to the stock of the gun, some straggling, ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... were in a quiet street, and then quickened his pace until he was close behind the man. Then he drew one of his pistols, and, springing forward, struck him a heavy blow on the head with its butt. He fell forward on his face without a cry; and Harry, satisfied that he had stunned him, ran on and overtook the others, and, turning down the first street they came to, was assured that ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... his arms round each of the household when he was "boun," and every one of them went out of doors with him; he leans on the butt of his spear and leaps into the saddle, and he and ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... of the counter as did Oxenford to his, never taking our eyes off each other. On reaching his end of the bar, I noticed the barkeeper going through motions that looked like passing him a gun, and in the same instant some friend behind me laid the butt of a pistol in my hand behind my back. Dropping the knife, I shifted the six-shooter to my right hand, and, advancing on the object of my hate, fired in such rapid succession that I was unable to tell even whether my fire was ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... making a great impression; a large man, with a large head, and a very landed manner; knowing enough to torment his fellow-creatures, not to instruct them; the ridicule of young ladies, and the natural butt and target of wit. It is easy to talk of carnivorous animals and beasts of prey; but does such a man, who lays waste a whole civilized party of beings by prosing, reflect upon the joy he spoils and the misery he creates in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... [with a flash of family pride.] — And I the son of a strong farmer (with a sudden qualm), God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since, from the butt of his tailpocket, and not have missed the ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... Mr. Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn't much. He said, 'See here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of himself—though there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was in the wrong, ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... their leader in the centre, they charged at full gallop. They encountered no timid enemy. The large body which they charged consisted (excepting some mounted officers) entirely of infantry, who, setting the butt of their lances against their feet, the front rank kneeling, the second stooping, and those behind presenting their spears over their heads, offered such resistance to the rapid charge of the men at arms as the hedgehog presents to his enemy. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... difference is in danger of losing the healing influence of a kindly touch—has become an uncourteous monster of 35 heads and 3 appendices—I see no early end of it. The British Foreign Office has a lot of lawyers in its great back offices. They and our lawyers will now butt and rebut as long as a goat of them is left alive on either side. The two governments—the two human, kindly groups—have retired: they don't touch, on this matter, now. The lawyers will have the time of their lives, each smelling ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... years, was certainly not cruel, but at the same time he was not exactly human. In Nature we never hear of a she-lion sending her cubs away to be looked after by a denatured lion. It is really doubtful whether you could ever raise a lion to lionhood by this method. Some goat would come along and butt the life out of him, even after he had evolved ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the side to seize the girl in his arms, Truxton King brought the butt of the heavy revolver down upon his skull. Brutus dropped across the gunwale with a groan, dead to all that was to happen in the ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... he hears I've written a poem. Well, just as I was sittin' down, I whispered, 'How is our learned Lepsius?' to Burton major. Old Butt grinned like an owl. He didn't know what I was drivin' at; but King jolly well did. That was really why he hove us out. Ain't you grateful? Now shut up. I'm goin' to write the 'Ballad of the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... think well and wisely about a poker will begin somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird, comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone bathing and left his clothes ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... neighbourhood, sketching the ancient bridge on the moor and the site of the old fair, a farmer said to him, "I well remember the train of pack-horses and the effect of their jingling bells on the silence of Dartmoor. My grandfather, a respectable farmer in the north of Devon, was the first to use a 'butt' (a square box without wheels, dragged by a horse) to carry manure to field; he was also the first man in the district to use an umbrella, which on Sundays he hung in the church-porch, an object of curiosity to the villagers." ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... you mean to say that you are not aware that your daughter has been engaged to Mr. Preston for some time— years, I believe,—and has at last chosen to break it off,—and has used the Gibson girl—I forget her name,—as a cat's-paw, and made both her and herself the town's talk—the butt for all the gossip of Hollingford? I remember when I was young there was a girl called Jilting Jessy. You'll have to watch over your young lady, or she will get some such name. I speak to you like a friend, Clare, when I tell you it's my opinion that girl ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fell to examining the back parts of Abdullah of the Land, and saying, "Yea, by Allah, he is tailless!"; and they laughed at him. So he said to the Merman, "O my brother, hast thou brought me hither to make me a butt and a laughing-stock for thy children and thy consort?"—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... green. So bright and sunny was the morning that the late summer wore the air of spring. Cary stood still beside a log, huge and mossy, that lay beside the road. "Let us rest here a moment," he said, and, taking his seat, began to draw in the dust before him with the butt of his whip. "I do not remember seeing you that day. I did not know that ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... means. But the Sheik had also thought and had taken precautions. One day it seemed as if her desperate wish might be fulfilled, and she had had only a moment's hesitation as she stretched out her hand to take the revolver that had been left lying on a table, but as her fingers closed on the butt a muscular hand closed over hers. He had come in with his usual silent step and was close to her without her knowing. He had taken the weapon from her quietly, holding her eyes with his own, and had jerked it open, showing the empty magazine. "Do you think that I am quite a fool?" he had asked ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... ever thus should stand, The butt of every tearful eye; To raise the Culprit's trembling hand, To heave the ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... he jerked Thure violently backward, and lifted the butt of his heavy revolver threateningly, while his face hardened. "Quit it, or—" and the heavy butt descended lightly on Thure's ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his feet beside a bunch of egrets,—killed for their plumage,—the butt of his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand, toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race. His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... air-gun, with the mechanism set ready for firing. In the stock of the gun is the cylinder, in which an accurately fitting and hollow piston moves. A powerful helical spring, turned out of a solid bar of steel, is compressed between the inside end of the piston and the upper end of the butt. To set the gun, the catch is pressed down so that its hooked end disengages from the stock, and the barrel is bent downwards on pivot P. This slides the lower end of the compressing lever towards the butt, and a projection on the guide B, working in a groove, takes the piston with ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... heard, sir. But she drew so much water that she hit slap against the rock, and started a butt. We merely touched on its top with our fore-foot, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... theirs. Their line gets hitched across your mast, and overturns you, or it catches somebody in the boat, and either throws them into the water, or cuts their face open. The best plan is to stand your ground, and be prepared to keep them off with the butt-end of ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... this the pleasant pasture of our life Much you may eat without the least offence, Much you don't eat because your maw objects, 880 Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock Open great eyes at you and even butt, And thereupon you like your mates so well You cannot please yourself, offending them; Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep, You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears Restrain you, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... till the lash of the whip gave out, and the butt took its place. Then, as if the astonished horse had just aroused to the state of things, it bolted! and the way its old heels picked up that road was the most amazing thing of all ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... fire from the Russians. That, however, lasted only a moment; then they advanced in a jump; the attacking line thinned out, stretched itself out and, continually seeking cover, tried to advance. A few minutes only and the first Russian trench line was reached. In storm, with bayonet and rifle butt, they came on and broke into the trenches. They were fighting now man for man. Then the artillery fire set in again. Again in the afternoon the infantry advanced in storm formation against the head of the village and the trenches flanking it. From them roared rifle and machine-gun fire against ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... irregular habits, which resulted in pecuniary embarrassment, and between 1865 and 1870 he returned again to his work at the law courts. The result, however, of the disestablishment of the Irish Church was to drive Butt and other Irish Protestants into union with the Nationalists, who had always repudiated the English connexion; and on 19th May 1870, at a large meeting in Dublin, Butt inaugurated the Home Rule movement in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... replied Curtis. "He's heard those blamed clothes were found, and that's going to make us trouble. We've had Jernyngham interfering and mussing up the tracks, and now Prescott's getting ready to butt in. I expect he'll be off to Navarino very soon, and we can't stop him unless we arrest him, which I'm not ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... danger banishing, in a measure, the thoughts of their bereavement. An ominous silence on the part of the Indians was broken at last by the swish of a blazing arrow to the roof. Mr. Arnold rushed to the garret, and with the butt of his rifle broke a hole in the covering and flung the ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... late to draw rein, and with a cheer the cavalry rode down into the midst of the foe. There was a wild, fierce fight, lance against spear, sabre against sword, the butt-end of a rifle or the deadly knife. Some cut their way through unscathed. Others were surrounded and cut off. Splendid feats of heroism were performed. Many of those who got over returned to rescue officers or comrades, until at last all ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... < chapter xliii 10 HARK > ! Hist! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco? It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted 'Peruke-maker with two fiery torches' is for burning 'the saltpetres of the Arsenal;'—had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be de Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay's sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Frederick Seward appeared from an opposite doorway and demanded his business. He responded in the same manner as to the servant below, but being met with a refusal, suddenly closed the controversy by striking Mr. Seward a severe and perhaps mortal blow across the forehead with the butt of a pistol. As the first victim fell, Major Seward, another and younger son of the secretary, emerged from his father's room. Without a word the man drew a knife and struck the major several blows with it, rushing into the chamber as he did so; then, after dealing ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... de chambre' to bring her billiard cue into her closet, and ordered me to open the box that contained it. I took out the cue, broken in two. It was of ivory, and formed of one single elephant's tooth; the butt was of gold and very tastefully wrought. "There," said she, "that is the way M. de Vaudreuil has treated a thing I valued highly. I had laid it upon the couch while I was talking to the Duchess in the salon; he had the assurance to make ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... soldier. He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two years spent in the country between the Kentucky and Green rivers, he went back to Philadelphia. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and then hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar he had ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... rebels, who wished to throw him into the sea. One of them had laid hold of his right leg, and had bit most unmercifully the tendon above the heel; others were striking him with great slashes of their sabres, and with the butt end of their guns, when his cries made us hasten to his assistance. In this affair, the brave Lavilette, ex-serjeant of the foot artillery of the Old Guard, behaved with a courage worthy of the greatest praise. He rushed upon the infuriated beings in the manner of M. Correard, ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... her anxious and frightened features, and then he dropped the butt of his rifle on the ground, like one whose purpose had undergone ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Resurrection, thy brethren will always number thee among those who have renounced the Mother. Hark! thy enemies are in pursuit of thee, already near. Should they capture thee, thou must be the slave of their wills, the partner of their crimes, the sport and butt of all their bitter jests throughout the remnant of thy wretched life. One only refuge remains for thee!' And as he spoke, he drew his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... myself not shorter than 65,000, but won't. The tale can be sent as soon as you have made arrangements; I hope to finish it in a month; six weeks, bar the worst accidents, for certain. I should say this is the butt end of what was once The Pearl Fisher. There is a peculiarity about this tale in its new form: it ends with a conversion! We have been tempted rather to call it The Schooner Farallone: a tract by R. L. S. and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... struck the land! Why the barefooted band It just nailed up that door: and the very next day, With master for Cap'en, went marchin' away; And Bally the butt of the whole Wabash band. But he bore with it all, yet once firmly said, "When I get back home, I'm ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... devoted as ever to Jackanapes. And that was how it came about that Mr. Johnson bought him a commission in the same cavalry regiment that the General's grandson (whose commission had been given him by the Iron Duke) was in; and that he was quite content to be the butt of the mess where Jackanapes was the hero; and that when Jackanapes wrote home to Miss Jessamine, Tony wrote with the same purpose to his mother,—namely, to demand her congratulations that they were on active service at last, and were ordered to the front. And he added ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... ye young cut-throat? I say get howld of his body and when ye've got howld of his body, I'd further advise gettin' howld of the butt ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... filled that dim place; a soldier violently pushed the young Tzesarevitch into the file behind the Empress and held him there; the Grand Duchess Olga was flung bodily after him; the other children, in their hospital dresses, were shoved brutally toward their places, menaced by butt ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... his friends who dismounted to defend him. As soon as I saw this man lying on his back, I made a hard charge at him; I struck at his head. An enemy standing near discharged his gun at me, and took the butt of the gun to strike me on the head. Just at this moment my horse stumbled and fell forward which saved me from receiving the blow. As I did so I made a circle and came back again to my own people. But I ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... government rests; but it is strange to see what Daedalian complications, and wheels within wheels, we have contrived to work into the superstructure. A modern ward heeler in New York could have taken up the whole frame of government in Seventeenth Century New England by the butt end, and cracked it like a whip—provided of course the Pilgrim fathers had allowed him to attend ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... with two balls, and both taking effect, crippled his arm a good deal. Two savages immediately ran towards him; and he, towards the door; and just as he was in the act of entering it, one of them had approached so closely as to strike at him with the butt end of his gun. The breech came first in contact with the facing of the door, and descending on his head, seemed to throw him forward into the house, and his wife closing the door, no attempt was made by the savages ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... of their hands froze to the butt ends of their muskets, for it was freezing hard that night. I frequently saw a little soldier take off his shoes in order to walk barefoot, as his shoes hurt his weary feet; and at every step he left a track of blood. Then, after some time, he would sit down in a field for a few minutes' rest, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... an angry laugh and a sharp, downward blow of the butt of his whip upon the peasant's head. Charlot's hand grew nerveless and released the bridle as he sank stunned to the ground. Bellecour touched his horse with the spur and rode over the prostrate fellow with no more concern than had he been a dog's ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all levelled their shafts at him in turn. In the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the Hind let Loose; and at the Revolution it received the practical concurrence of the National Convention, and of the country generally. Now the doctrine, be it remembered, was an often disputed one. Buchanan's little work was the very butt of controversy for considerably more than an hundred years. It was prohibited by Parliament, denounced by monarchs, condemned to the flames by universities; great lawyers wrote treatises against it at home, and some of the most celebrated scholars of continental Europe took the field ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Law's tangled up in long coils of Red Tape, She's the butt for each Jeremy Diddler's coarse jape, Every filthy Paul Pry's ghoulish giggle. JOHN BULL, my fine fellow, wake up, and determine To stamp out the lives of the venomous vermin Who round your home-hearth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... wagging a greeting with her hind quarters, as bulldogs do. Two of the puppies loped off to meet her. The long-suffering way in which she permitted them to mouth her argued that she was accustomed to being the kindly butt of their exuberance. The third turned to follow his fellows, hesitated, caught my lady's eye, and rushed back to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... front—butt her around," Monsieur cried. "If she does not like it, then let her, as you ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... car Or Phrygian fields: this hour shall end thy life-days and the war Here on this earth." Such words as these from witless Liger stray, But nought in bandying of words the man of Troy would play; Rather his mighty battle-shaft he hurled against the foe, While Lucagus his horses drives with spear-butt, bending low Over the lash, and setteth forth his left foot for the fight. Beneath the bright shield's nether rim the spear-shaft takes its flight, Piercing his groin upon the left: then shaken from his wain, He tumbleth down and rolleth o'er ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... said Spriggs, and then they both fell to a-laughing; and certain it is, that, although the artist has only given us a draught of the landlord, he was a subject sufficient for a butt! ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... habit in this house to make the most sacred ties of life the butt for ill-timed and ill-judged joking. No knight of old thought or spoke more reverently or with greater reserve of his lady love than did Brian of Erica. He regarded himself now as one bound to do her service, consecrated from that day forward as her ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... a startled look at him and he added reassuringly: "Oh, don't mistake me. I don't want to butt into your set—not for social purposes, anyhow; but if ever it should come handy to know any of 'em in a business way, would you fix it up ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... use; fortunately we did not know this, and our confidence in them was quite complete. On the 10th May, just before we left the sector, we had a little excitement in the front line. A German bombing party suddenly rushed "E1 Left," a rotten little "grouse-butt" trench only 37 yards from the enemy, and held by the 4th Leicestershires, and succeeded in inflicting several casualties before they made off, leaving one dead behind them. This in itself was not ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... rent the coat of bronze about him, that aforetime warded death from his body, but now rang harsh as it was rent by the spear. And he fell with a crash, and the lance fixed in his heart, that, still beating, shook the butt-end of the spear. Then at length mighty Ares spent its fury there; but Idomeneus boasted terribly, and cried aloud: "Deiphobos, are we to deem it fair acquittal that we have slain three men for one, since ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Nelson had drawn rose before her: the one man standing alone in his rage on the platform, overwhelmed by his calm young adversary, beaten and made the butt of laughter for a thousand. Her father had been in the wrong in that quarrel, and somehow she was sure, too, he must have been wrong in the "personal" one, as well: the mysterious difficulty over Fanchon's Mr. Gray, who had ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water- jugs with real water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine. After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell on my heart like sunshine. There was an English fruiterer at dinner, travelling with a Belgian fruiterer; in the evening at the cafe, we watched our compatriot drop a good deal of money ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a herd of cows presents when you have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and disposition. Some are timid and awkward and the butt of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly-fed one a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... despair you land the butt of your rifle brutally on his chest, and he will start up with a cry ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of a long tapering shaft or beam, pivoted at a short distance from the butt end on a pair of strong pyramidal trestles. At the other end of the shaft a sling was applied, one cord of which was firmly attached by a ring, whilst the other hung in a loop over an iron hook which formed the extremity of the shaft. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... she was a generous, patient, self-denying girl, transparently honest in word and deed; the gentle soul shining through its homely mask, like a candle in a bottle. Upon the whole, ugly, illiterate—and, above all, ill-starred, lowly, and defenceless—as she was, she would have made an admirable butt for the flea-power of your ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... an ordinary one with drawers and shelves on one side, and an open space on the other for the hanging up of clothes. Very few clothes hung there at present; but it was in this portion of the closet that he stopped and began to try the wall of Brotherson's room, with the butt end of the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... house the family sat at breakfast. He came in carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... while I was preparing it. I had had some instruction on a previous day as to how it should be made, but the two others had not. When they had put in the watling to within the proper distance of the top they began trimming off the twigs and butt ends of the withes. I happened to turn toward the gabion and observed what they were doing. In a tone of voice, and with a familiarity that surprised my own self, I exclaimed, "Oh, don't do that. Don't you see if you cut those off before sewing, the whole thing will come to pieces? ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... gleaming like scattered diamonds in the sky. Bit by bit the ground hardened, and if by chance we dozed we stuck to it. Morning found the men huddled like sheep, their hunting shirts hard as boards, and long before Hamilton's gun we were up and stamping. Antoine poked the butt of his rifle through the ice of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... To such persons the importance of the principle (if true) which is contended for throughout these pages must appear undeniable; it strikes at the root of more than one half of the arguments by which Home Rulers from the time of Mr. Butt to the days of Mr. Parnell have attempted, fairly enough, and latterly with great success, to win over English opinion to their cause, and it undermines the whole position occupied by Mr. Gladstone and his English followers. They assume with ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... alive," vowed the carter, striking the iron with the butt of his whip, "if you do not ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... on, when some, 'more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil shamefully.' His last words were, 'Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our enterprise.' A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket after he had received a bullet. John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by running Erinetta through with ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the crew, while several of them sprang into the cabin, where they discovered Mrs. Ellice almost dead with terror. Dragging her violently on deck, they were about to cast her into the sea, when Buzzby, who stood with his hands bound, suddenly burst his bonds and sprang towards her. A blow from the butt of a pistol, however, stretched him ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... many of the people in his own country his delight was unbounded. The height of his ambition seemed to be to have "tin min undher him," and his greatest trial was "huntin' thim tarmints of cows." He was the butt of all the jokes and tricks in the camps round, yet he took everything good-naturedly; "the boys must have their laugh sometimes," being his only comment. He said he was only thirty-seven, but, according to his own account, he had been "kept at school till he was sixteen, lived tin years on ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... the cheek was 4-2/3 diameters of the shot, unless some change in height had to be made to fit a gun port or embrasure. To prevent cannon from pushing shutters open when the ship rolled in a storm, lower tier carriages let the muzzle of the gun, when fully elevated, butt against the sill over the ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... that the voice they had just heard did not belong to the man for whom they were looking the rioters remained silent with surprise, and during this short interval Sam brought the butt of his gun to the floor with unnecessary force in order that there might be no question about ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... with the butt end of her willow riding-switch, to find out what he had in his cheek-pouches. An onion and a few marrowfat peas rolled out, and the little girl, kneeling beside him, eyed ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... often be sugarcoated. President Hadley, when a young man, was receiving instructions for a delicate negotiation. "If the issue is forced upon us," he interrupted, "there is, I think, nothing to do but to tell the truth." "Even then," replied his chief, "not butt end foremost." Cases of religious disbelief will occur to every one. While all hypocrisy and truckling to the majority opinion is ignoble, the blunt announcement of disbelief may do much more harm than good. Truth is not the only ideal; men live by their beliefs, and one who ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... gave me a simple gun, the butt end of which, made of steel, hollow in the centre, was rather large. It served as a reservoir for compressed air, which a valve, worked by a spring, allowed to escape into a metal tube. A box of projectiles in a groove in the thickness of the butt end contained ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... my hands," he remarked; and we noticed as he spoke that he held a heavy revolver in his hand, and that the butt of another one protruded from his sash. "I am armed and you are not. If one of you moves or speaks he is a dead man. If not, I shall not harm you. You must wait here for an hour. Why, you FOOLS" (this with a hiss of contempt which rang in ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cassewary were all in the room, but none of them moved. Silverbridge led the way quickly across the hall, and Isabel Boncassen followed him very slowly. When she entered the room she found him standing with a cue in his hand. He at once shut the door, and walking up to her dropped the butt of the cue on the floor and spoke one ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... in every direction, but the other soldier came behind the Prince and knocked him down with the butt of his gun. Then he tied his legs with another rope, and, seeing him thus bound, the crowd of monkeys, which had scattered and fallen over one another in their efforts to escape, came creeping timidly back, and looked on him with ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... hundred and fifty operations upon the various pieces used in the construction of the musket are performed by these dies. Some of the pieces are struck out by one operation of the drop, while others, as the butt-plate, require as many as three, and others a still larger number. The hammer is first forged, and then put twice through the drop. Four men are kept constantly at work forging hammers in the rough, while but two are required to put them through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... What will you do, sir? Have you ne'er a currant-butt to leap into? They'll put you to the rack, you ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... climbed out and returned to the fallen tree. There he picked up one of the long branches in his mouth, grasping it near the butt, twisted it over his shoulder and started to drag it to the canal. When he reached the latter he entered the water and began swimming, still dragging the branch in the same way. Once more Old Mother Nature stopped him. "You've shown us how you cut trees and move them, ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare—what a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and a stir without, the thump of hurrying feet, and the butt of a guard's gun thundered against ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... were line infantry, of the type which gets most of the work and none of the Press notices, a hard-bitten, unregenerate crowd, who cared not a whit whether Belgium bled or not, but loved fighting for its own sake and put their faith in bayonet and butt. And wherever these Antrims went thither went the Padre also, his harmonium and his Woodbines. I have a story that, when they were in a certain part of the line where the trenches were only thirty yards apart ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... this ship was a favourite goat, good-tempered, affectionate, and playful; but a single vice counterbalanced all his virtues: he took a drop. A year or two ago some light-hearted tempter taught him to sip grog; he took to it kindly, and was now arrived at such a pitch that at grog-time he used to butt his way in among the sailors, and get close to the canteen; and, -by arrangement, an allowance was always served out to him. On imbibing it, he passed with quadrupedal rapidity through three stages, the absurd, the choleric, the sleepy; and was never his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... she was only twelve hundred tons, now I come to think of it in exactly the same place as you are. He pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same butt-strap, and the plates opened like a furnace door, and I had to climb into the nearest fog-bank, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... these ejaculations the inmate of the chamber was heard drawing back a table, then the butt of a gun sounded upon the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Thompson's my allotted period, I next went to Mr. George Butt, a very able and learned man, who afterwards became a Queen's Counsel, but never an advocate. I acquired while with him a good deal of knowledge that was invaluable, became his favourite pupil, and was in due course entrusted with papers of great responsibility, ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... took a last look to make sure that everything was ready. He felt his gun at his hip, removed belt and all, and threw it back upon the bed. Then he turned his head and stared, frowning, at the black butt where it protruded from the holster suggestively ready to his hand. He reached out and took the gun, turned it over, and hesitated. No telling what insane impulse fever might bring upon him—and still—no telling what Buck Olney might do when he discovered that he was ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the glade came slow and steady blows like those which a man might make as he lifts his axe and smites into the butt. There was a sort of reverberation, too, as if the tree were hollow. But that might only be the effect of the night, the stillness, and the heavy covert of great woods which lay like a big green blanket all about us, and tossed every sound ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... loud and clear, shattering the intense silence with one sharp explosion of sound, rang a shot. And Corporal Ripley, who was following close at the heels of MacNair, staggered, clawed wildly for the butt of his service revolver which protruded from its holster, and, with an imprecation on his lips that ended in an unintelligible snarl, crashed headlong ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... of air making its way through the door caused the lamp to smoke. Arnoux slept with his two arms wide apart; and, as his gun was placed in a slightly crooked position, with the butt-end downward, the mouth of the barrel came up right under his arm. Frederick ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... and cultured men are to be pitied, for they are ever the butt, byword and prey of the untaught, who are often the knowing. As success came to Southey he lost the sense of values, that is to say, the sense of humor. He attacked Byron with great severity, and Byron's reply was the dedication ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... fire which softened their bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other tribes. Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their natural powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude. Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as brute beasts will do to express different passions, as anyone must have noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... or dreaming, or was this some trick of liquor in his often distorted fancy? He, Whiskey Dick! the butt of his friends, the chartered oracle of the barrooms, even in whose wretched vanity there was always the haunting suspicion that he was despised and scorned; he, who had dared so much in speech, and achieved so little in fact! he, whose habitual weakness had even led him into the wildest ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... Silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the squire; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin Silence. Vain of his acquaintance with Sir John, who makes a butt of him, he exclaims, "Would, cousin Silence, that thou had'st seen that which this knight and I have seen!"—"Aye, Master Shallow, we have heard the chimes at midnight," says Sir John. To Falstaff's observation, "I did not think Master Silence had been a man ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... elementary books for children; three or four Prayer-books, and one Bible were purchased. At two o'clock they all took their departure, with many expressions of pleasure and gratitude. We got away just before a violent north-easter (a wind which always comes, as they say, with the butt end first), which carried us rapidly to Gold Cove, at the head of the bay. It is a snug, well-sheltered place, but the water is deep almost up to the shore; and we moored, for the first time in my experience, to a tree. However, we found bottom at about sixteen fathoms, and plenty ...
— Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the "Hawk," 1859 • Edward Feild
... all the apparatus of the Cabinet of Physical Science, breaking it in pieces. They were furious with these inventions of the evil one, with which they thought the unbelievers communicated with the Government of Madrid, and they smashed on the ground with the butt ends of their muskets, and trampled with their feet, all the gilt wheels of the apparatus, and all the ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so; and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and his large frame lurched closer. He wore a heavy gun and a knife in his belt. Also there protruded the butt of a pistol from the inside of his open vest. Allie felt the heat from his huge body, and she smelled the whisky upon him, and sensed the base, faithless, malignant animalism of the desperado. Assuredly, if he had any fear, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... "Never since my wine-butt leaked, and let out its liquor by an illegal vent," replied the friar, "and so left me nothing to drink but my ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... his answers derived new questions; she went so far as to speak of painting, of music, of dancing—even of sculpture! She proved herself equally familiar with the pencil, with tunes, and with books, until Thaddeus was petrified by so much learning, and feared that he might become the butt of ridicule, and stammered like a little lad before his teacher. Luckily the teacher was beautiful and lenient; his neighbour guessed the cause of his perturbation, and shifted the talk to less deep and difficult subjects, to the cares and troubles of existence ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... in an exhausted voice. "I guess it's al'ays little things you can't stand. Big ones you can butt ag'inst. There! I feel better, now I've told ye. Here's the key. Should you jest ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... one Sabbath night. Before day, Monday morning, he called me up to whip me; called me into his dining-room, locked the doors, then ordered me to pull off my shirt. I told him no, sir, I wouldn't; right away he went and got the cowhide, and gave me about twenty over my head with the butt. He tore my shirt off, after I would not pull it off; he ordered me to cross my hands. I didn't do that. After I wouldn't do that he went and got his gun. and broke the breech of that over my head. He then seized ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... when taken out of the boat, showed none of these symptoms of emotion, but running instinctively to the scuttle-butt, asked eagerly for a drop of water. As the most expeditious method of feeding and dressing them, they were distributed among the different messes, one to each, as far as they went. Thus they were all soon provided with dry clothing, and with as much to ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... scalping-knife.[27] His weapon was the long, small-bore, flint-lock rifle, clumsy, and ill-balanced, but exceedingly accurate. It was very heavy, and when upright, reached to the chin of a tall man; for the barrel of thick, soft iron, was four feet in length, while the stock was short, and the butt scooped out. Sometimes it was plain, sometimes ornamented. It was generally bored out—or, as the expression then was, "sawed out"—to carry a ball of seventy, more rarely of thirty or forty, to the pound; and was usually ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... conduct. The cases which naturally suggest themselves again concern animals. Experience as interpreted by the English law has shown that dogs, rams, and bulls are in general of a tame and mild nature, and that, if any one of them does by chance exhibit a tendency to bite, butt, or gore, it is an exceptional phenomenon. Hence it is not the law that a man keeps dogs, rams, bulls, and other like tame animals at his peril as to the personal damages which they may inflict, unless he knows or has notice that the particular animal kept by him has the abnormal tendency which ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... specification under this charge alleged that Captain Wells did violently and without just cause or provocation assault First Lieutenant P.H. Breslin "by furiously striking and hitting him (Lieutenant Breslin) upon the head with a hickory stick, the butt end of a billiard cue, and did continue the assault (upon Lieutenant Breslin) until forced to desist therefrom by First Lieutenant Carl Veitenhimer, Fourth United States Infantry, thereby endangering the life of Lieutenant Breslin ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... when in the act of roasting a chamois, surprised by four Bavarian Jaeger, he unhesitatingly dashed the melted fat of the animal into their faces, and, quick as lightning, dealt each of them a deathblow with the butt-end of his rifle.] ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... rase and she gaed butt the hoose, Aye steekin' door and door. Three hours gaed by or her mother heard Her ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... by the barrel with the muzzle against his shoulder, having aimed the butt at the crouching lion. Chunky had had a severe ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... guilders! The Mayor looked blue; So did the Corporation too. For council dinners made rare havoc With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock; And half the money would replenish Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish. To pay this sum to a wandering fellow With a gipsy coat of red and yellow! "Beside," quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink, "Our business was done at the river's brink; We saw with our eyes the vermin sink, And what's dead can't come to ...
— The Pied Piper of Hamelin • Robert Browning
... dropping the butt of his piece on the rock, leaning his arms upon it, and staring at the speaker. "You don't think we are likely to have a ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... from within. He guessed what Cassidy was doing—peering through that slit of window under the curtain. But he was not absolutely sure. And he knew the necessity of making no error, with Cassidy in there, gripping the butt of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... could make Germany worthy of an alliance in the eyes of Russia and other powers. Bismarck rejected this almost angrily. The English he thought little of. If they tried to invade Germany the Landwehr would knock them down with the butt-ends of their rifles. That a close blockade might knock Germany down never seemed to occur to him. However, in the end Tirpitz says that the Prince became mollified and expressed agreement with the view that an increased ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all its symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble the drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and knee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded goats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seeking opportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in black petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their bargains with a draught ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... another crowd of them with a poor frightened man in the centre. He was crying out—"For me, I am a man of peace—gentlemen, I am no spy. I have lived all my life in the Rue Scribe." But one after another struck at him, some with the butt-end of their rifles, some with their bayonets, those behind with the heels of their boots—till that which had been a man when I stood on one side of the street, was something which would not bear looking upon by the time that I had passed to the other. For these ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Indian was then to be seen, but we well knew they were in the bushes close by, and that, in all probability, we should every one share the fate of our murdered comrade. What to do now was the universal inquiry. With the butt of my rifle I scattered the fire, to prevent the Indians making a sure mark of us. We then proceeded to pack up with the utmost despatch, intending to move into the open prairie, where, if they attacked us again, we could at least defend ourselves, notwithstanding our disparity ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... up, and thinking that he might as well show, from the very first, that he was not to be bullied, or made a butt with impunity, he walked straight to the stove, and looking full at Jones (who had inspired him already with strong disgust), he said, "You called me a coward just now; I'm not a coward, though I don't like fighting for nothing. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... forward merrily. The Afghan forces were upon the run—the run of wearied wolves who snarl and bite over their shoulders. The red lances dipped by twos and threes, and, with a shriek, up rose the lance-butt, like a spar on a stormy sea, as the trooper cantering forward cleared his point. The Lancers kept between their prey and the steep hills, for all who could were trying to escape from the valley of death. The Highlanders ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... service has become a sort of butt with those who shoot their arrows at what is called slowness, and who delight to transfix old generals. Since Bonaparte, in less than a year, tumbled over Beaulieu, Wurmser, and Alvinczy, (whose united ages exceeded two ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Then he asked Snengkeld to come to his little supper; and Kantwise also he invited, though Kantwise had shown Dockwrath tendencies throughout the whole affair;—but Moulder was fond of Kantwise as a butt for his own sarcasm. Mrs. Smiley, too, was asked, as was natural, seeing that she was the betrothed bride of one of the heroes of the day; and Moulder, in the kindness of his heart, swore that he never was proud, and told Bridget ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... both to the paper and the society. But if he was largely responsible for the fighting temper of the early movement, he, at any rate, never shirked his share of the fighting. His name was the butt at which all shafts were aimed. As Lot "seemed like one that mocked to his sons-in-law," so seemed the Parson to the most opposite sections of the British nation. As a friend wrote of him at the time, he "had at any rate escaped the curse of the false prophets, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... freed from the imprisonment of her convent-school at Padua, felt her heart go out in pity towards this homeless young prince, who just now seemed to be the butt for all the riot and teasing of the boys of ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... of them, catching them thus before they could fly. The names of most of the mountains about here ended in bhal, which was a Gaelic corruption of the Norse fiall, a mountain. There were many Norse names all through the Lewis, but more particularly toward the Butt. The termination bost, for example, at the end of many words, meant an inhabited place, but she fancied bost was Danish. And did Mr. Lavender know of the legend connected with the air of Cha ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... a wan smile at his partner, sitting on the bottom of an upturned pail, as he said this. Then he reached for his hip pocket and drew out a revolver, which he handed, butt-end forward, to the professor, who, not knowing his friend carried such an instrument, instinctively ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... over the weapon, butt first. The major-domo blinked, and took it. Bell sat down and smiled widely. He had been expected to be uproarious, to attempt to force the major-domo to lead him to Ribiera. And, of course, he would have been led ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... drives the butt of his spear into the earth, and throws himself into the saddle, ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... the manger, the arms of his foe clinging to him like ropes of steel. Twice he brought down the butt of his sawed-off gun on the black head of Rutherford. The grip of the big hillman grew lax, and as the man collapsed, his fingers slid slackly down ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... have an intuitive perception that danger was approaching; for it turned abruptly round just as the missile left the seaman's hand, and received the butt with full force close to the ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... spurred boot-heels crossed the porch floor; there was a thundering knock with the butt-end of a riding-whip on the ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... notions received, as upon a mount, to shew the knowledges adjacent and confining. If therefore the true end of knowledge not propounded hath bred large error, the best and perfectest condition of the same end not perceived will cause some declination. For when the butt is set up men need not rove, but except the white be placed men cannot level. This perfection we mean not in the worth of the effect, but in the nature of the direction; for our purpose is not to stir up men's hopes, but to guide their travels. The fullness of direction ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... heated" were the fearful words which greeted Mr. Verdant Green on his initiation into a spoof Lodge of Freemasonry at Oxford. This was one of the many "rags" of which he was the butt during his days ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... She's served them butt, she's served them ben, Intill a gown of green, But her e'e was ay on Brown Robin, That stood low under ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot's feet and kisses 'em. 'Luck again,' says Dravot, across the Lodge, to me; 'they say it's the missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We're more than safe now.' Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says, 'By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o' the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!' At that he puts ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... Judge's face flushed with anger and he bent forward and shook a threatening finger at Jimmy and declared, "I never make terms with a malefactor. If you had an idea that I am the type of man to use as the butt for a silly, asinine jest, I'll teach you to think differently. Mark that ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... that day may be styled harassing, those with which he was overwhelmed towards evening may be called exasperating. First of all he broke the top of his rod, a misfortune which broke his heart entirely. But recollecting suddenly that he had three spare top-pieces in the butt, his heart was cemented and bound up, so to speak, in a rough and ready manner. Next, he stepped into a hole, which turned out to be three feet deep, so that he was instantly soaked up to the waist. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... leaned over the side to seize the girl in his arms, Truxton King brought the butt of the heavy revolver down upon his skull. Brutus dropped across the gunwale with a groan, dead to all that was to happen in the ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... this afternoon. Charley and I made our lucky up the wash-us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty water-butt, head downwards; but his legs were so precious long that they stuck out at the top, and so they took ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... thatdo for a BAThrooM wallpaper? it could be produced verery cheaply and itcould be calld the CHER RYdesigN damn, imeant to put all that in capitals. iam afraid this articleis spoilt now but butt bUt curse . But perhaps the most excitingthing aLout this macLine is that you can by presssing alittle switch suddenly writein redor green instead of in black; I donvt understanh how Lt is done butit is very jollY? busisisness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... come with her, and I went. The phaeton was waiting, but we had scarcely started when some fellow seized the horses' heads, and a couple of ruffians attacked us. One of them I beat over the head with the butt of the whip, so that he dropped the cudgel with which he was about to strike me; then lashing the horse, I shook off the others and got safely away. I cannot imagine who they were or why they should ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... done this steadily ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the butt of its ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether "the friends of progress," using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great consequence. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... Beethoven frequently thought of an object, although he often laughed at musical delineation and scolded about petty things of the sort. In this respect 'The Creation' and 'The Seasons' were many times a butt, though without depreciation of Haydn's loftier merits. Haydn's choruses and other works ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... it. Come! tuck up your gowns and begone, or else—Hence these abominable trials, sentences, and condemnations. What a sorry spectacle is that troop of judges, with hanging heads and bent backs, driven with the butt end of the musket into baseness ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Bullmer line; she had been christened the Robert Bullmer, and her first act when the dog-shores had been knocked away was a bull charge down the launching slip, resulting in the bursting of a hawser, the washing over of a boat and the drowning of two innocent spectators; her next was an attempt to butt the Eddystone over in a fog, and, being unbreakable, she might have succeeded only that she was going dead slow. She drifted out of the Bullmer line on the wash of a law-suit owing to the ramming by her of a Cape boat in Las Palmas harbour; engaged ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... the day following the dance in the note," Archie protested. "You'd certainly make a mess of things if you tried to butt ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... intricate. But reasoning on the policy of the present French government, who never aim at little things while great objects are in view, I have considered the invasion of Ireland as the real mark and butt of all their operations. The flight to the West Indies was to take off the naval force, which is the great impediment to their undertaking. The Rochefort squadron's return confirmed me. I think they will now collect their force at Ferrol—which Calder tells ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... quare question for your honour to be after axing me. Sure all the country knows O'Sullivan of Toomies, for didn't him, and his father before him, live at the butt end of the mountain, near the neck of the Lawn; and wasn't they great chieftains in the ould times; and hadn't they a great sketch of country to themselves: they haven't so much now, for their hearts were too big for their manes (means;) and that's the rason ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... you are at? Well, dis is Mike O'Grady's district you're buttin' into—see? Mike's got de stomach-ache privilege for every kid in dis neighborhood—see? And if dere's any picnics or red balloons to be dealt out here, Mike's money pays for 'em—see? Don't you butt in, or something'll be handed to you. Youse d—— settlers and reformers with your social ologies and your millionaire detectives have got dis district in a hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college students and professors rough-housing de soda-water stands and dem rubber-neck coaches ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... at the speaker. He was a stout little man, who wore his hard felt hat at a rakish angle. The butt of a fat cigar was clenched between his teeth, and his genial eyes met Malcolm's with an inviting ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... should never triumph over him, this mocking imp, this butterfly-girl, who from the first had held him with a fascination he could not fathom. He would make her pay for her audacity. He would teach her that he was more than a mere butt for her drollery. He would ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... time the fire was lighted, and when Shad brought up a kettle of water from the river Bob had already cut a stiff pole about five feet in length. The butt end of this he sharpened, and, jamming it into the ground, inclined it in such manner that the kettle, which he took from Shad and hung by its bail upon the other end of the pole, was suspended directly ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... me in some direction—I neither knew nor cared whither. Soon the motion ceased, and, with a seaman's instinct, I began to haul myself along by the rope I grasped, although no definite idea was in my mind as to where it was attached. Presently I came butt up against something solid, the feel of which gathered all my scattered wits into a compact knob of dread. It was the whale! "Any port in a storm," I murmured, beginning to haul away again on my friendly line. By ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... from any position in the manual, the motion next to the last concludes with the butt of the piece about 3 inches from the ground, barrel to the rear, the left hand above and near the right, steadying the piece, fingers extended and joined, forearm and wrist straight and inclining downward, all fingers ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... I got to Stuck River crossing I came to a turn in the trail where it crossed the top of a big fir that had been turned up by the roots and had fallen nearly parallel with the trail. The big roots held the butt of the tree up from the ground. I think the tree was four feet in diameter a hundred feet from the butt, and the whole body, from root to top, was eighty-four steps long, or about two hundred and ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... with shiny hair and limbs bursting out of their ill-fitting clothes. There would be loud talking and laughter, rough jokes that would make her wince, compliments that would disgust her—they not knowing how to take her, nor she them. She would be wholly out of her place—a butt for impertinence—perhaps worse. And there would be a certain sense of dragging a lady from her sphere—of making free with the old house and ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Large it doth and may appeare, had nott any thought or suspition that the said Privateers would have taken any things from any man wrongfully, they before they went out severall times promiseinge the contrary (which if they should deny may be made to appeare). Butt when sd. Privateers came to the Eastward, instead of complyinge with their Charter Party or makeinge good their Promise, forced the sd. Michell to carry them whither they Pleased, and although the sd. Michell was very ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... 'Oh fie,' said he, 'that had not been to have acted Octavio to the life, but would have made a discovery.' 'Ah,' said she, 'that was your aim to have acted Octavio to the life, I believe, and not to discover my lady's constancy to your lord; but I suppose you have been sworn at the Butt of Heidleburgh, never to kiss the maid, when you can kiss the mistress.' But he renewing his caresses and asseverations of love to her, she suffered herself to be convinced of all he had a mind to have ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... boughs, string them on a stick which you have previously prepared (Fig. 4). This stick should be of strong, green hardwood, four or five feet long with a fork about six inches long left on it at the butt end to keep the boughs from sliding off, and sharpened at the upper end so that it can be easily poked through a handful of boughs. String the boughs on this stick as you would string fish, but do it one handful at a time, ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... Scott was the heir of "Old Jake Scott". "Old Jim Scott" had about fifty slaves, who raised crops, cotton, tobacco, and hogs. Candus cooked for Scott and his wife, Miss Elizabeth. They were both cruel, according to Mrs. Richardson. She said that at one time her Master struck her over the head with the butt end of a cowhide, that made a hole in her head, the scar of which she still carries. He struck her down because he caught her giving a hungry slave something to eat at the back door of the "big house". The "big house" was ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... flanks of the ship had been of a much more serious character; a long portion of the inside boarding had been burned away, and the very ribs of the vessel were con- siderably damaged; the oakum caulkings had all started away from the butt-ends and seams; so much so that it was little short of a miracle that the whole ship had not long ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... from ague seldom received very much sympathy at the time, but was considered a fair butt for genial ridicule and chaff, yet even there the trouble had its serious side. Through all those communities there stalked a well-known and dreaded spectre, the so-called "congestive chill," what is now known in technical language as ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... could be ignorant of the language he held respecting the Bourbons, and in which he indulged as freely after he became the Minister of Louis XVIII. as when he was the Minister of Bonaparte. It was universally known that in his conversation the Bourbons were the perpetual butt for his sarcasms, that he never mentioned them but in terms of disparagement, and that he represented them as unworthy of governing France. Everybody must have been aware that Fouche, in his heart, favoured a Republic, where the part of President ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Ebro: there were even dark suggestions as to the need of dethroning the Spanish Bourbons once for all. Interpreting these hints in the light of their own consciences, the King, Queen, and favourite saw themselves in imagination flung forth into the Atlantic, a butt to the scorn of mankind; and they prepared to flee to the New World betimes, with the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... golden green away in England; and soon there rises up in my mental vision a picture that fascinated my youth in the Fliegende Blatter, representing "Friedrich Gerstaeker auf der Reise." That gallant man is depicted tramping on a serpent, new to M. Boulenger, while he attempts to club, with the butt end of his gun, a most lively savage who, accompanied by a bison, is attacking him in front. A terrific and obviously enthusiastic crocodile is grabbing the tail of the explorer's coat, and the explorer says "Hurrah! das gibt wieder einen prachtigen Artikel fur Die Allgemeine Zeitung." I do not ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the Mexicans thought of asking for quarter. One of the infantrymen, retreating before Dalzell's deftly handled sword, and fighting back with his rifle butt, retreated so close to the edge of the roof that, in another instant, he had fallen to the street below, breaking ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... had been waiting. Nobly he maintained his reputation as a thief by quietly going behind the bar and lifting from a box four cigars which he stowed away in his pockets. But even that, apparently did not satisfy him, for when he espied the butt of a cigar, flung into the sawdust on the floor by a man who had just come in, he picked it up before squatting down again ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the words of Pitt himself. In one of his speeches, having accused his rival of filling his speech with everything that was personal, inflammatory, and invidious, he remarked:—"I am not surprised if he should pretend to be the butt of ministerial persecution; and if, by striving to excite the public compassion, he should seek to reinstate himself in that popularity which he once enjoyed, but which he so unhappily has forfeited. For it is the best and most ordinary resource of these political apostates to court, to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... word? Ha-ha. When I think of all that I have done for that man, the acts I have defended, the stupidities I have tried to convert into statesmanship, the tempers I have been the butt of, the childish insults I have had to tolerate, the theatricalities I have been compelled to treat as if they were the most glorious manifestations of Imperial splendour—when I think of all this and realise that he and I are both still alive, I marvel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... said and thought, but also everything you would like to have thought and said, but did not," and, "Introducing to each other words which never had thought of being acquainted." Both of these perhaps hit the modern forms of the phenomenon even harder than they hit their original butt. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... they may be, provided that they do but amount to half-a-dozen, you will invariably meet with a bully. And it is also generally the case that you will find one of that society who is more or less the butt. You will discover this even in occasional meetings, such as a dinner-party, the major part of which have never ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... down-stream so fast that I had to run hard to get level with it. Here was work indeed, and at that joyous moment I would not have changed places with Jack Dobson. Without ado, I jumped into the river, waded out, recovered the butt of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... those grewsome surroundings, overcame all caution. Swiftly as I dared in the dense blackness I crept forward, feeling the smooth wall with eager fingers, my right hand still nervously gripping the revolver butt. Then I came to the door, similar to the other, although no groping about would reveal the catch, or enable me to force ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... I'm man enough to go with you," he said; "and if you mean me any harm I can look out for myself; and if I can't, why, here is something can look out for me," and therewith he lifted up the flap of his coat pocket and showed the butt of a pistol he had fetched with him when he had set out from his ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... nephew thither, that he may see, and learn to avoid the scene; for, I think, an English gentleman never appears to such disadvantage, as at the levee of a minister — Of his grace I shall say nothing at present, but that for thirty years he was the constant and common butt of ridicule and execration. He was generally laughed at as an ape in politics, whose office and influence served only to render his folly the more notorious; and the opposition cursed him, as the indefatigable ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... grieve to trace How Death has triumph'd in so short a space; Who are the dead, how died they, I relate, And snatch some portion of their acts from fate. With Andrew Collett we the year begin, The blind, fat landlord of the Old Crown Inn, - Big as his butt, and, for the selfsame use, To take in stores of strong fermenting juice. On his huge chair beside the fire he sate, In revel chief, and umpire in debate; Each night his string of vulgar tales he told, When ale was cheap and bachelors were bold: His heroes all were famous in their days, Cheats ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... Weller had, to begin with, some merely accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared, Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had become a sort of black background and had to ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... all!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I can understand Jimmy, because he likes me to drive him all the time, but you others, who aren't regular clients at all, why you should butt in and try to spoil my chances, I can't think. Mr. Wingate is just my conception of the ideal fare—generous, affable, and with trans-Atlantic notions about tips. I shall send you my card, all the same, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... joyous passage of arms at Ashby, or on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, for—either because the flour bags made the lances ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... have nothing in common; but on this occasion I learned that the preamble is mistaken. On this occasion I saw one thing in common between the employing class and the working class, and that thing was a black-snake whip. The butt end of the whip was in the hands of the employing class, and the lash of the whip was on the backs of the working class, and thus to all eternity was symbolized the truth about the relationship ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the "French master," the poor, despised, "frog-eating Mounseer Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make a man diabolique! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this depressing drudgery to our "vagabond's" credit. Think of it! The first poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions conjugating ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... such a custom, if once it were permitted, makes him confess, in that epistle, that he durst not advise Liserus to excommunicate any man without taking counsel of other pastors. Now, I much marvel what butt Dr Forbesse(1097) shot at when he entitleth one of his chapters De Potestate Excommunicandi, and then, in the body of the chapter, doth no more at all but only quote those two testimonies of Zanchius and Calvin; both of which do utterly condemn the usurpation ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... an only sister, Anne Scott, who seemed to be from her cradle the butt for mischance to shoot arrows at. Her childhood was marked by perilous escapes from the most extraordinary accidents. Among others, I remember an iron-railed door leading into the area in the centre of George's Square being closed by the wind, while her fingers were ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... no other way of passing his life than in dangling about women. He was generally tolerated as a butt, and being impervious to contempt, supposed that his fascinations procured him immunity. He did—it must be reckoned the first of his two accomplishments—he did know a pretty woman from a plain one, and therefore as soon as he knew Alison much resorted ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... him up here?" Philip cried. "If you wouldn't butt in at all I intended to take him to my sister's a cousin ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... with the heat, she had been blown about by Chicago wind until it was strange there was any of her left in one piece, she had had front doors—yes, and back doors too, slammed in her face, she had been the butt of the alleged wit of menials and hirelings, she had been patronised by vapid women as the poor girl who must make her living some way, she had been roasted by—but never mind—she had had a beat or two! And now she was to wind it all up by marrying Joseph Tank, who had ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... as all that they were capable of, and had been bidden by Smallbones to turn and hold alternately, but "that oaf Giles Headley," said Stephen, "never ground but one lance, and made me go on turning, threatening to lay the butt about ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had struck. He too must needs wear his four stars outside his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. "In honour I gained them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality, "in honour I will die with them." Captain Douglas of the Royal Oak, when the Dutch fired ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Raleigh, his firstborn. He died leading them on, when some, 'more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil shamefully.' His last words were, 'Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our enterprise.' A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket after he had received a bullet. John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by running ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... this thought which led him stealthily to place his hand on the butt of the revolver at his hip, prepared to whip it out and fire as quickly as he knew how. At the same time he edged away from him, so as to maintain ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... awhile on the tenterhooks. He went on to remind her of the burn of the Glen-wood. He described their nests in the beech-butt and under the shelter of the great march dyke. He would have spoken of the race across the moors and the rescue at the White Gates, save that by instinct he knew that her thoughts would at once be carried to ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... man said, advancing into the cavern, standing the butt of his rifle on the rock, and ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... Bronston froze. Then in automatic reflex his hand went inside his jacket to rest over the butt of the Model H ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... rattling cars. I was nearly asleep when there came a sudden shock, and the conductor's voice rang out warning us to leave the train. At slackened speed we had run into a snow block, and the wedge-headed plow was going, so he said, to plug the drifts under a full pressure, and butt ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... not care to play pony; then it was quite impossible to do anything with him. But he was never rough with, or offered to butt, Tess and Dot. They could manage his goatship when nobody ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... Nebuchadnezzar appeared on the stage at Hamburg in an opera of Keiser's in 1704; Ariosti put him through his bovine strides in Vienna in 1706. He was put into a ballet by a Portuguese composer and made the butt of a French opera bouffe writer, J. J. Debillement, in 1871. He recurs to my mind now in connection with a witty fling at "Nabucco" made by a French rhymester when Verdi's opera was produced at Paris in 1845. The noisy brass in the orchestration offended ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that's all I've got to say. If Jenkins doesn't butt in and reorganise it, it will probably go into the hands of a receiver before the year is up. Is it the bank or your private investments you've ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Nominally Cherubina is the butt of Barrett's satire, but the permanent interest of the book lies in the skilful stage-managing of her lively adventures. There is hardly an attempt at characterisation. The people are mere masqueraders, who amuse us by their costume ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... angrily driving some of the swimmers away from his fishing location at that moment. It was plain the members of the moving picture company used the hermit as a butt for their jokes. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... and particularly and personally as it regarded yourself, made me anxious to hear from you on your return. I was the more so too, as I had myself during the whole of your absence, as well as since your return, been a constant butt for every shaft of calumny which malice and falsehood could form, and the presses, public speakers, or private letters disseminate. One of these, too, was of a nature to touch yourself; as if, wanting confidence in ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... been on the outposts that night, and, returning to the camp, I surprised two men robbing, beating, and, as I thought, murdering a third. One of the vagabonds escaped undetected, but with a blow from the butt of my musket which he will carry to his grave. The other I thrashed on the spot. He was the bailiff Scroope, whom you put up to witness against me. Their victim was the messenger from the castle, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... golden chain; "it passes my poor skill to say how many may be wounded before Pasche, [Footnote: Easter.] if some rule be not taken with this youth—not but the youth is a fair youth," he added, correcting himself, "and able at his exercise; but somewhat too ready with the ends of his fingers, the butt of his riding-switch, and the point ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... and days they work on the body, examining it from head to foot, without noticing the movable support, the cause of their mishap. In vain I prolong my watch; I never see a single one of them push the support with his foot or butt it with his head. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... an unknown man was found head down in a water-butt outside a country bungalow. There was an ugly bruise on his forehead, and the provincial police who were investigating the case made up their minds that there had been ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... countenances, whilst the perpetual clank of fetters conspires to fill the soul with horror. But this impression on the convict soon passes away, who, feeling that he has here no reason to blush at the presence of any one, soon identifies himself with his situation. That he may not be the butt of the gross jests and filthy buffoonery of his fellows, he affects to participate in them; and soon, in tone and gesture, this conventional depravity gets hold of his heart. Thus, at Anvers, an ex-bishop experienced, at first, all the outpourings of the riotous jests ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Englishman felt that his hand, that his own hand, had seized the butt-end of his revolver and that his eyes were fixed on the man's back, just below the neck. One movement and the whole play was finished; a touch of the trigger and the life of the strange adventurer had come to a ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... coming and going in the yard, a perpetual chattering of raucous voices. The wives were always bickering and scolding, the tongue of one of them going day and night, her chief butt being a naked and sickly slave, who was for ever being flogged. There was no sleep for Mary when this woman had any grievance, real or imaginary, on ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... are many ways butt down upon this, and they are crooked and wide. But thus thou mayest distinguish the right from the wrong, the right only being straight and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... are speeding gayly over the bright waters, never very calm along this shore. Presently we come to a spot clearly marked by some odd-colored, tumbled-down cliffs and the remains of a great iron butt, where, more than a hundred years ago, the Grosvenor, a splendid clipper ship, was wrecked. The men nearly all perished or were made away with, but a few women were got on shore and carried off as prizes to the kraals of the Kafir "inkosis" or chieftains. What sort ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... remained. As Dion looked at her now, he simply could not see the beautiful schoolgirl of sixteen, the blonde gipsy who had bent forward, cigarette in mouth, to his match, who had leaned back and blown rings to the moon above Drouva. Had she ever set the butt of a gun against her shoulder? Something in this woman's eyes made him suddenly feel as if he ought to leave her alone. Yet her arm still lay on his, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... boats to that ring," the "beefeater" told them. "That shows you 'ow much farther h'up the water came in those days. H'in a room over the gateway of the Bloody Tower there, the Duke of Clarence, h'according to some, drowned himself in a butt of Malmsey wine; and in h'an adjoining room, they say that the little Princes were murdered by h'order of their uncle, the powerful Duke of Gloucester, who stole their right to the throne. Right 'ere, at the foot of these steps, is where 'e 'urriedly buried them, h'after 'is ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... poor, and the people had never heard in their lives, apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be able to talk German, which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat there ordering beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would have me their butt, and even as it was found something monstrous in me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with them (for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly of those who imagine the world to be ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... The young man was waiting for him, and as soon as the Dragon had taken the Princess by the hand to carry her off he spread the salve upon his back, pressed him against the wall, and set his dogs upon him. At the same time he belaboured him with the butt-end of his musket, till the Dragon was quite exhausted and began to beg off, promising to give a written agreement never again to molest the Princess. When he had written the paper in his own blood and signed it ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... and sleeve were observed to be stained with fresh blood. On following him they found the dead body stretched out upon the grass beside the pool. The head had been beaten in by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as might very well have been inflicted by the butt-end of his son's gun, which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the body. Under these circumstances the young man was instantly arrested, and a verdict of 'wilful murder' having been returned at the inquest on Tuesday, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... whither I wished to go. Upon my inquiring, in my turn, whether they were at liberty to take me wherever I might wish to go, one of them, a Marseillais, asked me, giving me at the same time a push with the butt end of his musket, whether I still doubted the power of the people? I answered "No," and I mentioned the number of my brother-in-law's house. I saw my sister ascending the steps of the parapet of the bridge, surrounded by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... swift to provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... animal made his way with unobtrusive swiftness the length of the room and stood between the dog and a man who fingered the butt of ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... morning, he called me up to whip me; called me into his dining-room, locked the doors, then ordered me to pull off my shirt. I told him no, sir, I wouldn't; right away he went and got the cowhide, and gave me about twenty over my head with the butt. He tore my shirt off, after I would not pull it off; he ordered me to cross my hands. I didn't do that. After I wouldn't do that he went and got his gun. and broke the breech of that over my head. He then seized ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... was the reply; "and I happen to know her companion, who is a proud girl, but not in the least insolent; and I doubt whether Ginevra will have gained ground in her estimation by making a butt ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... He let his quirt slip butt-first through his hand and grasped the lash. Fadeaway's hand slipped to his holster. Before he could pull his gun, Corliss swung the quirt. The blow caught Fadeaway just below the brim of his hat. He ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... pealings and 2 peaces of lettis and drank haff a pale of water and tiped over 3 whole pales full. one is tame and follows me round. that is the old one. the young one is wild and if i dont look out wil butt me when i aint looking and where i aint xpecting it. once she nocked me over and i hit her with a stick hard. so now when i get in the pen she gets in the corner. she knows she cant fool with ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... seemingly unconscious, stolid Scotchman named Johnstone, with sneers and sarcasms which the Scotchman seemed to disregard or take in good part. On the next morning, however, Townshend's victim, enlightened by some friend as to the way in which he had been made a butt of, became belligerent and sent Townshend a challenge. Various opinions have been expressed of Townshend's action in the matter. He has been applauded for good sense. He has been reproached for cowardice. Certainly Townshend did not, would not fight his challenger. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... trees,—then the rustling and tugging of the creatures, in getting the fallen trees out of the water,—and, finally, the surging and splashing with which they came swimming towards the ground-work of the dam, with the butt end of those trees in their mouths. The line of the dam they had begun, passed with a curve up stream in the middle, so as to give it more strength to resist the current; across the low-water bed of the river ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... we had one especial individual who was commonly regarded as the butt of the room—a good-natured, heavy man, with a dull face and a duller comprehension; but, he seemed proud and pleased always when singled out as a mark for our chaff:—he took it as an honour, I think, ascribing our fun ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... withal, hear you, draw me the biggest shaft you have out of the butt you wot of; away, you know my meaning, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... the school to butt in?" warned Jess. "Then keep quiet, can't you? Much taffy you'll get if Rachel catches us. Your only chance is to lie low, you ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... busxelo. Buskin duonboto. Business (profession) profesio. Business (in general) afero. Business-man aferisto. Bust busto. Bustle movo,—ado. Busy okupa. But sed. But (prep.) krom. Butcher bucxisto. Butler kelisto. Butt (end of gun) kapo de la pafilo. Butter butero. Butterfly papilio. Button (verb) butonumi. Button-hook butonumilo. Button butono. Button-hole butontruo. Buy acxeti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Very well, now is your opportunity. You have insulted not only our friend Osterberg, but the Debating Society of which I am a member. These things cannot go unnoticed. Apparently you selected Osterberg as a butt for your insults, knowing that, from the nature of his studies, he could not retaliate in the usual manner; but such cowardly bullying shall not be passed over, you shall account to ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... justify such being made. To this practice, at least, I am safe in attributing the rarity, if not the positive absence, with the Indian, of that unhappy condition of bow-leggedness, of not too slight prevalence with us, and which renders its victim often a butt for not very charitable ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... impatient, and by degrees deprived me of my natural gaiety. One day when the king was with me, he perceived my want of spirits. "What ails you?" said be, with the greatest solicitude. "What ails me!" replied I, "I wish I were dead, rather than see myself the butt of all the scandal of the foul-mouthed gossips of your court." The king, suspecting the confidence I was about to repose in him, was sorry he had asked for it, and was silent. He began to play a tattoo with his fingers on the chimney-piece. ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... dining-room sat a group of anglers. They looked jovial fellows, and Dickson would fain have joined them; but, having been fishing all day in the Lock o' the Threshes, they were talking their own talk, and he feared that his admiration for Izaak Walton did not qualify him to butt into the erudite discussions of fishermen. The landlord seemed to think likewise, for he drew back a chair for him at the other end, where sat a young man absorbed in a book. Dickson gave him good evening, and got ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Heffelbauer. "How long you dink a code live? Der reborters call him a maskeet. But von day he butt mit his ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... hoping if not for a miraculous maid, yet at least for a passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the country and rouse the ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from Heaven. The gayer and younger portion of the Court probably expected a little amusement, above all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a soothsayer to tell their fortunes and promise good things to come. They had not very much to amuse them, though they made the best of it. The joys of Paris were very far off; they were all but imprisoned in this dull province of Touraine; ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... against a massive carved bookshelf, and looked at Sagan, who, with a cigar-butt buried in his ragged beard, was walking, with long, uncertain steps, up and down the floor. The tiger in the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... in the light of later experience, the attitude which one felt disposed to assume, the attitude that as this was an India Office business with which the War Office had nothing to do it was their funeral, was a mistaken one. The War Office could not, of course, butt in unceremoniously. But Lord Kitchener was a member of the Government in an exceptionally powerful position in all things connected with the war, and had one represented one's doubts to him, he would certainly have gone into ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... himself, he didn't have so very much the best of Heels of the navy-yard. So he looks it over again; fat as a history of the Roman Empire, and hefted it and—well, there were young apprentice-boys aboard that didn't weigh any more. But to make sure, he lashes it to the butt-end of a fourteen-pound shell the gunner had once given him for a desk-weight. He hated to lose that desk-weight, a relic of the Santiago fight, but a good cause this—a good cause. He starts to unscrew his air-port, but come to think, it was still daylight, and so he waits for the ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... of Ireland. When he found that I knew and took an interest in many of the people in his own country his delight was unbounded. The height of his ambition seemed to be to have "tin min undher him," and his greatest trial was "huntin' thim tarmints of cows." He was the butt of all the jokes and tricks in the camps round, yet he took everything good-naturedly; "the boys must have their laugh sometimes," being his only comment. He said he was only thirty-seven, but, according to his own ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... went at it with both hands and fairly made it hum. Then, at the word, with remarkable swiftness, he gave it fist and elbow, first right and then left. Then he did some fancy work at a combination hit and butt. ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... to be piled, it was also the last sheaf to be lifted. It travelled to the stack on the summit of the last load, and, by a happy chance, formed one of the outside layer. By scratching and gnawing continuously for an hour, he worked his way to the butt of it, paused for a moment on the precipitous steep, and then scrambled lightly down to earth. A perpendicular descent was nothing ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... being omitted. I needn't again go over the twenty-four different screws, but, in ease of accident, it will be well to retain their various outside thread diameters in your memory, specially not forgetting that those of the Butt Trap Spring, the Dial Sight Pivot, and the Striker Keeper Screw, stand respectively at .1696, .1656, and .116 of an inch. Of course you will remember the seven pins, and that, if anything should go wrong with the Bolt Head Cover Pin, as you will practically have to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... to help the murderer were shot dead by Jozsef Bardy, who, when he had fired off both his muskets, still defended his prostrated brother with the butt-end of one, until he was overpowered and disarmed; after which a party of them carried him out to the iron cross, and crucified him on it ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... said Win coolly. "I believe it was an English admiral who backed Dewey up at Manila when the Germans tried to butt in. After that battle somebody wrote a poem about it and wrote the truth, too. This is ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... in shape, like a right-angled triangle, with a parallelogram below its base; the hypothenuse or head of the sail is secured to a yard, like an enormous fishing-rod; the halyards are secured to it about a third of the way from the butt-end, and it is hoisted close up to the head of the mast. A tackle brings down the lower end of the yard to the deck, and serves to balance the lofty tapering point, while the sheet is secured to the lower ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... of trees and commenced to dig in. Someone spotted a sniper post, coolly stretched himself out on the ground, muttered: "Three hundred yards," and squinted along the sights. Ping, ping ... two bodies fell limp from a platform—up a leafy tree. The Private slowly cut two notches on his rifle-butt. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... that I believed all of them were Selover's men. He threw the cigarette butt into the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... out of the log, drove it deep into the top log toward the end, and by using the haft to cling to, crawled toward the rear of the load and looked down at the caboose coupling. The top log was a sixteen-foot butt; the two bottom logs were eighteen footers. With a silent prayer of thanks to Providence, Bryce slid down to the landing thus formed. He was still five feet above the coupling, however; but by leaning over the swaying, bumping edge and ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... when she heard the soldier assigned to their home bang on the door with the butt of his rifle, fled to the kitchen, where she stood listening and watching. She nearly cried out when the soldier thrust the bayonet of his rifle at her father, and all the resentment of her race at such injustice rose up ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... And sick my heart from parting agony: My frame is wasted and my vitals wrung * And love-fires grow and eyes set tear-floods free: And when the fire burns high beneath my ribs * With tears I quench it as sad day I see. Love left me wasted, baffled, pain-begone, * Sore frighted, butt to spying enemy: When I recal sweet union wi' their loves * I chase dear sleep from the sick frame o' me. Long as our parting lasts the rival joys * And spies with fearful prudence gain their gree. I fear me for my sickly, langourous ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... all round the fire started into activity. A hasty glance round the encampment showed that their captives were not within its circle. With an exclamation of fury, the captain seized his gun, and with the butt-end struck the sentry to the ground. Then in furious tones he ordered every man off in instant pursuit. Snatching up their arms, some hurried off one way, some another, shouting threats ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... there on. When they hitched up, on the next morning, Cantwell placed the ax, bit down, between the tarpaulin and the sled rail, leaving the helve projecting where his hand could reach it. Grant thrust the barrel of the rifle beneath a lashing, with the butt close by the handle-bars, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... intentionally rude, these gay-spirited young people, but a girl who couldn't play Fox and Geese seemed to them a justifiable butt for ridicule. Determined to succeed, Delight ran from one to another, arriving just too late every time. The unfamiliar exercise wearied her, her cheeks glowed pink with mortification at her repeated failures, and her breath ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... rude wooden bench of newly-hewed wood, lit my pipe again without interference. But I was sorry to miss that conference outside in the open air. I wanted to hear, even if I could not understand. Holaf still remained by my side, and his hand did not leave the oddly-carved butt of the tapered tube-gun. ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Lord and of Gideon!" shouted Gifted Gilfillan, nothing daunted. And he was proceeding to lay about him stoutly, when the pedlar, snatching a musket, felled him to the ground with the butt. The scattered Whig party hurried up to support their leader. In the scuffle, Edward's horse was shot, and he himself somewhat bruised in falling. Whereupon some of the Highlanders took him by the arms, and half-supported, half-carried him away ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... all of them rest on the like untenable grounds. I did not wonder at finding the country abounding in unbelief. Now that the fires of the Inquisition have ceased to burn, the priesthood are made the butt and laughing-stock of those who are educated. Still, the national mind does not run toward the pure Gospel, which is here unknown and prohibited, but to infidelity and socialism. A sincere Protestant can have no sympathy with ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... young, he had been fishing in the river Irvine, attended by a boy who carried his basket, when some English soldiers, belonging to the garrison of Ayr meeting him, insisted on seizing his trout. A fray took place, and Wallace killed the foremost Englishman with a blow from the butt of his fishing-rod, took his sword, and ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... injured, some angry and scowling, and full of complaints and threats now that they were about to be conveyed away; but every angry remonstrance was met by one more severe, and sometimes accompanied by a tap from the butt of a pistol, or a blow given with the hilt or flat ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... alone. I have to think something out all by myself. Nobody can help me, and if I'm here, all the girls will butt in and ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... Boudru's mother was busy with odd jobs in the kitchen garden and the children were playing in the front room, there was a ring at the door and the sound of a butt-end of a rifle, as it "grounded" on the cobble stones. When Boudru on tiptoe lifted the latch, the door swung open, and a big man in a greenish uniform stood before him. There was no sign of cap-badge or title on his shoulder straps, and he was horribly dirty. He ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... water. He likewise sprung his main-mast, and the ship made so much water that she could not be freed by four pumps assisted by bailing. On the 9th the wind became calm, but the sea continued so high that the ship, in rolling, opened all her upper works and seams, and started the butt ends of her planks, and the greatest part of her top-timbers, the bolts being drawn by the violence of the roll. In this condition, with additional disasters to the hull and rigging, they continued beating westward to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... can drive. A year later you will see them driving their knuckles against a log or a tree. In this way they become hardened and are used as a weapon in fights when they are grown. And, too, they can butt like a goat, so in their family fights they not only use their ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... house of my friend, and passing through the door went out on the porch. I sat down and was slipping off my socks, to put on dry ones, when I heard a rustling in the room behind me. The next moment Col. Tucker had his gun leveled on me, but it flashed in the pan. He then whirled up the butt of it to fell me to ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... true-hearted soldier; but he is made too good for this world and somewhat too innocent, too transparently a child of nature. Warrington, with all his sense and honesty, is rough; Pendennis is a bit of a puppy; Clive Newcome is not much of a hero; and as for Dobbin he is almost intended to be a butt. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... strap upon the right side of his saddle, while a leather-covered jug was swung upon the opposite side by a thong looped over the horn. All this the girl took in at a glance as the rangy buckskin picked his way easily up the slope. She noted, also, the white butt-plates of the revolver that protruded from its leather holster. Her first impulse was to mount and fly, but the futility of the attempt was apparent. If the man followed she could hardly hope to elude him upon a horse that was ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... if I'd be so bold!" replied the captain, his nose growing redder as he gave a smile which showed where two front teeth were missing that had been knocked out by the butt end ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in 'Land and Water,' March, 1867, p. 134, on the authority of Capt. Hutton and others. For the wild Pembrokeshire goats, see the 'Field,' 1869, p. 150.), rear on their hind legs, and then not only butt, but "make a cut down and a jerk up, with the ribbed front of their scimitar-shaped horn, as with a sabre. When the O. cycloceros attacked a large domestic ram, who was a noted bruiser, he conquered him by the sheer novelty of his mode of fighting, always closing at once ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... year 1805. As Lousteau died in 1800, and the doctor apparently obeyed a feeling of vanity in paying the lad's board until 1805, the question of the paternity was left forever undecided. Maxence Gilet, the butt of many jests, was soon forgotten, —and for this reason: In 1806, a year after Doctor Rouget's death, the lad, who seemed to have been created for a venturesome life, and was moreover gifted with remarkable vigor ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt to ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... up like lightning, and, swinging the butt of his rifle round—for the weapon was hanging over his right shoulder—struck the figure he could but dimly see beside him, and heard at once a dull thud as the wooden stock rapped the man's head violently. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... were ablaze with wild sputterings and jets of red flame. Eagerly, but carefully, he lowered the fiery ball into the hole, paying out the string till it was evident that the tree was hollow almost down to the butt. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of their ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Edith struck that hand again and again with the heavy butt of her riding-whip, but it did not loosen its grasp. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... group. I found myself looking down at one of those thick-set Burmans whom I always associated with Fu-Manchu's activities. He lay quite flat, face downward; but the back of his head was a shapeless blood-dotted mass, and a heavy stock-whip, the butt end ghastly because of the blood and hair which clung to it, lay beside him. I started back appalled as Smith caught ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... came Aunt Isabelle, and bringing up the rear, General Dick, and the four young people; Leila in a pair of mismated slippers, hippity-hopping behind with Barry, and Porter assuring Mary that he knew he "hadn't any business to butt in to a family party," but ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... peacefully and without a dream; the sun was high in heaven when, with a yawn and a stretching of my limbs, I awoke. I heard, as I opened my eyes, a little rustling as of somebody moving; my hand flew to the butt of my pistol. But when I turned round I saw Barbara only. She was sitting a little way behind me, looking out over the sea. Feeling my gaze she ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... when he went out to his uncle. He had seen Tom Ricketts, of the fourth form, who used to wear a jacket and trousers so ludicrously tight, that the elder boys could not forbear using him in the quality of a butt or 'cockshy'—he had seen this very Ricketts arrayed in crimson and gold, with an immense bear-skin cap on his head, staggering under the colours of the regiment. Tom had recognised him and gave him a patronising nod. Tom, a little wretch whom he had cut ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... von Schonburg saw near his camp by the water-holes a small group of horsemen standing motionless in the desert, their lances erect, butt downward, resting on the sand, the little company looking like an oasis of leafless poplars. The Count was instantly astride his Arab charger, at the head of his men, ready to meet whatever came, but on ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... never forgot. "You kin call yourself Abbie if you choose," he used to say, "and 'tain't none o' my business, but I was in the meetin'-house and heard Zeke let drive, and b'gosh it sounded just like a buzz-saw strikin' the butt-end of a log. 'Abijah! Abijah! he hollered. Shet Parson Simmons up same's a steel trap. Gosh, but it ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the "Cods," or leaders of the forecastle, and descending until he arrives at poor Rope Yarn, or Ropey, as he was called, a stunted journeyman baker from Holborn, the most helpless and forlorn of all land-lubbers, the butt and drudge of the ship's company! A Dane, a Portuguese, a Finlander, a savage from Hivarhoo, sundry English, Irish, and Americans, a daring Yankee beach-comber, called Salem, and Sydney Ben, a runaway ticket-of-leave-man, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... intervention. The sensitiveness of his nature appeared in his falling in love at first sight with a Highland girl whom Burke and he casually met during a tour. His loss of her made a painful impression on him.[406] The butt of an unkind fate, he seemed destined also to be the leader of lost causes; and the proud and penniless emigres found in him ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... nothing, but his gauntleted hand moved down to the butt of one of his pistols. His heart throbbed, but he preserved the appearance of coolness. He was fast becoming inured to danger. Owing to the slope they could not increase the speed of their horses greatly, but they were beyond the mouth of the path before they were seen by Skelly and ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the spike of his pole in, and they all lifted together, and the butt end of the log slipped a little way into ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... him the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Nobly he maintained his reputation as a thief by quietly going behind the bar and lifting from a box four cigars which he stowed away in his pockets. But even that, apparently did not satisfy him, for when he espied the butt of a cigar, flung into the sawdust on the floor by a man who had just come in, he picked it up before squatting down again to resume ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... his shoulders, Larrikins stumbled over a dead Arab that lay in front of him, and down came he with 'old Hankey Pankey' all in a heap together, with a couple of Somalis, at whom they were going full butt. ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... slope, and stuck its claws well into the ice in front of it. I ran back to the foot of the slope to meet it. Its claws lost hold, and it came down thundering, like a huge round stone from a mountain side. I stood, and, measuring exactly its line of descent, stuck the butt of my spear into the ice with the point sloping upwards. Then I retired to see the end, for I did not dare to stand near to it. It happened as I had wished: the bear came straight on my spear. The point went in at the breast-bone, and came out ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... and flat-brimmed hat of the style now made common by the Boy Scouts. His shirt was flannel, and his heavy roping saddle studded with silver conchas. He was belted with heavy cartridges, and a holster strapped down to his leg showed the butt of a ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... here," said Ambrose. "Do what you're told without asking questions. If you make a racket you'll be cracked over the head with the butt of ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... waiting for them. In his imagination, he could see them coming up in single file, Vahr Farg's son in the lead, and he could imagine himself hidden behind a mound of snow, the ice-staff upright to brace his left hand and the forestock of the rifle resting on his outthrust thumb and the butt against his shoulder. The first bullet would be for Vahr. He could shoot all of them, one after another, ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... questions; she went so far as to speak of painting, of music, of dancing—even of sculpture! She proved herself equally familiar with the pencil, with tunes, and with books, until Thaddeus was petrified by so much learning, and feared that he might become the butt of ridicule, and stammered like a little lad before his teacher. Luckily the teacher was beautiful and lenient; his neighbour guessed the cause of his perturbation, and shifted the talk to less deep and difficult subjects, to the cares and troubles of existence in the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table.(140) He was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning and required a nurse like a child. His contemporaries reviled these misfortunes with a strange acrimony, and made his poor deformed person the butt for many a bolt of heavy wit. The facetious Mr. Dennis, in speaking of him, says, "If you take the first letter of Mr. Alexander Pope's Christian name, and the first and last letters of his surname, you have A. P. E." Pope catalogues, at the end of the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... adopt the uncongenial part of a moralist, who found it convenient to cultivate the friendship of the strictest sectaries, and to pose as the saviour of the kingdom. It was not the first, nor the only, antic by which he made himself, as Zimri, the easy butt of Dryden's satire. He became the prime favourite of the people, and his power with the mob seemed to make him the rival of the King. It added to the zest with which he pursued this new freak, that it helped him to satisfy ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... whole they carry on the benignant scheme of social nature, like the other instincts that rule the animal creation. But of all the most numerous are the men, who have ever more their own dearliest beloved self, as the only or main goal or butt of their endeavours straight and steady before their eyes, and whose whole inner world turns on the great axis of self-interest. These form the majority, if not of mankind, yet of those by whom the business of life is carried on; and most expedient ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... as descriptive of a malt liquor, will be found than the one noticed by our correspondent; for it was only about 1722 that Harwood, a London brewer, commenced brewing this liquor, which he called "entire," or "entire butt," implying that it was drawn from one cask or butt. It subsequently obtained the name of porter, from its ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... troubler of the magistrates and ministers of his time, was asked how it was he let Crassus alone, "Oh," said he, "he carries hay on his horns," alluding to the custom of tying hay to the horns of a bull that used to butt, that people might keep out of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did. We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up and down town telling people how smart he was. Then ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Alekper! Do nothing for him: here's news, my masters! What new prophets for us are these unwashed Russians?" The Captain was a brave man, and thoroughly understood the Asiatics. "Away, ye rascals!" he cried in a rage, laying his hand on the butt of his pistol. "Be silent, or the first that dares to let an insult pass his teeth, shall have them closed with a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... verdict upon actions which may be carelessly misrepresented, or words, if not intentionally, yet heedlessly misquoted, without affording an opportunity to the condemned individual to speak for himself, is unjust in the extreme. But how many excellent persons are made the butt of ridicule, or tossed about as the playthings of a gossipping spirit, which, incapable of a direct charge, gratifies its malignity by infusing calumnies into the too listening ear of prejudice. An idle report is, by this means, magnified and circulated to an incalculable extent; ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... lowlands, and is very crooked, has a slow current and divides much into canos and strings of lagoons which flood the flat, low areas of country on either side. It is simply the drainage ditch of districts which are extensively overflowed in the rainy season. Captain Butt ascended it 195 m., to near its ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... external source or other; but I can make no sort of conjecture whence; and certainly no one had ever spoken to me on the subject of the Catholic religion, which I only knew by name. The French master was an emigre priest, but he was simply made a butt, as French masters too commonly were in that day, and spoke English very imperfectly. There was a Catholic family in the village, old maiden ladies we used to think; but I knew nothing but their name. I have of late years heard that there were one or two Catholic boys in the school; ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... ranks, filling up the gaps as they were formed, and returning as best they could the fire of the Prussians, held together with sullen obstinacy. By this time the ammunition on both sides was exhausted, and now the struggle became hand to hand, bayonet against bayonet, butt end ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... under censure by venturing, without his wife's authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his whip. At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of the stove pipe, "Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa! The'e's somebody knockin'." The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard within, and in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... for Wilson, Yugoslavia and so forth. The carabinieri rushed among them, howling vengeance. A Mrs. Politeo, who was holding a bouquet, was flung down by them and trampled on. The lawyers and the doctor with whom I had been walking were all three struck over the head or on the shoulders with the butt end of muskets. (La Dalmazia wrote that I had been filling their heads with idle tales.) Children were screaming. I saw another woman, hatless, being dragged off by a couple of carabinieri—and a naval officer, who was disgusted, sternly ordered them to ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... their vast numbers. The firing, at point-blank range, was so furious that the men's clothing was ignited. Nothing could stand before it, all went down; and the work that it left unfinished was completed by bayonet and musket butt. Of the brave men who rode into action that day two-thirds remained upon the battlefield, and the sole end achieved by that mad charge was to add another glorious page to history. And then Zephyr, struck by a musket-ball full in the chest, dropped in a heap, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... draw rein, and with a cheer the cavalry rode down into the midst of the foe. There was a wild, fierce fight, lance against spear, sabre against sword, the butt-end of a rifle or the deadly knife. Some cut their way through unscathed. Others were surrounded and cut off. Splendid feats of heroism were performed. Many of those who got over returned to rescue officers or comrades, until at last all ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... had forgotten it till then—and, tightly seizing it in his strong hands, he flings the butt end against the lock. The wood is old, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the principal mark or butt; the most conspicuous, owing to his being in advance of his men, and perhaps on account of his stature also, if "eg gawr," or ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately passed him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept him as a butt for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles. If, as was his usual custom, he dropped asleep, after a meal, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... gains his elastic blow by the free movement of the wrist. To gain a similarly elastic blow mechanically in his first action, Cristofori cut a notch in the butt of his hammer from which the escapement lever, "linguetta mobile" as he called it—"hopper," as we call it—being centered at the base, moved forward, when the key was put down, to the extent of its radius, and after the delivery of the blow returned to its resting place by the pressure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... about food made a warm, sickish taste rise in his mouth. He brought out the hardtack which Boyd had so indignantly rejected the night before, and holding the chunk balanced on his saddle horn, rapped it smartly with the butt of a revolver. It broke raggedly across, and then he was able to crack it ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... We were undoubtedly put into a great consternation on this account, lest they should run into our grove, and consequently bring us into the like danger. Hereupon we resolved to kill the first that came, to prevent discovery, and that too with our swords, and the butt end of our muskets, for fear the report of ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... thus should stand, The butt of every tearful eye; To raise the Culprit's trembling hand, To heave the Culprit's ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... numerous. They haunt river sides, and the shores of lakes and ponds. None of these are easily got at, on account of the wood-dogs; but the rams of the horned kind are reputed to sometimes turn upon the pursuing pack, and butt them to death. In the extremity of their terror whole flocks of wild sheep have been driven over precipices and ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... was wholly free from solemnity, and when he heard or saw what was ludicrous was not afraid to laugh at it. Sir Robert Peel was an excellent hand at what our fathers called banter and we call chaff. A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the grand seigneur's manner. The victim was dimly conscious that he was being laughed at, but comically uncertain about the best means of reprisal. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... which met his eyes. Every one of the Dutchmen had got his musket to an order, following a sort of fugleman of their own; while Mike had invented a "motion" that would have puzzled any one but himself to account for. The butt of the piece was projected towards the captain, quite out of line, while the barrel rested on his own shoulder. Still, as his arms were extended to the utmost, the county Leitrim-man fancied he was performing ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... standard, a long spear's length in front of our line. But by this I had leapt to my feet; and it was time, for he was almost on me. Spear had I none; so I dragged out the standard shaft from the ground where I had struck it, and levelled that sharp butt end full at his chest. Overhead was his axe again, and I had no shield to stop the blow; but I must ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... household ought to offer, and did present in miniature, the elements of a complete society. Among the inmates there was, as in the world at large, one poor discouraged creature—a butt on whom mocking pleasantries were rained. This patient sufferer was the old vermicelli maker, Goriot. Six years before, he had come to live at the Maison Vauquer, having, so he said, retired from business. He dressed handsomely, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... fact, we found terrible proofs of the enemy's presence. After taking possession of the towns and villages, they had arrested the inhabitants, maltreated them with saber-strokes and the butt ends of their guns, stripping them of their clothing, and compelling those to follow them whom they thought capable of serving as guides on their march; and if they were not guided as they expected they killed with the sword or shot their unfortunate prisoners. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... a Sweater, and whose people butt into the Society Column with Sickening Regularity, started to Tackle Low; he had Bushy Hair and a Thick Neck, and his strong Specialty was to swing on ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... splendidly dressed, of a haughty countenance, displaying the greatest contempt for all the arguments addressed to him, his impatience being marked by "Has!" accompanied by stamping on the ground the while and striking it with the butt of his spear. This chief was in confinement at Lubuagan, but, to save his face, Governor Hale had ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... increase the wrath of the man of law. He looked at Miss Vernon with such an air of spite and resentment, as laid me under a strong temptation to knock him off his horse with the butt-end of my whip, which I only suppressed ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Church, for all of them rest on the like untenable grounds. I did not wonder at finding the country abounding in unbelief. Now that the fires of the Inquisition have ceased to burn, the priesthood are made the butt and laughing-stock of those who are educated. Still, the national mind does not run toward the pure Gospel, which is here unknown and prohibited, but to infidelity and socialism. A sincere Protestant can have no ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... look at him and he added reassuringly: "Oh, don't mistake me. I don't want to butt into your set—not for social purposes, anyhow; but if ever it should come handy to know any of 'em in a business way, would you fix it up for me—AFTER ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the butt of his revolver, ready to draw, if necessary, to enforce his command. Buck saw the movement, and shouted to him: "Keep your hand away from that gun, Sheriff. You know I am quick on the draw." He significantly fingered ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... mouth and eyes had become deeper and sharper. Some perpetual indignation seemed smouldering in the knitted brow and protruding upper lip. He sat there silent and motionless for some half hour, his chin resting on his hands, and they again upon the butt of his axe, apparently in deep thought, and listening with a silent sneer to the clinking of glasses ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... vacant place they covet before their eyes. Then, I can never count change even when my mind is tranquil, and she knows that, and swoops threateningly upon me in booking offices and stationers' shops. When I am dodging cabs at crossings she will appear from behind an omnibus or carriage and butt into me furiously. She holds her umbrella in her folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff, and with as deadly effect. Sometimes she discards her customary navy blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with bead trimmings, and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... through them without disgrace. Before, and after them, I walked about—supervised, as I have mentioned, by the man with the wooden leg. How vividly I call to mind the damp about the house, the green cracked flagstones in the court, an old leaky water-butt, and the discoloured trunks of some of the grim trees, which seemed to have dripped more in the rain than other trees, and to have blown less in the sun! At one we dined, Mr. Mell and I, at the upper end of a long bare dining-room, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... time the fair Editha had exercised her undoubted charms over Marmaduke's violent nature, but latterly she had become a mere butt for his outbursts of rage. But now to her astonishment, and in response to her petulant reproach, his fury seemed to fall away from him. He threw his head back and broke out into uncontrolled, half-sarcastic, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... deck, up and around on the ship. "Doggone!" he breathed. "I am the ranking—I'm the only naval officer present." Then he shook his head and bent to his patient. He might have the rank, but the last thing he was going to do was to butt in on any ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... match and looked around him, seeing an old rusty tin candlestick with the butt of a candle in it on a shelf under ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... Anne Scott, who seemed to be from her cradle the butt for mischance to shoot arrows at. Her childhood was marked by perilous escapes from the most extraordinary accidents. Among others, I remember an iron-railed door leading into the area in the centre of George's Square being closed by the wind, while her fingers ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Wayfarer's Tickle—the same who sat at cards with the mail-boat doctor and beat his dog with the butt of a whip—having got news of my father's death, came presently to our harbour, with that in mind which jumped ill with our plans. We had dispiriting weather: a raw wind bowled in from the northeast, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... poker be heated" were the fearful words which greeted Mr. Verdant Green on his initiation into a spoof Lodge of Freemasonry at Oxford. This was one of the many "rags" of which he was the butt during his days at ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... patently strong—strong enough to excuse any disheartenment. Scarcely a window pierced its narrow butt-end, four stories high, under which the steps wound. It ended just where they met the towpath, and from its angle sprang a brick wall dead-blank, at least twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and at Rome and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the principal grotesque characters. These things, as Rousseau pointed out, have a great effect upon morals. Once the old man became a recognised traditional stage-butt, his social authority had come to an end. In the de Senectute it is obvious that Cicero is running counter to the stream in seeking to restore to favour a character about whom the public is indifferent and for whom all he can do is ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... she was quiet—the quiet that is deliberative, threatening. Then she slowly closed her fingers about the whip butt. Fixing her gaze in passionate anger upon him, she advanced a ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... said Mills promptly, lowering the butt of his gun to the ground and resting both hands on the muzzle. The stranger started slightly, but did not cease ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... his first trophy as a hunter. While bending down some branches over head, without looking up, an opossum fell upon his hat, knocking it over his eyes, and springing on the neck of Pete, thence leaped to the ground. But before it disappeared Joe had dismounted, and giving it a blow with the butt of his musket it rolled over on its side, with its eyes closed and tongue hanging out, indicating that the stroke ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... village instead of a king. Around this smoke-shrouded table the most important affairs of state were discussed. Around it the rudest practical jokes were perpetrated. Gundling, a beer-bibbing author, whom the king made at once his historian and his butt, was the principal sufferer from these frolics, which displayed abundantly that absence of wit and presence of brutality which is the characteristic of the practical joke. As if in scorn of rank and official dignity, Frederick gave this sot and fool the title of baron and created him chancellor ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... which he was apoinnted by your worshipp at Mydsomer to do, for the churche yarde lyeth to commons and all other thynkes in the churche is ondonne.... I praye you dele w[i]t[h] hym so yt he maye be a presydent for them that shall have the offyce; for they wyll but jess att itt, and saye it is butt a mony matter: therefore lett them paye well for the penaltie whiche was sett on theire heads." Continuing, the writer states that his reason for writing is "that you be not abewseid in youre office by there muche intreatyng for themselffes, ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... in the castle the thundering blows which the Tyrolese struck with the butt-ends of their rides against the door of the room where Ulrich von Hohenberg ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... I must avow that I had also a certain degree of pride which prevented me from making advances when unfairly treated. I had always lived in an atmosphere of confidence, love, and goodwill,—perhaps I had been a little spoilt by the kindness of my friends, and now it seemed hard to be a butt for ill-natured sarcasms. These shafts, however, were seldom, if ever, let loose in the presence of my husband, who would not have tolerated it; the want of welcome being as much as he could bear. Still, there was no doubt that matters had slightly mended since our first visit, and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... succeeded also in reaching the fence unhurt, but in the act of crossing, were vigorously assailed by several Indians, who throwing down their guns, rushed upon them with their tomahawks. The young man defended his sister gallantly, firing upon the enemy as they approached, and then wielding the butt of his rifle with a fury that drew the whole attention upon himself, and gave his sister an opportunity of effecting her escape. He quickly fell, however, under the tomahawk of his enemies, and was found at daylight, scalped ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... elbow to elbow the Germans charged, their bayonets a sea of flashing steel, their thunderous shouts drowning the roar of guns, and rank on rank they reeled back from British steel and swinging rifle-butt, and German shouts died and were ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... it is strange to see what Daedalian complications, and wheels within wheels, we have contrived to work into the superstructure. A modern ward heeler in New York could have taken up the whole frame of government in Seventeenth Century New England by the butt end, and cracked it like a whip—provided of course the Pilgrim fathers had allowed him ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... there! Give room! The Regent comes from Mass. Guards, butt them on the toes—way there! give room! Prick ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... his daughters, but rather to his sons, and often to the eldest son alone, as in the old feudal days. Social conventions are not unlike those of other southern countries. For the majority of women marriage is the one aim in life, and an unmarried woman is shown little consideration and is the butt of much ridicule. In the northern part of Italy, women are gaining a certain amount of liberty in these latter days, and young girls of the better class may, without causing much comment, go upon the street unattended. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... in behind the sheltering jiggermast, and even as he ducked his left hand dipped into his side coat-pocket, so that when he had gained shelter it was coming out with a fresh clip of cartridges. The empty clip fell to the deck, the loader clip slipped up the hollow butt, and he was good ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... wot makes me so squeamish these days," he drawled, with a slow smile. "He sartin desarved it in the throat. That Pole 'n' me's goin' to butt agin each other some more. I never was wuth shucks when it comes to justice . . . an' I allus suffer fer it after. Look at Bilsy, an' Dutch ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... there's no denyin' That it ain't so easy tryin' To grin and grip your rifle by the butt, When the 'ole world rips asunder, And you sees yer pal go under, As a bunch of shrapnel sprays 'im on the nut; I admit it's 'ard contrivin' When you 'ears the shells arrivin', To discover you're a bloomin' bit o' spunk; But, my lad, you've got to do it, And your God will ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... never gave any particular heed to it. I used to see the automatic lying in the drawer of the wardrobe in Mr. Parrish's room in a wash-leather case. I noticed this steel appliance, sir, because the case wouldn't shut over the pistol with it on and the butt used to stick out." ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... try to butt in on Happy Jack's specialty," Weary remonstrated, folding the message and slipping it inside the yellow envelope. "If this is the same jasper that cooked there a month ago, we're going to eat ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... the officer's advice, and gave me One with the butt end of a pistol, which nearly clove my skull in twain, and certainly made me peaceable and quietness, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... plough. Lot 222. Iron turnwrist [pronounced turn-riced] plough. Lot 242. 9-time scarifier. Lot 251. Clod crusher. Lot 252. Hay tedder." From another catalogue more ramalogues, these abrupt and active little words might be called, butt at one. As "Lot 4. Flint spud, two drain scoops, bull lead and five dibbles. Lot 10. Dung rake and dung devil. Lot 11. Four juts and a zinc skip." Farm labourers are men of little speech, and it is often needful that voices ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the quiet of unlimited expectation, a particularly elaborate act was being prepared. A massive wooden stand, with shelves and seats at various heights, was brought in. Signor Tomaso, coiling the lash of his whip and holding the heavy handle, with its loaded butt, as a sceptre, took his place on a somewhat raised seat at the centre of the frame. Hansen, with his pitchfork in one hand and a whip like Tomaso's in the other, drew nearer; and the audience, with a thrill, realized that something more than ordinarily dangerous was on the cards. The tiger came ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... a start as his eyes lifted above the saddle, and his hand dropped to the butt of the revolver which he carried so clumsily in his belt. Hun Shanklin was standing there facing him, not above a dozen feet away, grinning dubiously, but with what he doubtless meant ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... for release from an atmosphere grown suddenly boresome. The elder by four seconds went to the door and, affecting intense maturity, spat out from it. The younger, dipping his head in the water-butt near the leader, took a small comb from his pocket and, using the disturbed water-butt as a mirror, began parting into ideal smoothness his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... marked the winter with the triumphant Nor'westers of Athabasca Lake. Often, when wild drinking songs were ringing in the Nor'westers' dining hall, the Hudson's Bay men would be brought in to furnish a butt for their merciless victors. One night, when the hall was full of Indians, one of the Northwest bullies began to brawl out a song in celebration of the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... footsteps, and I knew Levi in a moment, as the gas lamp shone on him. I didn't want to play spy, but I did want to know what that chap was up to. So, while their backs was towards me, I crawled behind the water-butt without making any noise, and I could catch a few words now and then, as they were not ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... and dull resentment, eyed his companion askance, with furtive suspicion. Their association was now one of some seven years' standing; and it seemed a grievous thing that, after posing so long as the patient butt of his rude humour, P.S. should have so suddenly turned and proved himself the better man—and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... spot by some running stream, where there is plenty of red willow, has been fixed upon for a camping-place, and a fire has been lighted, the squaws cut a quantity of the willow, and, making a rude framework of the larger branches, of which the butt-ends are fixed firmly into the ground, and the small ends bound together to look like a small dome, they weave the smaller branches and twigs in and out until the whole affair looks like a great leafy basket turned upside down. The entrance is very low, and when once inside, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... are very important. The American tuna rod is an excellent piece of workmanship. It is made in two pieces, the tip and the butt. The tip, according to the rules of the Tuna Club, must not be less than 6ft. long, and fits into the butt just above the reel. It is made of split cane, but with no steel centre, and is very strong and stiff, bending a little ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... camp-fire, and an unpleasantly modulated voice asks us to say our prayers, adding that we are on the point of going to Glory with our boots on. I think perhaps there may be some truth in this, as the mouth of a horse-pistol almost grazes my forehead, while immediately behind the butt of that death-dealing weapon I perceive a large man with black whiskers. Other large men begin to assemble, also with horse-pistols. Dr. Hingston hastily explains, while I go back to the carriage to say my prayers, where there is more room. The men were miners ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... night, behold the young Beaver toiling with might and main. His parents have felled a tree, and it is his business to help them cut up the best portions and carry them home. He gnaws off a small branch, seizes the butt end between his teeth, swings it over his shoulder, and makes for the water, keeping his head twisted around to the right or left so that the end of the branch may trail on the ground behind him. Sometimes ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... the chaste keeping of the heroes of the dragonnades.[115] Happily, her mother had come to see her start, had followed her in spite of everything, and they did not dare to beat her away with their butt-ends. She stayed in the room, kept watch—neither of them, indeed, lying down—and shielded her child ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... thus delineating the character of Nathan Slaughter, the latter found himself surrounded by the young men of the Station, the butt of a thousand jests, and the victim of the insolence of the captain of horse-thieves. It is not to be supposed that Roaring Ralph was really the bully and madman that his extravagant freaks and expressions seemed to proclaim ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... blow—with a heavy head sea, that prevented our sailing even when we got aslant. On the afternoon of the day we quitted Stornaway, I got a notion how it was going to be; the sun went angrily down behind a bank of solid grey cloud, and by the time we were up with the Butt of Lewis, the whole sky was in tatters, and the mercury nowhere, with a ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... revolver through the crack butt first. '; Take this, you Yankee, and remember that you will surely be hung if you don't get ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... Miss Ross. I can see you are thoroughly capable and independent; but, believe me, India is not like England, and a white woman needs a good many things done for her here if she's to be at all comfortable. I don't want to butt in and be a nuisance; but just remember I'm there ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... menes to make a bourse! but must walke in the raine, when ytt raineth, more lyker pedlers then marchants; and in thys countrie, and all other, there is no kynde of pepell that have occasion to meete, butt they have a plase meete for that pourpose." Indeed, Clough got quite excited over the thought that London, of all cities in the world, possessed no decent accommodation for merchants transacting their everyday business, and declared his readiness to build "so fere a bourse in London as the grett ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... difficulty of questioning a dying man, whose countenance expressed his gloomy fanaticism, and he turned away his head with a frown. Two soldiers, friends of those whom Marche-a-Terre had so brutally killed with the butt of his whip, stepped back a pace or two, took aim at the Chouan, whose fixed eyes did not blink at the muzzles of their guns, fired at short range, and brought him down. When they approached the dead body to strip it, the dying man found strength to ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... cut the sticks for the shafts the Cave-men made gifts to the wood-gods, and asked for the straightest and toughest branches that grew on the trees. Then they cut the branches carefully and carried them home to the cave. There they peeled them from butt to tip and smoothed them with stone scrapers. Sometimes they rubbed them with fat and laid them away to dry. It was hard work to make a crooked stick straight. But the Cave-men tried many ways and at last they learned ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... house, a dirty blanket let down outside the window. The tree made a black pattern on it. Clear glass beads hung in a row from the black branch, each black twig was tipped with a glass bead. When Jenny opened the window there was a queer cold smell like the smell of the black water in the butt. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... a second. The butt of the pistol that would equalize the affair was almost within his grasp, and Muller stood in the light, but he saw an ominous glint in the pale blue eyes and the farmer's fingers tighten on the haft. There ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... that sort of thing. Since we can't hold you a prisoner now, we release you. It's likely that you don't know your way to your own camp, but your red comrade here will guide you. My friend didn't break his skull, when he struck him with the butt of his rifle, though it was a shrewd blow. He's ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... advised that a club, of which he was an honorary member, would entertain him—that it would be a farmer's night. Alfred well knew there would be great fun at the expense of the farmer. He would be the butt of all the jokes the busy brains of a dozen or more keen wits could devise. Therefore, he studied for days that he might in a humorous way parry the jibes. Nothing humorous in connection with the farm could be evolved from his brain. He was too ambitious, ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... tired you were, and though I hated to 'butt in' on your performance, I just felt I had to, to save ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... came to pass that when he tackled one hulking and bashful sort of a chap who stuttered, Kyle was in most excellent mood to have a little fun with a butt. Even Echford Flagg ceased operations to listen, for the humor seemed to be sharp-edged enough ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... went out on the point of the ledge to whistle the dolphins' summons. Tino-rau's sleek head bobbed above water as he answered the girl with a bubbling squeak. Karara knelt and the dolphin came to butt ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... keeping abreast of the boats as well as they were able, crying out taunts and imprecations; and one, more zealous in his passion, went to the top of a hill and struck the earth three times with the butt of his gun,—the registration of a mighty oath against the whites, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... he makes off as if for Berwick and the sea. Once or twice he leaps clean into the air, a flying bar of silver. Then he sulks at the bottom, a mere dead weight, attempting devices only to be conjectured. A common plan now is to tighten the line, and tap the butt end of the rod. This humane expedient produces effects not unlike neuralgia, it may be supposed, for the fish is off in a new fury. But rush after rush grows tamer, till he is drawn within reach of the gaff, and so on to the grassy bed, where a tap on the head ends his sorrows, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... flags of England, France, and Turkey; and the lion and the eagle conjointly supported devices which bore the names "Alma, Balaclava, and Inkermann." At the dejeuner sherry was served which had reached the venerable age of one hundred and nine years, was valued at L600 the butt, and had belonged to the great Napoleon. The same evening, the Queen and the Prince, with their guests, went in State to the Italian Opera, where Fidelio was performed. "We literally drove through a sea of human ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... the scythe and knew it must be old Father Time. The hour-glass puzzled me no little though. The man has cotton batting wings. One of them is a little wabbly, but what can you expect from Caledonia? They're always trying to butt the bull off the bridge. They're jealous of our town. Oh, they stooped to all the mean, underhanded tricks you ever heard of to get the canning factory to go to their place instead of here. But we know a thing ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... pistol ready by my side. I slept peacefully and without a dream; the sun was high in heaven when, with a yawn and a stretching of my limbs, I awoke. I heard, as I opened my eyes, a little rustling as of somebody moving; my hand flew to the butt of my pistol. But when I turned round I saw Barbara only. She was sitting a little way behind me, looking out over the sea. Feeling my gaze she ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... himself back again before the house, and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... to go?" Quin finished it for her. "Now, look here, Miss Isobel; you can fire me, but you know you can't fire the furnace! Who is going to stay here at night? Who is going to carry Madam up and down stairs? Of course I don't want to butt in, but if ever a house needed a man it's this one. Why don't you have me stay on until things get to running ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn't much. He said, 'See here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of himself—though there was a light in his eyes ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... thought of applying such adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the world's attention is too absurd for discussion; grown men and women may speak kindly of a harmless creature who utters amiable sentiments and is a helpless nincompoop ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... at the gate. Sunfish scrambled with his feet for secure footing, found it and waded up to the front door. The water was a foot deep on the porch. Thurston beat an imperative tattoo upon the door with the butt of his quirt, and shouted. And Mona's voice, shorn of its customary assurance, answered faintly from ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... 'striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone.' His arguments, indeed, never seem to have owed much to such logic as implies systematic and continuous thought. He scarcely waits till his pistol misses fire to knock you down with the butt-end. The merit of his best sayings is not that they compress an argument into a phrase, but that they are vivid expressions of an intuitive judgment. In other words, they are always humorous rather than witty. He holds his own belief with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mean time, had escorted the children to the larch-copse bordering on the lane which leads to the village. Now he crept stealthily back to the yard, and established himself behind the water-butt. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... was only too glad when Jennie Bruce spoke to her. She was just a little afraid of Jennie's sharp tongue; and yet she had never been the butt of any of the harum-scarum's jokes. Perhaps Jennie had spared Nancy because the latter was so much alone. The ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... emptied at a gulp and called for more. There was a strange silence in the house—a silence in decided contrast to the screams I had heard, and I wondered if the wretches had shot the woman. I started to knock on the door with the butt of my pistol, but Jane Ryder ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... passing members touching the question of the expectant Jorrocks and the missing purse. Beyond, however, eliciting many sallies of wit from the younger spirits, for it was part of the major's policy to lay himself open to be a butt, his laudable perseverance was entirely thrown away. At last he gave it up in disgust, and raising his stick hailed a passing 'bus, into which he sprang, taking a searching glance round to see that no one was following him. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scrambled out on the jam and was clawing out the butt of a log with a rude sort of boat-hook. It slid forward slowly as an alligator moves, three or four others followed it, and the green water spouted through the gaps they had made. Then the villagers howled and shouted and scrambled ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... time for reflection, for it was a hot day, and though he drove slowly, the horses were sweating at every pore. Pel Frost, then, must have overheard his wife's storm of reproaches, perhaps even her threats of violence. It had come to this, that he was the village laughing-stock, a butt of ridicule at the store ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... otherwise, of others. There are people in whom the adversely critical spirit is so highly developed that they find it hard to praise any one or to hear any one praised—their criticism leaps to the surface in one way or another, in the sneer, in the "butt," in the joke, in the gibe, in the openly expressed attack. This way of being superior may be direct and open, more often it is disguised. Many a woman (and man) who denounces the sinner receives from her contemplation ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... heap of refuse; four or five gaunt ferocious-looking dogs came bounding up to greet their comrade Festhold; and a great old long-bearded goat stood on the top of the mixen, looking much disposed to butt at any newcomer. The Sorel family had brought cleanliness from Flanders, and Hausfrau Johanna was scrupulously dainty in all her appointments. Christina scarcely knew how she conveyed herself and her ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with an instinct that sleep could not deny, his left hand kept clasped around the butt of ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... clerk" is far too stiff and formal for that soul of good-heartedness striving in vain to hide behind a bluff exterior—"Eddie," I say, blew a last cloud of smoke from his lungs to the ceiling, tossed aside the butt of his cigarette, and motioned to me to take the ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... often to miss opportunities of effective intervention. The sensitiveness of his nature appeared in his falling in love at first sight with a Highland girl whom Burke and he casually met during a tour. His loss of her made a painful impression on him.[406] The butt of an unkind fate, he seemed destined also to be the leader of lost causes; and the proud and penniless emigres found in him their ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. We have got brain, and know when we ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... not aware of the presence of the men until they were directly behind him. Then he turned, only to be met with a blow on the head with the butt of a pistol, and he sank to the ground with ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... de nat'al stuffin' outen you,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin'. She des hilt on, en den Brer Rabbit lose de use er his feet in de same way. Brer Fox, he lay low. Den Brer Rabbit squall out dat ef de Tar-Baby don't tu'n 'im loose he butt 'er cranksided. En den he butted, en his head got stuck. Den Brer Fox, he sa'ntered fort', lookin' dez ez innercent ez wunner yo' ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... latter's work calls for the process, despite the pretensions of modern criticism that it must not be criticised. Although to buffet an anonym is to beat the air, still the very effort does good. A well-known and popular novelist of the present day was a favourite butt for certain journalists who, with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... or his comfort to its supreme purpose. Fame was merely foolishness when caught in the trap of martial law. I saw a man of European reputation flourish his card before railway officials, to be thrust back by the butt end of a rifle, No money could buy a seat in a railway carriage already crowded to suffocation. No threat to write a letter to the Times would avail an old-fashioned Englishman when his train was shunted for hours on to a side line to make way for troop trains, passing, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... quite true, but it does not go far to account for their failure. Punch has done this steadily ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the butt of its ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether "the friends of progress," using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great consequence. Most people in the United ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the fete to be given by the Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card of invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this time to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of all the streetsters. The poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton House, proud as a peacock, and he was greeted with a tremendous cheer from the bystanding mob, but when he came to the lackeys he was told that his card was a hoax and sent about his business. The ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... by four pillars, like a bedstead. Below lay the body of a priest, embalmed and gilt. I intended to have brought this home, but before I arrived there, I found one of my marines, a graceless dog without religion or any other good quality, very busy hammering the mummy to pieces with the butt end of his musket. I was very angry, and ordered him to desist. In excuse, he replied that it was an abominable molten image, and it was his duty, as a good Christian, to destroy it—the only evidence of Christianity ever witnessed on ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... themselves again concern animals. Experience as interpreted by the English law has shown that dogs, rams, and bulls are in general of a tame and mild nature, and that, if any one of them does by chance exhibit a tendency to bite, butt, or gore, it is an exceptional phenomenon. Hence it is not the law that a man keeps dogs, rams, bulls, and other like tame animals at his peril as to the personal damages which they may inflict, unless he knows or has notice that the particular animal kept by him has the abnormal tendency ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... must have electrified the club almost as much as the first appearance of The Traveler, and let them still deeper into the character and talents of the man they had been accustomed to consider as their butt. Retaliation, in a word, closed his accounts with the club, and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the boatswain. "Carew took 'is gun away, and 'it 'im over the eye with the butt of it. Laid 'im out, same as you. They let the lass take 'im into 'is room and stay there to nurse 'im. I seen ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... coat he brought a gleaming weapon with a long barrel and an unusually large butt—an air pistol of great power and reliability. In the old South African times Bullard had been a notable shot with rifle and revolver, and practice during the last few days had shown him that his hand and ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... till the last biscuit is eaten, and the scuttle-butt shall be dry, with no better fortune. It is not my business to teach your Honor; but there is not a man in the ship, who ever expects to be a farthing the better for her capture. Men are of many minds concerning ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... brutal and unreasoning violence, they were hauled and pushed down the steep, winding path to where the camels were waiting below. The Frenchman waved his unwounded hand as he walked. "Vive le Khalifa! Vive le Madhi!" he shouted, until a blow from behind with the butt-end of a Remington beat him ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the cover of darkness I would see what had become of him. So I ran lightly along in the shelter of the lee bulwark, dodging past the galley, the scuttle-butt, and the cabin in turn. At the quarter-deck I hesitated, knowing well that a sound thrashing was the least I could expect if Mr. Falk discovered me trespassing on his own territory, yet lured by a curiosity that was the stronger for the vague ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... see where the wounded man had dragged himself up the trail, finally staggering to his feet, and with a caution which he had not exercised a few hours before Howland continued slowly between the thick forest walls, one hand clutching the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket. Where the trail twisted abruptly into the north he found the charred remains of a camp-fire in a small open, and just beyond it a number of birch toggles, which had undoubtedly been used in place ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... like a porcupine, and din'd just like a pig, sir, And an over-running butt of sack she swallow'd at a swig, sir! Her brawny maids of honour ate and drank confounded hard, sir, And droves of oxen daily bled within her palace-yard, sir! ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... LISZTVEREIN, of which he was soon the leading spirit, alone escaped; the opera, bereft of Nikisch, and the Gewandhaus, under its gentle and aged conductor, were treated by him with biting sarcasm. But his chief butt was the Conservatorium, and its ancient methods. He asserted that not a jot of the curriculum had been altered for fifty years; and its speedy downfall was the sole result to be expected and hoped for. The fact that, at this ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... For a moment the foresight wavered across the indistinct form, and then his numbed hands grew steady, and, trusting that nothing would check the frost-clogged action, he pressed the trigger. He felt the jar of the butt, a little smoke blew in his eyes, and he could make out nothing on the crest of the ridge. It, however, seemed impossible that he had missed and next moment he heard a heavy floundering in the snow among the rocks above. ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... month by threats to drag me out of my home and hang me, or otherwise measure me up for a crop of angelic pin-feathers that I've been unable to write anything worth reading. But as soon as I can swallow my heart and quit shivering I will grab the English language by the butt-end and make it crack like a new bull-whip about the ears of hypocrites and humbugs. Meanwhile I desire to state that there is nothing the matter with the ICONOCLAST's contributors. They are a bouquet of pansy blossoms of whom any publisher might well ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... upon a time had been a frisky little lamb, Diddie's special pet; but now he was a vicious old sheep, who amused the children very much by running after them whenever he could catch them out-of-doors. Sometimes, though, he would butt them over and hurt them, and Major Waldron had several times had him turned into the pasture; but Diddie would always cry and beg for him to be brought back, and so Old Billy was nearly ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are, And Love's torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar— ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... crossed it. Blackbeard, bending over the dead man, straightened up, with a woolly, furry wad in his hand. Shredding this, he found imbedded in the center the bullet which had perforated the body. Its nose was spread to the size of a half dollar, its butt-end, steel-jacketed, was undamaged. He compared it with ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Pussy was burnt, As I too have learnt; But, as you will read, She jumped into the water-butt before you could count, ONE, TWO, ...
— The Nine Lives of A Cat - A Tale of Wonder • Charles Bennett
... vindictive look shot from Terry's eyes as his hand involuntarily played with the butt of the pistol he had in ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... compressed vegetable bubbled together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess-tins; outrageous demands for 'a little more stuffin' with that there liver-wing;' and gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as a gun- butt. ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... rising from the low chair by the fire to seek protection near the skirts of her mistress, and coming into contact as she crossed the doorway with an ancient Stranger, she instinctively made a charge or butt at him with the only offensive instrument within her reach. This instrument happening to be the baby, great commotion and alarm ensued, which the sagacity of Boxer rather tended to increase; for, that good dog, more thoughtful than its master, had, it seemed, been watching ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... would not do much for her sake. I almost think that I would do it entirely for her sake, if there were no other reason. But to shame myself by taking that which belongs to another, as though it were my own property! To live a coward in mine own esteem! Though I may be the laughing-stock and the butt of all those around me, I would still be a man to myself. I ought to have felt that it was sufficient when she told me that some of her thoughts must still be given to you. She is yours, Mr Gordon; but I doubt much whether you ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... accomplishment; but a sad feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of frivolous companions. Some seasons later, I call to mind seeing, at the "Commencements" and "Exhibitions" of Harvard University, a girl, plain in appearance, but of dashing air, who was invariably the centre of a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... articles as were voted too shabby for the family wear. All work which was dirty or disagreeable, fell to Agnes as a matter of course. The widow's two daughters, Joan and Dorothy, respectively made her the vent for ill-temper, and the butt for sarcasm; and if, in some rare moment of munificence, either of them bestowed on her a specked apple, or a faded ribbon, the most abject gratitude was expected in return. She was practically a bond slave; for except by running away, there was no chance of ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... some of the ridges and on crossing a large flat creek I observed two new trees or shrubs (they are both) from one I obtained some seeds like beans, and rather a nice tree; the other, when large, at a distance looks like a shea-oak, having a very dark butt and long, drooping, dark-green, narrow leaves, and did not appear to have any seeds at present. Started at 7.17 till twenty-two minutes to 10, nine miles, on a bearing of from 100 to 105 degrees; at 8.18 sighted a large ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... societies, however small they may be, provided that they do but amount to half-a-dozen, you will invariably meet with a bully. And it is also generally the case that you will find one of that society who is more or less the butt. You will discover this even in occasional meetings, such as a dinner-party, the major part of which ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... unusual or improper, why does he not deny the soft impeachment so much credited both in this country and in his own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck, after being the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become such a purist as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the Commons, and scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he had touched the yellow and handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable Indian princes and rajahs who come to England ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... saw a man appear, tall, slim, dressed in black, hat in hand, who came in like a ram ready to butt his opponent, showing a receding forehead, a small pointed head, and a colorless face of the hue of a glass of dirty water. You would have taken him for an usher. The stranger wore an old coat, much worn at the seams; but he had ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... don't," Miss Scarlett went on. "I'm not used to it. To be left alone—oh, of course Billy Cox has been trying to butt in, but what good is he? My Hercules, my Roman Antony, who won my trusting heart last summer, at a time when I had just got it back from what I had thought a final and total loss—I find him away, and when he gets back, because, forsooth, he happens to be newly engaged, he's so wrapped ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... ordinary one with drawers and shelves on one side, and an open space on the other for the hanging up of clothes. Very few clothes hung there at present; but it was in this portion of the closet that he stopped and began to try the wall of Brotherson's room, with the butt end of the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... James, glaring at my host. "I advise you to keep your hands off anyway, for if I catch you a-hurting of him again—" There was a terrible threat in the eyes and in the upraised butt of the whip, but suddenly the manner changed, for James was looking at the bottle on the table and it had a strangely quieting influence on his temper. The blaze died away from his eyes; his voice became soft to meekness; the whip fell limply. "I might think you'd done it a-purpose, Professor, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... fear from the Sedition Act, appeared with startling suddenness in October, 1798, when Representative Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, an eccentric character who had become the butt of all Federalists, was indicted for publishing a letter in which he maintained that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... The state of man in divers functions, Setting endeavor in continual motion; To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, Obedience: for so work the honey-bees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts; Where some, like magistrates, correct at home, Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad, Others, like soldiers, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... kindled, a great supper begun, and the poultry was set loose to roam at will. Somewhere the Gypsy children had picked up a kid and a little calf. Both of these were freed, and at once began to butt each other, to the vast ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... which was about to meet, when there were some final difficulties between the King and his Liberal Ministers over the exact wording of the oath of allegiance. The excitable Neapolitan populace forthwith became unmanageable. The Swiss Guards, who had long been the butt of the people, put down the revolt without mercy. Once more King Ferdinand was master. He hastened to dismiss his Cabinet and dissolved the Parliament before it could come to order. Orders were sent to General Pepe, who had marched to the front in northern Italy ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... were played. I know that now quite well. I do not pretend to be proficient in the modus operandi of the hankey- pankey man, but I know that he has a method, all the same,—one susceptible, too, of facile explanation. Go back to your friend, and tell him that I am not again likely to be made the butt of his old method,—nor of his new one ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... into laughter. The sum would have been a severe demand on the military chest of the army. The handsome stranger advanced to him, and, seizing his musket, said, loftily, "Fellow, if you won't give the money, this must." He struck the butt-end of the musket thrice upon the floor. At the third blow a burst of gold poured out, and sequins ran in every direction. The soldiery and the officers of the court were in utter astonishment. All wondered, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... doing, ye are meer names only, And even your best perfection, accidental; What ever malady thou art, or Spirit, As some hold all diseases that afflict us, As love already makes me sensible Of half her sufferings, ease her of her part, And let me stand the butt of thy fell malice, And I will swear ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (1 of 10) - The Custom of the Country • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. At last I ventured a home thrust. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendos, about the oblong box, just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the "peculiar shape of that box"; and, as I spoke the words I smiled knowingly, winked, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... in a little circle now of which somehow I found myself the centre, and they were attacking us on all sides. Stephen got a knock on the head from the butt end of a gun, and tumbled against me, nearly upsetting me. As I recovered myself I looked ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... disinterested judge has just declared that he finds nothing amiss in him; but the rabble cry out, all the more, "crucify him." While ardently loved by a devoted few in that tumultuous crowd, he is, to all the rest, an object of severest scorn, the butt of ribald jest. Wearing his crown of thorns, he is made to bear, till he faints under his burden, the very instrument of his torture. His Roman executioners, giving to him the punishment accorded to thieves and robbers, have imposed upon ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... Joy, perhaps because she flushed so prettily as her slight anger rose. But whatever the reason she was always the butt for their good natured teasing. And no matter how much she resented it, she turned it off with a joke. Yet it could be seen that she always turned to Shirley Williams, ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... across the fields, and I lit in a swarm of them—it had rained them just where I jumped. I set my back to the fence, but one of the fellows in the road leaned over and smashed my head in, rather—with the butt of a gun, I believe. I came out from the fence and they made a little circle around me. No one said anything. I saw they had ropes and saplings, and I didn't want that, exactly, so I went into them. I got a good many hoods off before it was over, and I can swear to quite ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Morning Sitting gave only possible fillip to interminable Debate on Land Purchase Bill. BRER FOX still away, so comparative peace reigns in Irish Camp. TIM HEALY no one to butt his head against; COLONEL NOLAN too busy deploying his army of five men; showing them how to retreat in good order when Division-bell rings, and how, when it is decided to vote, they shall pass out through one door, march in at the other, cross the floor, and look as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... man brought the butt of the gun down with full force on Elaine's head. Only her hat and hair saved her, ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... hand, but one affected with bees in his nightcap,—who had ideas of his own about farming, and was obstinate with them; "pays you due respect, but's got a notion as how his way of thinking's better 'n his seniors. It's the style now with all young folks. Makes a butt of old Mas' Gammon; laughs at the old man. It ain't respectful t' age, I say. Gammon don't understand nothing about new feeds for sheep, and dam nonsense about growing such things as melons, fiddle-faddle, for 'em. Robert's a beginner. What he knows, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the goat should not stay in the house another day, but she had not the heart to insist on its banishment, the children were so fond of it. I do not know why they were fond of it, for it never showed them the least affection, but was always taking the most unfair advantages of them, and it would butt them over whenever it got the chance. It would try to butt them into the well when they leaned down to pull up the bucket from the curb; and if it came out of the house, and saw a boy cracking nuts at the low flat stone the children had in the back-yard ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... would fain be "distinguished" by Madame Schontz, but as for marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-eight whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her jests, and her disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the latter, whom she put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his hand, and heart, and future,—three things ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... subscribed by charitable people to succour the starving Irish met occasionally ships sailing out of the Irish ports laden with food reaped by the starving Irish. On the quays of Galway the unhappy people wailed as they saw their harvests borne away from them, and were admonished by the butt-ends of British muskets, the British Government meantime passing Relief measures which provided employment for hordes of English officials and Irish understrappers, and pauper-relief for those who surrendered their manhood and their property—the cost of this ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... day late in October, 1786, the Merchant of St. Elphege sat at the pine dinner-table in his kitchen, opposite his wife, resting his wooden soup spoon on its butt on the table. The windows, both front and rear, were wide open, for one of those rare fragrant golden days of late autumn still permitted it. He was listening, with some of the stolid Indian manner, to his wife reading Germain's letter. He vouchsafed ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... church the king of Meliapour gave him the duties of all merchandize imported, which was the tenths[170]." Going still deeper, they came to a hollow place between two stones, in which lay the bones of a human body with the butt and head of a spear, which were supposed to be the remains of the saint, as those of the king and disciple were also found, but not so white. They placed the bones of the saint in a China chest, and the other bones in another chest, and hid both under the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... no sound of any sort, nor a breath of wind to guide us. The little stubby trees that stand here and there, like bushes with a wooden leg to them, were drizzled with a mess of wet, and hung their points with dropping. Wherever the butt-end of a hedgerow came up from the hollow ground, like the withers of a horse, holes of splash were pocked and pimpled in the yellow sand of coneys, or under the dwarf tree's ovens. But soon it was too dark to see that, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... car on four wheels can lose any decent motorcycle on a switchback track, and Jackson, the owner of this one, says it's good enough for sixty on a fair stretch of road. Anyhow, we held the thug dead easy, but didn't press him any, as I had no call to butt ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... steeple with its rent side looked down on cobbled streets thronging with ordered ranks of men standing ready to move. Here and there a few officers spoke together, or a man gave his chum a light from his fag, or straps were tightened. A rifle butt rang on the pavement, and the adjutant's horse moved his feet restlessly. These men had no illusions as to what they would probably have to face; but none guessed that there lay ahead the most dreadful test of physical endurance which the old battalion, since the great ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... notwithstanding which he succeeded in releasing himself from the grasp of his adversary. The sentinel, however, returned to the charge, and following him up closely, felled him to the earth with a blow from the butt-end of his musket. Still, however, the thief struggled violently, and prostrate as he was, endeavoured to bring down his opponent by seizing his legs: the soldier was now compelled, in self-defence, to transfix his prisoner to the ground, by running his bayonet ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... stalking through the terrible dances, a heroic figure at last. He shuddered every time he found himself on one leg; he got sternly into everybody's way; he was the butt of the little noodle of an instructor. All the social tortures he endured grimly, in the hope that at last the cork would come out. Then, though there were all kinds of girls in the class, merry, sentimental, practical, coquettish, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. We have got brain, and know ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... look again at the priest, I was amazed to find him close to me, too close for a man with such eyes in his head, for a man who moved so swiftly and softly, and, in spite of me, a nervous movement of my hand left me with my fingers on the butt of my pistol. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... for our salt tute cared not how much we laughed at his failures, which all his shots were. He brought up his gun as if it were a harpoon, and always gave it a jerk, to help it shoot farther, when he pulled the trigger. The butt was seldom at his shoulder; and as he insisted upon putting immense loads in his gun, the results were sometimes disastrous to him and ridiculous to us. He often sprang back after a shot, as if he had been kicked by a horse, or wrung his hands, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... the flour was obtained, and the raisins; the beef-fat, or "slush," from Old Coffee; and the requisite supply of water from the scuttle-butt. I then went among the various cooks, to compare their receipts for making "duffs:" and having well weighed them all, and gathered from each a choice item to make an original receipt of my own, with due deliberation and solemnity I proceeded to ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... court ball. No—I was convinced that I had not been intoxicated, but on this occasion I resolved to exercise special caution, and to be strictly temperate, in the event of the disguised perpetrator of pranks again attempting to make the German stranger the butt of his impudence. This time he should meet his match; I would keep my head clear and my feet steady enough to venture a dance with him. The constantly suspicious attitude of my mind, to be sure, interfered with my pleasure very considerably. I was in a too observant ...
— The Gray Nun • Nataly Von Eschstruth
... on the narrow strand, the Pathfinder leaning on his rifle, the butt of which rested on the gravelly beach, while both his hands clasped the barrel at the height of his own shoulders. As Jasper threw out this severe and unmerited imputation, the deep red of his comrade's face maintained its hue unchanged, though the young man perceived that the fingers ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... using his sword, he drew a long pistol from his girdle and levelled it. Brown leaped upon him, caught the pistol as it exploded just in time to turn the muzzle aside, wrenched the weapon from his foe's grasp, and brought the butt of it down with such a whack on his head that it laid ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... all distinguished Protestants who will work for the common good of Ireland. That is not at all surprising when we remember that the Irish Party have, in the past, numbered among their leaders at least three distinguished Protestants—Grattan, Butt, and Parnell—and at the present day always return a steady percentage of Protestant representatives to ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... and feeling the hook in his horrid jaw, tugged most fiercely to release himself, but in vain. Twelve sailors hauled him in, when, with distended jaws, he seemed to look out for the legs of the men, whereupon they rammed the butt-end of a harpoon down his throat, which put a stop to all further proceedings on his part. He was said to be quite young, perhaps the child of doting parents. The juvenile monster had, however, already cut three rows ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... room! The Regent comes from Mass. Guards, butt them on the toes—way there! give room! Prick me that ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... to do with abstract opinions," said he, thinning away the butt-end of his cigarette. "And nothing to do with treason, or anything of that kind. He has got hold of a horrible story—told me all about it when he was foully drunk—that in itself would have made me break with him, for I loathe drunken men—and ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... substance called nicotine. This is a powerful poison, even in very small doses, with only feeble narcotic, or pain-deadening, powers; but fortunately, the larger part of it is destroyed in the process of burning. Enough, however, is carried over in the smoke, or absorbed through the butt of the cigar or cigarette, or the mouth-piece of the pipe, to injure the nervous system, especially in youth. As will be seen in the chapter upon the "Care of the Heart," it especially attacks the nerves supplying the heart, and is thus most ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... and the rest of us war either gashed by thar knives or had got ugly cracks. However, six of them war lying in the boat when we hauled it alongside; two war stone-dead, the other four had been stunned with the butt ends of the muskets, or cut down by the darkies' sabres. We took 'em down to the next place and handed 'em over to the sheriff; and as thar happened to be a lot of boats waiting thar for the wind, you may guess it warn't many hours afore they ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... men truly virtuous care to be rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian, alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? Happy! if happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... wounded man had dragged himself up the trail, finally staggering to his feet, and with a caution which he had not exercised a few hours before Howland continued slowly between the thick forest walls, one hand clutching the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket. Where the trail twisted abruptly into the north he found the charred remains of a camp-fire in a small open, and just beyond it a number of birch toggles, which had undoubtedly been used ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe. Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full butt ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... highest degree unbecoming; but I am sure that my fellow officers will bear me out in saying that I have shown fully as much patience as is becoming. I, therefore, have to tell you that I will no longer be your butt, and that I shall treat any further remark of the nature of those you have just made as a deliberate insult, and shall ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... It's all some joke, and I'm the butt of it. She was in that house by the same authority she rode ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... shown himself to be an excellent soldier. He had evidently exactly calculated the danger zone, and found that by getting close to the traverse he could sit up erect and make ready his supper without being cramped. I watched him solemnly pounding the coffee with the butt end of his revolver, and then boiling the water and frying his bacon, just as if he had been in the lee of the roundup wagon somewhere out on ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... his reflections till the driver pulled up for him to get down at his own gate. As he got down the said driver glanced up curiously at the row of windows on the first floor, and as soon as Mr. Dempster's back was turned, pointed to them with the butt-end of his whip, and nodded queerly to the gentleman who sat ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... and enjoyed himself, but his expression was the same as it had been on dry land, stupid, with a look of astonishment on it as though someone had, unnoticed, stolen up behind him and hit him on the head with the butt-end of an axe. Yegorushka undressed, too, but did not let himself down by the bank, but took a run and a flying leap from the height of about ten feet. Describing an arc in the air, he fell into the ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... first it'll likely upset things fer me—you goin' ther' to hold him up as it were." His smile was more pronounced. "Now I guess I'll show you where his lay-out is if you'll sure give me your promise to let me hunt around fer ha'f-an-hour around his corrals—'fore you butt in. Then I'll get right back to you an' you can go up, an'—shoot him to hell, if you notion ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... and hay and a lot of potatoe pealings and 2 peaces of lettis and drank haff a pale of water and tiped over 3 whole pales full. one is tame and follows me round. that is the old one. the young one is wild and if i dont look out wil butt me when i aint looking and where i aint xpecting it. once she nocked me over and i hit her with a stick hard. so now when i get in the pen she gets in the corner. she knows she cant fool with ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... The he lifted his revolver from his breast pocket and dropped it into his side pocket, with his hand on the butt. Then with his left hand he quietly opened the door, pushed it back, and as quietly stepped into ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... the last day of November, we met with an English ship, and because it was too late that night, it was agreed that they were to give us two or three tons of wine next morning, being, as they said, all the provision of drink they had, save only a butt or two which they must reserve for their own use: But, after all, we heard no more of them till they were set on ground on the coast of Ireland, where it appeared they might have spared us much more than they pretended, as they could very well have relieved our necessities, and had sufficient for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... the standard, a long spear's length in front of our line. But by this I had leapt to my feet; and it was time, for he was almost on me. Spear had I none; so I dragged out the standard shaft from the ground where I had struck it, and levelled that sharp butt end full at his chest. Overhead was his axe again, and I had no shield to stop the blow; but I must ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... boat, and saw that he was right. A plank in the middle had been splintered. It looked as if somebody had driven some heavy instrument into it. As a matter of fact, Albert had effected the job with the butt-end of an oar. ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... But Barnes must give me a summons of wakening at seven to-morrow morning, for my servant's a sleepy-headed fellow; and I daresay my clerk Driver has had Clarence's fate, and is drowned by this time in a butt of your ale; for Mrs. Allan promised to make him comfortable, and she'll soon discover what he expects from that engagement. Good-night, Colonel; good-night, Dominie Sampson; good-night, Dinmont the Downright; good-night, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... lampooned. What Cibber suffered from the "Dunciad" Shadwell suffered from "MacFlecknoe." Incited by Dryden's example, the poets showered their missiles at him, and so perseveringly as to render him a traditional butt of satire for two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... big sunny kitchen five men lounged about in addition to the white-coated chef and his beardless stripling of an assistant. And each of the five had a holster strapped openly over his coat with the butt of an automatic protruding in ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... cried Lise, in angry bravado. "Do you think I'm going to let you butt into this? I guess you've got enough to do to look out for your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... impossible to conceive of a lot more pitiful or a fate more obdurate than his so far had been. There was little hereditary morality in his nature, and none had been inculcated by training; he had nothing of what is called vital piety, nor even sincere superstition. A butt and an outcast at a French school under the old regime, he had imbibed a bitter hatred for the land indelibly associated with such haughty privileges for the rich and such contemptuous disdain for the poor. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... There is no question yet of Impressionism, and yet Monet and Renoir are already painting, Monet has exhibited at the Salon des Refuses, but criticism sees and attacks nobody but Manet. This great individuality who overwhelmed the Academy with its weak allegories, was the butt of great insults and the object of great admiration. Banished from the Salons, he collected fifty pictures in a room in the Avenue de l'Alma and invited the public thither. In 1868 appeared the portrait of Emile Zola, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... anybody he robs; catch old Mumbo Jumbo currying favour with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean and Chapter, should he meet them in a stage-coach; it would be with him, Bricconi Abbasso, as he knocked their teeth out with the butt of his trombone; and the old regular-built ruffian would be all the safer for it, as Bill would say, as ten to one the Archbishop and Chapter, after such a spice of his quality, would be afraid to swear against him, and ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... half-box of raisins, one hundred pounds of bread, twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats, a keg containing four pounds of butter, twelve gallons of water in a forty-gallon 'scuttle-butt', four one-gallon demijohns full of water, three bottles of brandy (the property of passengers), some pipes, matches, and a hundred pounds of tobacco. No medicines. Of course the whole party had to go on short rations ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you will breathe a beggar and an outcast. Your golden dreams are over, your cunning plans are circumvented, your ambitious hopes are crushed for ever, you are blighted in the very spring of your life. Oh, may you never die! May you wander for ever, the butt of the world's malice; and may the slow moving finger of scorn point where'er you ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... kept pretty busy for the next minute or so. He rushed, leaping and yelling, roaring and dodging, from side to side and corner to corner, and then made a frantic bolt for the outer staircase, but he had only got half-way up when his head fell with a splash into a water-butt below, while his body slid down to the bottom of the steps, where it lay in a limp ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... doctors ain't got any license to monkey with," began Bill, chewing out blue smoke from his lungs with each word, "and they're both fevers. After they butt into your system they stick crossways, like a swallered toothpick; there ain't any patent medicine that ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Puffing stolidly on the butt of an alleged cigar, into which he had stuck a sharpened match as a visible means of support, a boy who was probably not so old as he looked sat upon the curbstone at the corner, and claimed the world for his cuspidor. He was an ill-favored runt of a boy, with a sedate manner and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... short as was the time that the Sardinians had held possession, they had already tumbled everything into confusion in their search for plunder. Tables and couches had been upset, closets and chiffoniers burst open with the butt-ends of the swords or with the discharge of a pistol into the lock. Looking-glasses had been smashed, valuable vases lay in fragments on the floor, bottles of wine whose necks had been hastily knocked off stood on the table. In the courtyard were ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... brave, gushed forth the blood. Quickly the good knight sprang back again and snatched the spear that she had driven through his shield. Stout Siegfried's hand now sent it back again. He thought: "I will not pierce the comely maid." So he reversed the point and cast it at her armor with the butt, that it rang out loudly from his mighty hand. The sparks flew from the armor rings, as though driven by the wind. Siegmund's son had made the throw with might. With all her strength she could not stand before the blow. In faith King Gunther ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... developed as to justify such being made. To this practice, at least, I am safe in attributing the rarity, if not the positive absence, with the Indian, of that unhappy condition of bow-leggedness, of not too slight prevalence with us, and which renders its victim often a butt for not very charitable or ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... in the light of a martyr is evident from the words of Pitt himself. In one of his speeches, having accused his rival of filling his speech with everything that was personal, inflammatory, and invidious, he remarked:—"I am not surprised if he should pretend to be the butt of ministerial persecution; and if, by striving to excite the public compassion, he should seek to reinstate himself in that popularity which he once enjoyed, but which he so unhappily has forfeited. For it is the best and most ordinary resource ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... making a tomb for his body of his enemies on the field of battle, than to be hated of his own and poniarded by the hands of his nearest and dearest, or to die of poison or of drowning in a wine-butt." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... they were in a quiet street, and then quickened his pace until he was close behind the man. Then he drew one of his pistols, and, springing forward, struck him a heavy blow on the head with its butt. He fell forward on his face without a cry; and Harry, satisfied that he had stunned him, ran on and overtook the others, and, turning down the first street they came to, was assured that they ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... not, as you darned well please," said Hayle doggedly, biting at the butt of his cigar as he spoke. "It don't matter a curse to me; you don't mean to tell me you think I'm fool enough to stand ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the man nearest to him with a spear butt. The soldiers were silent instantly. Then the chief turned back to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... any one no more," said this man, with a satisfied chuckle, as he leaned on his gun, the butt of which he dropped to the ground. "I got him ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... to fetch Jane. He spent an hour looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt. The least he could do was to find ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... in not making him an inn-keeper in a German village instead of a king. Around this smoke-shrouded table the most important affairs of state were discussed. Around it the rudest practical jokes were perpetrated. Gundling, a beer-bibbing author, whom the king made at once his historian and his butt, was the principal sufferer from these frolics, which displayed abundantly that absence of wit and presence of brutality which is the characteristic of the practical joke. As if in scorn of rank and official dignity, Frederick gave this sot and fool the title of baron and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... forward with a sudden fury in his eyes. Swinging the heavy-thonged whip, again and again he brought it down on the writhing brute. Then he twisted the thong around his hand and belaboured its hollow ribs with the butt. It screamed for a while, but soon it ceased to scream; it only moaned a little. With glistening fangs and ears up-pricked the other dogs looked at their fallen comrade. They longed to leap on it, to rend its gaunt limbs apart, to tear ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... gaze to the imperturbable Collins with the brown, sun-baked face and the eyes blue and untroubled as an Arizona sky. Out of a holster attached to the sagging belt that circled the corduroy trousers above his hips gleamed the butt of a revolver. But in the last analysis the weapon of the occasion was purely a moral one. The situation was one not covered in the company's rule book, and in the absence of explicit orders the trainman felt himself unequal to that ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... sea. Once or twice he leaps clean into the air, a flying bar of silver. Then he sulks at the bottom, a mere dead weight, attempting devices only to be conjectured. A common plan now is to tighten the line, and tap the butt end of the rod. This humane expedient produces effects not unlike neuralgia, it may be supposed, for the fish is off in a new fury. But rush after rush grows tamer, till he is drawn within reach of the gaff, and so on to the grassy bed, where a tap on the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... hands that had to have gloves made specially to fit them, and feet that couldn't hide themselves even in a number ten boot. She was as good-natured as she was uncouth, and never happier than when she was being made a butt of. These were to be the nucleus around which this society was to be formed; and as they threw themselves down on the bed of pine-leaves which carpeted the old stump of a tree upon which Jenny Barton was seated, they were the most characteristic group that could have been chosen out of ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... not sufficient to account for their rank as belles, since there were several other girls in their circle quite as well, or better off. Nor had their wit or talent any share in giving them their position; on the contrary, people used to laugh at the betises of the Robinsons, and make them the butt of real or imaginary good stories. And, in point of birth, they were not related to the Van Hornes, the Bensons, the Vanderlyns, or any of the old Dutch settlers; nor like White Ludlow, and others of their set, sprung from the British families of long standing in the city. On the very morning ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... if possible, a humorist, a sentimentalist, and a good-tempered butt; the only kind of men who should be rigidly excluded are the busy mocker, the despiser, the superior person. It does not matter how much people disagree, if they will only admit in their minds that every one has a right to a point of view, and that their own does not necessarily rule out all others. ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... port shutters driving fragments into the casemates. The Lackawanna then kept away, making a circuit to ram again. She had her stem cut and crushed from three feet above the water-line to five below, causing some leakage, and the Monongahela had her iron prow carried away and the butt ends of the planking started on both bows; but the only damage caused to the Tennessee, protected by her sponsons, was a leak at the rate of about six inches an hour. The flag-ship now approached to ram, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Scotsman with a lust for blood. We had rifle practice on the marvellous ranges. We had sham battles in which the men engaged so intensely that on one (p. 017) occasion, when the enemy met, one over-eager soldier belaboured his opponent with the butt end of his rifle as though he were a real German, and the poor victim, who had not been taught to say "Kamarad", suffered grievous wounds and had to be taken away in an ambulance. Though many gales and tempests had blown round those ancient mountains, nothing had ever equalled ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... yourself Emperor of Britain already," a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum had ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... fingers in the pudding may spoil it—lest a multitude of counsellors as to the proportions of ingredients and the process of mixing may be productive of the reverse of safety. But somehow a man with a specialty is always forthcoming, and that specialty is pudding-making. Most likely he has been the butt of the room—a quiet, quaint, retiring, awkward fellow who seemed as if he never could do anything right. But he has lit upon his vocation at last—he is a born pudding-maker. He rises with the occasion, and the sheepish "gaby" becomes the knowing practical man; his is now the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... there was a sort of lull. The great water-butt that the sailors had been lowering down the hatchway had reached the hold below, and been rolled into its place, and this produced a temporary ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... and terror. Thus unnoticed and safe myself, I lifted my head slyly up, and with horror I beheld that the wolf had ate his way into the horse's body; it was not long before he had fairly forced himself into it, when I took my advantage, and fell upon him with the butt-end of my whip. This unexpected attack in his rear frightened him so much, that he leaped forward with all his might; the horse's carcass dropped on the ground; but in his place the wolf was in harness, and I on my part whipping him continually, we both arrived in full career ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... none appeared of recent date. The reindeer were here very numerous. Mr. Ross saw above fifty of them in the course of his walk, and several others were met with near the tents. A large one was shot by one of the men, who struck the animal; as he lay on the ground, a blow on the head with the butt end of his piece, and, leaving him for dead, ran towards the tents for a knife to bleed and skin him; when the deer very composedly got on his legs, swam across a lake, and finally escaped. A small fawn was the only one killed. Three ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... diving to the right, breaking his fall with the butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly toward the cover of a rock, and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was wrong. The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the ravine, what he had smelled had been lubricating oil and petrol, and the leaves on some ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... the bar with the butt of his gun: "Silence in the court!" he roared. "An' what's more, you're fined one round of drinks for contempt of court." Taking a match from his pocket he laid it carefully upon the bar, and continued: "The plaintiff will take the stand in his ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the Superfluous Mansion. It was not the first time that she had thus stood afar and looked upon it, like our common parents at the gates of Eden; and the young man had already had occasion to remark the lively slimness of her carriage, and had already been the butt of a chance arrow from her eye. He hailed her coming, then, with pleasant feelings, and moved a little nearer to the window to enjoy the sight. What was his surprise, however, when, as if with a sensible effort, she drew near, mounted ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... who founded the English system of government in Ireland, and secured to themselves immense tracts of its most fertile soil. What then must be the effect of the eloquent and impassioned denunciations of such writers as Mr. Butt, Mr. A.M. Sullivan, and Mr. John Mitchell, not to speak of the 'national press'? Yet the most fiery patriot utters nothing stronger on the English rule in Ireland than what the Irish may read in the works ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... on the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt-end of a green cheque-book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched his suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank, where several thousand pounds ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... possessed of considerable pluck, immediately faced about and attacked the major, who gave him a taste of the buttons, as he advanced. But the bear, nothing daunted, returned to the charge, which Elliott met with a blow from the butt-end of his gun, that was instantly struck from his hand by his formidable antagonist, who immediately closed with him. It now became a regular stand-up fight between Major Elliott and Ursus Major. For a long time it was doubtful which would ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... Custom-House, on the corner, one of the number, who knew of the assault on the apprentice-boy, said, "Here is the soldier who did it," when they gathered round the sentinel. The barber's boy now came up and said, "This is the soldier who knocked me down with the butt-end of his musket." Some now said, "Kill him! knock him down!" The sentinel moved back up the steps of the Custom-House, and loaded his gun. Missiles were thrown at him, when he presented his musket, warned the party to keep off, and called for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... of missiles pitched over the partitions on either side with extraordinary accuracy. A book from Langrish hit me on the ear, and a wet sponge from Trimble moistened my cheek. And when I sought shelter under the sheets, the butt-end of a fishing-rod in the ribs drew me from my hiding-place, and a clever cast with a hooked pin by Langrish relieved me of my outer covering altogether. The footsteps of the monitor on duty deprived me of the privilege of making ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... contact and secured. It ensures even running when used in belting. Any irregularity in thickness of a belt affects the speed of the driven pulley. As dynamos are generally driven by belts, and it is important to drive them at an even speed to prevent variations in the electro-motive force, butt joints should be used on belting for them, unless a very perfect lap joint is made, which does not affect either the thickness or ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... undisciplined flash of temper, Carl brutally clubbed his assailant into insensibility with the revolver butt and dragged him heavily to the tonneau of his car, throbbing unheeded in the darkness. Having assured himself of his guest's continued docility by the sinister adjustment of a handkerchief, an indifferent rag or so from the repair kit and a dirty rope, he covered ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... brought a gleaming weapon with a long barrel and an unusually large butt—an air pistol of great power and reliability. In the old South African times Bullard had been a notable shot with rifle and revolver, and practice during the last few days had shown him that his hand and eye still retained a good deal of their cunning. Moreover, it was an easy ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... affair, Jennechka. I daren't butt into your soul. I only asked because you're the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... fellow trotted to church alone behind the usher, acutely conscious of the very grotesque figure he was presenting. I must have been dressed very much as Henry Fairchild was when he went to visit his little friend Master Noble. On returning from church, I threw my velvet cap into the water-butt, where, for all I know, it probably is still, and nothing would induce me to put on the velvet tunic or the floppy collars a second time. I bombarded my family with letters until I found myself equipped with a high hat and Eton jackets ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of the little company of Irish Home Rulers that had appeared in Parliament in the early '70's was Isaac Butt. His repeated attempts to have the subject considered were as often rejected with derision. In his own party he was opposed by an element which desired to resort to aggressive measures to compel the English to heed Ireland's demand for local self-government. ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... the best work, who "never wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought," who believes that after his death he will be among the English poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered—that such a one should be merely the butt and laughing-stock of his readers! It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. "Praise or blame," he says, "has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.... In Endymion ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... position held by most of these men. Some who do not smoke hold cold pipes between their teeth, that they may not mar the harmony of the picture. One member of the circle is singled out nightly as an object for mirth, and the choice is made by lot. Each and every one can in turn become the butt of merry satire. To have been present at a meeting of this oddest of all court gatherings would furnish me with the most notable memory I could ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... men in your hands, and can bring the same to your obedience where you will; what means and waies ought you not to indeavour by dallyings and kind actions to gain the same on your side! you certainly know, that the main Butt which is aim'd at by all mankind, is to pass through this short life of ours with pleasure and quietness: But alas! what life, what rest, what pleasure can he possess in this World, who hath hapned upon a scolding, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... said Mr. Schwab dramatically, "that I've got you where I want you, thank you. You have killed Peabody dead as a cigar butt! Now I can tell them how his friends tried to bribe me. Why do you think I came in your car? For what money YOU got? Do you think you can stack up your roll against the New York Journal's, or against Tammany's?" ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for the corporation there near Butt bridge. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Spike. "Say, boss, he must have got a lot of plunks to be able to butt in here. An' I know how he got dem, too. Dat's right. I comes from little ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... portrait of that 'labouring working mind[9].' It might make him reflect that if the mighty reasoner could rise up and meet him face to face, he would be sure, on which ever side the right might be, even if at first his pistol missed fire to knock him down with the butt-end of it[10]. I have attempted therefore not to criticise but to illustrate Johnson's statements. I have compared them with the opinions of the more eminent men among his contemporaries, and with his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... to the Republican idea, for, from his point of view, it meant enfranchisement and universal happiness. One day—at the age of fifteen—in the Rue Transnonain, in front of a grocer's shop, he had seen soldiers' bayonets reddened with blood and exhibiting human hairs pasted to the butt-ends of their guns. Since that time, the Government had filled him with feelings of rage as the very incarnation of injustice. He frequently confused the assassins with the gendarmes; and in his eyes a police-spy was just as bad as a parricide. ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... (sometimes called Clarence) had only one constitution. It must have been a very bad one, because he was killed by a butt of Malmsey. If he had had more constitutions or better ones he would have lived to be very old. This is ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... There was no sight of any spree in prospect. A glimpse of the kitchen showed only the preparations for an ordinary meal, and Hartigan wondered whether or not there had been a mistake. Could it be that he was the butt ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... in the paved court where the pump is, and the dust-bin, and the water-butt, a young man, with his hat very much on one side, his mouth open under his fair bristly mustache, and his eyes as nearly round as human eyes can be. He wore a suit of a bright mustard colour, a blue ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... them into an appointed corner, and you butt the other,' said Ferdinand,'it will not ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... passing through the door went out on the porch. I sat down and was slipping off my socks, to put on dry ones, when I heard a rustling in the room behind me. The next moment Col. Tucker had his gun leveled on me, but it flashed in the pan. He then whirled up the butt of it to fell me to ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... Scarlett went on. "I'm not used to it. To be left alone—oh, of course Billy Cox has been trying to butt in, but what good is he? My Hercules, my Roman Antony, who won my trusting heart last summer, at a time when I had just got it back from what I had thought a final and total loss—I find him away, and when he gets back, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... rather splendid in the attitude of a man who can take a whole nation as his butt and bend every circumstance to his purpose of ridicule and attack. Our satirists to-day are contented to pillory individuals or possibly a sect or clique. Marvell's enjoyment in his own exuberance and ingenuity is so apparent and infectious that it matters ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
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