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More "Catapult" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been for a purpose, for the men crouching against the cliff, their faces showing ghastly in the flashes of powder, were able to perceive a massing of figures below. Then the shots ceased, and the butt of the great log crashed against something with the force of a catapult, and a yell ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... in its breath so strongly that it draws the birds into its mouth too. Marcus Regulus, the consul of the Roman army was attacked, with his army, by such an animal and almost defeated. And this animal, being killed by a catapult, measured 123 feet, that is 64 1/2 braccia and its head was high above all the trees in ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... he had done talking. He was upon his feet, the big, swaying body oddly like a clumsy black bear's, his big hands lifted in front of him. And then he threw himself forward, close to two hundred and fifty pounds of brawn and bone hurled like a boulder from a catapult. Some one had turned up the lantern wick. The black head and the red head from which the hat had dropped came together, there was the thud of two strong bodies meeting with an impact that brought a little coughing grunt from each, ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... the Hun machine from which that bomb had been shot downward like a projectile from a catapult, passing through a tube with a forward slant in the bottom of the big ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... cake and toffee and things in a handkerchief, and climb on to the porch with Grumper's longest fishing-rod, you might be able to relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any good he could fire sweets up with a catapult." ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... would have taken the fight out of most horses, has only steadied the Axeine; and, as we watch him striding through the deep ground, casting the dirt behind him like a catapult we think and say, "The race is not ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Jumped overboard, and dropped from view Like stone from catapult; And when he reached the Merman's lair, He certainly was welcomed there, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... old man was upon his feet. His thick arm shot out like a catapult; and his great fist, meeting Diego squarely upon the temple, felled him ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of the Guards Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer of admiration broke out along the French line. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... passing word now and then with the sentinel, when two men entered the battery, chatting busily together. One was in complete armor; the other wrapped in the plain short cloak of a man of pens and peace: but the talk of both was neither of sieges nor of sallies, catapult, bombard, nor culverin, but ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... raised by main force; whilst the two others, arming themselves each with a trestle, and using it like a great sledge-hammer, knocked down at a blow eight sailors upon whose heads they had brought their monstrous catapult in play. The floor was already strewn with wounded, and the room filled with cries and dust, when D'Artagnan, satisfied with the test, advanced, sword in hand, and striking with the pommel every head that came ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... by Firishtah, or "Filampatan," according to the author of the BURHAN-I-MAASIR. He seized it, slaughtered the inhabitants without mercy, and captured the unfortunate prince Vinayaka Deva.[41] The Sultan "commanded a pile of wood to be lighted before the citadel, and putting Nagdeo in an engine (catapult), had him shot from the walls into the flames, in which he was consumed." After a few days' rest the Sultan retired, but was followed and harassed by large bodies of Hindus and completely routed. Only 1500 men ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... of the ballista and other engines of war in Ammianus Marcellinus, XXII. iv. The engine here described by Procopius is the catapult of earlier times; the ballista hurled stones, not arrows. See ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... dragging the opossum from his sleeping-place in a hollow limb. She learned to hold a frenzied fox-terrier at the mouth of a hollow log, ready to pounce on the kangaroo-rat which had taken refuge there, and which flashed out as if shot from a catapult on being poked from the other end with a long stick. She learned to mark the hiding-place of the young wild-ducks that scuttled and dived, and hid themselves with such super-natural cunning in the reedy pools. She saw the native companions, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... into use, and did a certain amount of damage to the Boche trenches, but naturally produced considerable retaliation. Further efforts to fire rifle grenades met with some success, whilst a "Gamage" catapult introduced to throw bombs provided, at any rate, a little amusement. In patrolling considerable progress was made. Second Lieut. A. Hacking did some very daring work at "Peckham Corner," and near Petit Bois; 2nd Lieut. Hollins and L.-Corpls. Heath and G. Gadd ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... an awful picture of the siege. Whatever of mechanism or method was known to Greeks or Romans was employed by besiegers and besieged. Stones, fireballs, bunches of arrows, heavy beams were fired into the city by ballista and catapult, and were fired back with equal skill and abundance. The battering-rams breached the wall and found new walls rising just within. The besieged fished with iron hooks from the top of the walls, and hauled the captured ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... my boot on; I pulled it with my hands, I pushed with all the strength of the muscles of my leg, making the most unheard-of efforts, when suddenly, the two tags of my boot remained in my hands, and my foot struck out like a catapult." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... unpleasant words and jeers, whenever the companions came within hearing—had results in the shape of reprisals. Vince was not going to see Mike Ladelle's ear bleeding from a cut produced by a forcibly propelled oyster-shell, without making an attack upon the young human catapult; and Mike's wrath naturally boiled over upon seeing a piece of rock pushed off the edge of the cliff, and fall within a foot of where Vince was lying on the sand at the foot. But the engagements which ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... Duke's safety with much anxious care; at one hour of the day she bade him leave a position from which he was watching the attack, as she told him that if he remained longer in that place he would get slain from some catapult or engine, to which she pointed on the walls. Hardly had the Duke left the spot when a Seigneur de Lude was struck and killed by a shot from the very engine about which Joan had ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... museum, and a photograph of it is published in 'The Graphic.' Those who come to look at it in its glass case think it is a bunch of grapes, or possibly a monkey: those who see its photograph say that it is more probably an irregular catapult-stone or ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... rose from the mob. There was a rush forward. Billie was on the lower step. His long leg lifted, the toe caught Yankie on the point of the chin, and the rustler went back head first into the crowd as though he had been shot from a catapult. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... simply a colossal magnet. Under the influence of that magnet the iron bands of the Halbrane's boat had been torn out and projected as though by the action of a catapult. This was the occult force that had irresistibly attracted everything made of iron on the Paracuta. And the boat itself would have shared the fate of the Halbrane's boat had a single bit of that metal been employed ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... This happened in the scrub at sunset, and came, I think, from a bird smaller than the Australian minah, and of a greenish yellowish hue, larger, but similar to the members of the feathered tribe known to young city 'knights of the catapult' as greenies. It was while returning to camp from fishing that I noticed this bird, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... army of eighty thousand under Titus. How great must have been the military science that could reduce a place of such strength, in so short a time, without the aid of other artillery than the ancient catapult and battering-ram! Whether the military science of the Romans was superior or inferior to our own, no one can question that it was as perfect as it could be, lacking any knowledge of gunpowder; we surpass ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... black monkey leaped out of a tree top just as I stepped from behind a bush, and he saw me instantly. For a full half minute he hung suspended by one arm, his round head thrust forward staring intently; then launching himself into the air as though shot from a catapult he caught a branch twenty feet away, swung to another, and literally flew through the tree tops. Without a sound save the swish of the branches and splash after splash in the leaves, the entire herd followed him down ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... as if she felt his presence rather than saw it, her dark eyes flashed round upon him and she pulled up the big horse on its haunches with a suddenness which ought to have sent her from the saddle like a stone from a catapult; but she sat back as firm as a rock and gazed at him steadily, with a calmness which fascinated Stafford and kept him staring back at her as if he were the ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... most dreaded—in order to bring his feet into play, his jaws being momentarily helpless. His abdominal muscles were in splendid order. Like a lynx, Sourdough drew in and up his powerful hind quarters, and, as if they had been a missile launched from a catapult, slashed his two hind feet along Jan's belly, as a carpenter might rip a ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... bristles, and his great tail struck the door-casing resounding whacks, as he lashed it from side to side. Only a moment he stood there, and then the great striped body hurtled through the air as if shot from a catapult, and covering a good twenty feet in the spring it landed fair on Bombay, one of the largest tigers in the group. The aim was a true one and the sound of breaking bone mingled with a scream of pain from his victim, as Bombay ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... of the parts of his contrivance was now speedily accomplished, resulting in a very neat hand-catapult of a kind with which every boy is familiar. After testing the strength of the connections by stretching the rubbers several times to thrice their ordinary length, Bud looked about him and soon gathered a supply of small stones suitable ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... dissemination that allow large families to disperse quickly over the country, so that each member may have his place in the sun without injuring his neighbour; and these apparatus, these methods vie in ingenuity with the elm's samara, the dandelion-plume and the catapult of the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... began. Shouts filled the air,— "St. George!" "St. Denis!"—as here and there The shock of the battle shifted; There were catapult-shots and shots by hand, Ladders with desperate climbers manned, Rams and rocks, hot lead, and sand On the heads of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... so far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung objects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, and at last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steel globe in which to attempt the journey in person. His daughter Evelyn had demanded to accompany ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... company of boys are playing, an appeal to a senior bystander is always conclusive. Games between experts are watched with interest by quite a number of lookers-on, of every age. The Indian method of shooting a marble is to use the middle finger of the right hand as a sort of catapult. The marble is held with the left hand against this finger, and bending it back, it is suddenly let go. The effect of this is to volley the marble with great force and accuracy. The English boy's ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... this way first!" and, drawing his head down and folding his arms about it, he dashed forward for the center of my company, like a great stone hurled from a catapult. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... mixing, in one week prepare enough to keep all the ordnance on the castle walls busy for two. But indeed he had not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any noise audible to those within. It was this device ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... in his life he seemed able to keep his eye on the ball, and the way he sent it flying through the air was a caution. Diogenes and Simple Simon had both had their second stroke and Solomon drove off. His ball sailed straight ahead like a missile from a catapult, flew in a bee-line for Diogenes, struck him at the base of his brain, continued on through, and landed on the edge ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Khamon, and the Cirta gate, pell-mell, archers with hoplites, captains with soldiers, Lusitanians with Greeks. They marched with a bold step, rattling their heavy cothurni on the paving stones. Their armour was dented by the catapult, and their faces blackened by the sunburn of battles. Hoarse cries issued from their thick bears, their tattered coats of mail flapped upon the pommels of their swords, and through the holes in the brass might be seen their naked limbs, as frightful as engines of war. ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... localized itself. A woman picked up her skirts and flew wildly into a store. A man went over the park fence almost as though he had been shot out of a catapult. Came the crack of a revolver. Some ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... before the big rancher as though struck by a catapult; and the force of his fall against the stony earth stunned him so that he lay beneath his enemy as helpless as ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... the legionaries ascended to the seats allotted to the philosophic portion of the audience, and a torrent of wisdom in their persons, including that of Leaena, flung forth with the energy of a catapult, descended abruptly and violently to the earth. They were instantly seized and dragged into an erect attitude by the remainder of the soldiery, who, amid the most tempestuous peals of laughter and applause from the delighted public, thrust swords into their hands, ranged them in ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... shouting after her). Dearest HEDDA, not those dangerous things, eh? Why, they have never once been known to shoot straight yet! Don't! Have a catapult. For my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... it seems to hang suspended for a moment, then hurls itself as from a catapult against the barrier with a sound like thunder, filling the cavern to its utmost, causing the ground to fairly tremble with the impact, and sending the white spray high up the face of the cliff, to be scattered like chaff before the breeze. And the old rock that has stood the storms of ages, ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... flashing light, in gleams and sparkles, shoots and coruscations—not from great, black pupils alone—to whose size there were who said the suicidal belladonna lent its aid—but from great, dark irids as well—nay, from eyeballs, eyelashes, and eyelids, as from spiritual catapult or culverin, would she dart the lightnings of her present soul, invading with influence as irresistible as subtile the soul of the man she chose to assail, who, thenceforward, for a season, if he were such as she took him for, scarce had choice but be her slave. She seldom exerted their full force, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the stream in a frenzy, and struggled wildly with the current that swept their feet off the slimy limestone bottom, with the logs and trees dashing along like so many catapult-bolts, and with the horses and teams urged on by men more fear-stricken still. On the steep slope on the other side glimmered numbers of little fires where those who were lucky enough to get across were warming and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... which he had spoken. He saw Gualtier's start, and he himself sprang after him with fearful force. Coming up to him, he administered to him one single blow with his foot, so tremendous that it was like the stroke of a catapult, and sent the unhappy ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... a catapult if you like," said Hector, with lordly disdain. "It doesn't matter to me, and it certainly won't matter to any one or anything else. You'll never hit anything—girls never do. They can't ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... called his wife to his assistance, who is usually very strong, and with blue eyes; especially when, swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and brandishing her sallow arms of enormous size, she begins to strike blows mingled with kicks, as if they were so many missiles sent from the string of a catapult. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... with the rifle firmly clutched in his hands, he stooped in order to obtain a view of what was within. Scarcely had he done so, ere a deep growl and roar startled him, while at the same time a large black bear hurled itself like a catapult from ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... a fiend, a catapult. With a yell of "Hellsfire!" like a bursting shell, he would rowel his saddle-mule and lead the Train through flood or flame. His was a curse and a blow. He seemed a devil, condemned ever to pound miles ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... let's go gently and attend to things one by one: after I've attended to this, then I'll attend to that: I'll train my catapult on the old fellow for the two hundred first. If I shatter the tower and outworks with the said catapult, the next minute I'll plunge straight through the gate into the ancient and time-worn town; in case I capture it, you two can carry off gold ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... generation of vipers," of an "untoward generation," of "a stubborn generation," of "the iniquity of the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation?" So that the text comes to-day with the force of a projectile hurled from mightiest catapult: "Whose son ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... inquired Denys, with twinkling eyes. "I have lived among arms, and by Samson's hairy pow never saw I one more like a catapult. The bolster wrapped round his nose and the two ends kissed behind his head, and his forehead resounded, and had he been Goliath, or Julius Caesar, instead of an old quacksalver, down he had gone. St. Denys guard me from such feeble opposites as thou! and above ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... words came like a shot from a catapult. Enid's face grew colder. Bell drew a long tube of discoloured paper carefully tied round a ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... was right. He must jump overboard and take his chance in the river, for it was too late now to slow down and put his motor in reverse. In the impending crash that was only a matter of seconds, The Laird would undoubtedly catapult from the stern sheets into the water—and if he should drift in under the logs, knew the river would eventually give up his body somewhere out in the Bight of Tyee. On the other hand, should he be thrown out on the boom he would stand an equal chance of being seriously ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... was in sooth worthy of the steed which bore him. Both were caparisoned in the fullest trappings of feudal war. The arblast, the mangonel, the demiculverin, and the cuissart of the period, glittered upon the neck and chest of the war-steed; while the rider, with chamfron and catapult, with ban and arriere-ban, morion and tumbrel, battle-axe and rifflard, and the other appurtenances of ancient chivalry, rode stately on his steel-clad charger, himself a tower of steel. This mighty horseman was carried by his steed as lightly ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with one stone. No moors for me this year: I'm back on the simple life and the catapult. . ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... came from Dick a cry that he was away. Tony, who had been down at the side of the gorse, at once jumped into it, knowing the passage through. Lord Rufford, who for the last five or six minutes had sat perfectly still on his horse, started down the hill as though he had been thrown from a catapult. There was a little hand-gate through which it was expedient to pass, and in a minute a score of men were jostling for the way, among whom were the two Botseys, our friend Runciman, and Larry Twentyman, with ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... paused to consider a reply. He desired to be careful in public not to draw upon himself that small catapult. ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... election—and there was no meddling from the outsider. The mighty warrior would no more have ventured to offer a design for the temple of Pallas Athene than would the sacred poet have proffered a plan for constructing the catapult. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... skinned his teeth, and growled to himself, 'By the prophet, but I can almost love her again; she distinguished herself by that kick, which was aimed with infinite tact; it went right to the spot, and struck me like a discharge from a catapult, drove all the wind out of me, and left an absolute vacuum, as if a stomach-pump had sucked me out. Yap—yow—eaow—yeaow—yap—snif—xquiz;' and, after a good deal of panting and distress, he at last yawned so wide ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent—Jesse Bulrush—who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bows. The darkness swallowed it all. I swung Seraphina in front of me, and made her sit low on the stern sheets beneath my feet. A lot of foam boiled up around the boat, and we had the sensation of having been sent flying from a catapult. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Sea; directly in front, and to the right, the brown and gray and black flint mountains sawed into the sky until they vanished in the distance. Unseen below, the old caravan-trail climbed one side of the pass and slid down the other, a sheer five hundred feet below the parapet and the two corner catapult-platforms which now mounted 90-mm guns. On the little hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was parked, and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... four days anyhow. Not even men on foot can travel fast on a glassy sheet of ice. Every time I look at it on the mountain it seems to grow smoother. If I were standing on top of that ridge and were to slip I'd come like a catapult clear into the camp." ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... grand-hotel terraces. There was no great battle-field in Europe she had not trod upon. She knew them so well that she could people each field with the familiar bright regiments, bayonets and sabers, pikes and broadswords, axes and crossbowmen, matchlock and catapult, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... with their tactics. A brewer fancies that he can set fire to this block of masonry by pumping over it spikenard and poppy-seed oil mixed with phosphorus. A young carpenter, who has some archaeological notions, proposes to construct a catapult. Some of them think that they have seized the governor's daughter, and want to burn her in order to make the father surrender. Others set fire to a projecting mass of buildings filled with straw, and thus close up the passage. "The Bastille was not taken by main force," says the brave Elie, one ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with immense violence, and a noise more deafening than thunder, while the great seas dashed against the bows, now in full front toward them, with the force and shock of huge rocks projected from a catapult, and the wind shrieked and howled through the rigging as if the spirits of the deep were ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... himself. But what he is doing a man may be ignorant, as men in speaking say a thing escaped them unawares; or as Aeschylus did with respect to the Mysteries, that he was not aware that it was unlawful to speak of them; or as in the case of that catapult accident the other day the man said he discharged it merely to display its operation. Or a person might suppose a son to be an enemy, as Merope did; or that the spear really pointed was rounded off; or that the stone was a pumice; or in striking with a view to save might kill; ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... a measure, for something strange, he never bargained for what happened. It was as if he had been fired from some catapult of the ancient Romans. Through the air he hurtled, like some great flying animal, covering fifty feet from ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... and kicks won't do," said I, "let us see what virtue there is in stones;" and suiting the action to the word, I showered him with fragments of granite, as from a catapult. At every concussion he jumped and kicked, but kept his nose in the same relative position. I redoubled the logical admonition; he jumped the more perceptibly; finally, after an unusually affecting appeal from a piece of granite, he fairly budged, and I seized ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Saxons, not the pigs). They were fearless navigators and reckless warriors. Armed with their rude meat-axes and one or two Excalibars, they would take something in the way of a tonic and march right up to the mouth of the great Thomas catapult, or fall in the moat with a courage that knew not, ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... Universe,' and 'Most Remarkable of Cameleopards!' Heavens! what a power of speed thou art displaying! What a capacity for leg-bail thou art developing! Run, Prince!—Bravo, Epiphanes! Well done, Cameleopard!—Glorious Antiochus!—He runs!—he leaps!—he flies! Like an arrow from a catapult he approaches the hippodrome! He leaps!—he shrieks!—he is there! This is well; for hadst thou, 'Glory of the East,' been half a second longer in reaching the gates of the Amphitheatre, there is not a bear's cub ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spearman and my catapult! Oh! my swift horseman! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of foolishness! [An ANGEL, in a dress the color of embers, and carrying a blossoming apple ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... heavily-insulated plug connecting the power plant leads to his now almost fully charged accumulators, strapped himself and Nadia into place at the controls, and waited, staring into the plate. Catapult after catapult was dragged to the lip of the little canyon, until six of them bore upon the target. The huge stranded springs of hair, fiber, and sinew were wound up to the limit, and enormous masses of rock were toilsomely rolled upon the platforms. Each "gunner" seized his trip, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... robes. Before he could repeat his blow, the Moorish Scaevola, with a fate very different from that of his Roman prototype, was pierced with a hundred wounds by the attendants, who rushed to the spot, alarmed by the cries of the marchioness, and his mangled remains were soon after discharged from a catapult into the city; a foolish bravado, which the besieged requited by slaying a Galician gentleman, and sending his corpse astride upon a mule through the gates of the town into the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Thy catapult, so sure of aim, In cold neglect, alas! reposes, And even "tip-cat's" cherished game No longer threatens eyes and noses; Thy tube of tin (projecting peas) At length has ceased from irritating; But how much worse than all of these ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... There were two pocket-handkerchiefs of fine texture, and exceedingly dirty, as if they had been there for months (the one she used she carried in the bosom of her dress or up her sleeve), a ball of string, a catapult and some swan shot, a silver pen, a pencil holder, part of an old song book, a pocket book, some tin tacks, a knife with several blades and scissors, etc.; also a silver fruit knife, two coloured pencils, indiarubber, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the reverend period of nine or say ten years, he should still be the unabashed and proclaimed possessor of a hoop and a Noah's Ark. The child will quite see the reasonableness of this, and, the goal of his ambition being now a catapult, a pistol, or even a sword-stick, will be satisfied that the titular ownership should lapse to his juniors, so far below him in their kilted or petticoated incompetence. After all, the things are still there, and if relapses of spirit ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... after the lapse of a moment, vented itself in a kick, and such a kick! Not one of your Varsovianna flourishes, but a kick that employed every muscle from hip to toe, and drove the worthy steward up against the door like a ball from a catapult. ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of a second a furry catapult launched itself across the wide road at a speed that made it ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... exclamation of genuine wrath. For, with astonishing swiftness, the big hand had flown to the hip of the ragged trousers, had plucked a short-bladed fishing knife from its sheath, and had hurled it, dexterously, with the strength of a catapult, straight ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... doubled his fists and extended them awkwardly, coming with a rush. Mr. Pike suddenly squatted and leaned forward, balancing on his finger-tips, until number two was about to fall upon him and crush him, and then he arose with that rigid right shoulder aimed as a catapult. There was a sound as when the air-brake is disconnected, and number two curled over limply on the ground and made faces in an effort to ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... squirted into the trenches. Bombs are then thrown which on explosion ignite the fluid. Yet another sort of projectile took the form of an incendiary bomb or shell which was discharged noiselessly, possibly from a catapult. It bursts on impact, tearing a hole and burning a circle of ground about eight feet ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... him—come along with his glass-settin' tools, and go to work settin' some glass in one of the meetin'-house winders. Some o' them little small panes got broke somehow—yes'm, I did, but I never meant to, honest I didn't. I was jest tryin' my new catapult, and I never thought they'd have such measly glass as all that. Well, so I see—saw him get to work, and I says to Squashnose Weight—we was goin' home from school together—I says, 'Let's go up in the gallery!' Old Booby had left the door open, and 'twas right under the gallery that he ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... sports with its doll, so Rupert swung Deede Dawson twice about his head, round and round and then loosed him so that he went hurling through the air with awful force, like a stone shot from a catapult, clean through the window through which Rupert had the moment before tossed his pistol with but little more ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... the fire in the drawing-room, a room full of flowers and books, and lit by four long windows. Two of the windows looked on to the lawns, and the stone figures chipped by generations of catapult-owning boys; the other two looked across the river into the Hopetoun Woods. The curtains were not drawn though the lamps were lit, for Mrs. Hope liked to keep the river and the woods with her as long as light lasted, so the warm bright room looked warmer and brighter in contrast with the cold, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... dark staircase of the old War Department, which many will remember, it was our misfortune, while taking about three stairs at a time, to run a certain head like a catapult into the body of the President, striking him in the region of the right ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... between two islets, appeared directly ahead. It was only a matter of seconds till they would be reached, but remembering how the ray had turned before, Colin clutched the gunwale of the boat to prevent being flung out of it like a stone from a catapult when the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... helplessness of the lesser animal, crouching, as if fascinated by the cruel, claw-armed tyrant, waiting to make its spring. And he knew that at any moment this beast might come at him as if discharged from a catapult. But all the same the brain grew more and more acute in its endeavours to find him a way of escape. If he had only had a short bayonet fixed at the end of his gun, that he might hold it ready with the butt upon the ground, ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... this same siege, there were brought to him two iron cuirasses from Cyprus, weighing each of them no more than forty pounds, and Zoilus, who had forged them, to show the excellence of their temper, desired that one of them might be tried with a catapult missile, shot out of one of the engines at no greater distance than six and twenty paces; and, upon the experiment, it was found, that though the dart exactly hit the cuirass, yet it made no greater impression than such a slight scratch as might be made with the point of a style or graver. Demetrius ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... in the garden laying for a rat, There's a boy with a catapult a-laying for the cat, The cat's name is Susan, the boy's name is Jim. And his father round the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... suffering from pains in the back—but that's another story. Incidentally Mahomet at present inhabits a sniper's post surrounded by a perfect thicket of barbed-wire, and I had a bright scheme for its removal. I got hold of a trench catapult, an ingenious contrivance of elastic that hurls a bomb some hundreds of yards, and placed in it a harpoon attached to a long coil of rope. The idea was that on release of the catapult the harpoon would be hurled in the air, the rope would neatly pay out, and then, as soon as the harpoon had grappled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... science (veda) of the bow (dhanush). This weapon, as everything amongst the Hindus, had a divine origin: it was of three kinds—the common bow, the pellet or stone bow, and the crossbow or catapult. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... as the trough rolled underneath her. Eric, who was absolutely free of any fear of the sea, enjoyed the storm extremely. It was tiring, however, for, every second of the time, one had to hang on to something for fear either of being washed overboard, or hurled around like a catapult from a sling. When, therefore, the gaunt figure of Cape Fear light was passed and the Miami slipped in behind the lee of Smith Island, every one felt a relief ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released, he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning, puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke and Galway spoke in answer. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... farther and mentioned my misgivings but just then Sami came and I forgot all about them. I don't believe I have ever seen any child so frightened as that little Indian! He simply fell through the bushes behind the chicken house and shot, like a small, brown catapult, into Desire's arms. His round face was actually grey with fear. And he huddled in her big apron shivering, for all the world like some ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than Niagara, falling upon an ordinary collection ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... again, shot over his head as if from a catapult, and Dick went sprawling forward over the saddle onto the ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... into the high priest's slaughtering-room, And by the child Despair born red therefrom As, thank the secret sire picked out to cram With spurious spawn thy misconceiving dam, Thou, like a worm from a town's common tomb, Didst creep from forth the kennel of her womb, Born to break down with catapult and ram Man's builded towers of promise, and with breath And tongue to track and hunt his hopes to death: O, by that sweet dead body abused and slain, And by that child mismothered,—dog, by all Thy curses thou hast cursed ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... through, shoulder to shoulder, singing one of their rousing ditties. Some people who had been standing on their hired rolling chairs had narrow escapes from being flung upon the shoulders of those in front. Some did not escape—Mary for instance, who landed between us as if shot from a catapult. ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... a sensation. One of his dearest bits of fun was to drive the birds into a panic. This he did by flying furiously around the room, feathers rustling, and squawking as loud as he could. He usually managed to fly just over the head of each bird, and as he came like a catapult, every one flew before him, so that in a minute the room was full of birds flying madly about, trying to get out of his way. This ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... wrench he disarmed the fellow, and then, holding him before them as a shield, he backed slowly beside Abdul toward the little door which led into the inner courtyard. At the threshold he paused for an instant, and, lifting the struggling Arab above his head, hurled him, as though from a catapult, full in the faces of his ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would fall in, and kick grotesquely till he rose to end its troubles. Or a misguided frog, pursued perhaps by some enemy on land, would dive in and swim by with long, webbed toes. At this sight the master of the pool would dart from his lair like a bolt from a catapult. Frogs were much to his taste. And once in a long time even a wood-mouse, hard pressed and panic-stricken, would leap in to swim across to the meadow shore. The first time this occurred the trout had risen slowly, and followed below the swimmer till assured that there was no peril concealed in the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... know ... to know ... what Lord Evelyn is going to do about this matter." He jerked out the words like stones from a catapult. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... kill the partridges which Middleton is going to send over in the next ten minutes," he said, "you could shoot anything of the sort that comes along in East Africa, with a catapult. If you will stand just a few paces there to the left, Henry, Terniloff by the gate, Stillwell up by the left-hand corner, Mangan next, Eddy next, and I shall be just beyond towards the oak clump. Will you ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to hold on and resist the grinding shock, but Roy did not fare so well. Like a projectile from a catapult the shock flung him far. He came grinding down into the sand on one shoulder, ploughing a little furrow. Then he lay very still, while Peggy wondered vaguely if she was going ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... thirty paces short of the ladder he stopped. From that spot he hurled his first rock. His was a young, powerful arm and the missile sped upward as if shot from a catapult. It struck the face of the cliff a short distance above the head of the climber and glanced off to go hurtling down among the ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... gun; automatic gun, automatic pistol; escopet^, escopette^, gunflint, gun- lock; hackbut^, shooter, shooting iron [U.S.], six-shooter [U.S.], shotgun; Uzzi, assault rifle, Kalashnikov. bow, crossbow, balister^, catapult, sling; battering ram &c (impulse) 276; gunnery; ballistics &c (propulsion) 284. missile, bolt, projectile, shot, ball; grape; grape shot, canister shot, bar shot, cannon shot, langrel shot^, langrage shot^, round shot, chain shot; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... broadside-on, rolled so furiously that she momentarily threatened to turn bottom-up, while those of us who were on deck had to seize hurriedly the first fixed portion of the vessel's framework that we could lay hands on, to save ourselves from being pitched overboard like a shot out of a catapult. To continue pumping under such circumstances was impossible, for it needed both hands and all one's strength to ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... pistol, and amid a roar from the spectators the five athletes sprang ahead as though released from a catapult. Elbows pressed against their sides, heads up, they made a thrilling picture, and the crowd cheered wildly. At first they kept well together, but they were setting a fast pace, and soon one of the men ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... in the air it draws in its breath so strongly that it draws the birds into its mouth too. Marcus Regulus, the consul of the Roman army was attacked, with his army, by such an animal and almost defeated. And this animal, being killed by a catapult, measured 123 feet, that is 64 1/2 braccia and its head was high above all the trees in ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... die this way first!" and, drawing his head down and folding his arms about it, he dashed forward for the center of my company, like a great stone hurled from a catapult. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... you can have a catapult if you like," said Hector, with lordly disdain. "It doesn't matter to me, and it certainly won't matter to any one or anything else. You'll never hit anything—girls never do. They ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... through the street of Khamon, and the Cirta gate, pell-mell, archers with hoplites, captains with soldiers, Lusitanians with Greeks. They marched with a bold step, rattling their heavy cothurni on the paving stones. Their armour was dented by the catapult, and their faces blackened by the sunburn of battles. Hoarse cries issued from their thick bears, their tattered coats of mail flapped upon the pommels of their swords, and through the holes in the brass might be seen their naked limbs, as frightful as engines of war. Sarissae, axes, ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... his recent operation to accept promptly the presents his brothers offered, and did so with a sweetly wan and patient smile which kindled a noble rivalry in the matter of gifts. Patsey, now very repentant, brought his catapult, Bugsey his alleys, his loveliest "pure," and the recumbent lamb set in a ball of clear glass; Tommy surrendered his pair of knobbies. Their mother, watching the procession leaving the gate, was moved almost to tears by ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... by his strong blue-eyed wife, especially when she begins, gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen, brandishing her vast and snowy arms, and kicking with her heels at the same time, to deliver her fisticuffs, like bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all ages they are apt ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... catapult sailed through the air and struck two of the enemy as it fell, carrying them to the ground, knocking the breath from the bodies of ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released, he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning, puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... brawny fist smote him squarely between the eyes. He went down as though struck by a sledge-hammer, crashing to the ground full six feet from where he stood. Behind that clumsy blow was the weight of a thirteen stone body, hurled as from a mighty catapult. ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung objects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, and at last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steel globe in which to attempt the journey in person. His ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer of admiration broke out along the French ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... back at her. He had an ingratiating smile. His mouth was rather wide, and it seemed to stretch right across his face. He reminded Jill more than ever of a big, friendly dog. "I can feel it now,—all squashy in my pocket, inextricably mingled with a catapult, a couple of marbles, a box of matches, and some string. I was quite the human general store in those days. Which reminds me that we have been some time settling down to an exchange of our childhood ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... an army of eighty thousand under Titus. How great must have been the military science that could reduce a place of such strength, in so short a time, without the aid of other artillery than the ancient catapult and battering-ram! Whether the military science of the Romans was superior or inferior to our own, no one can question that it was as perfect as it could be, lacking any knowledge of gunpowder; we surpass them only in the application of this great invention, especially in artillery. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... the men!... Knapp, if I were you I'd swing my eight-inchers out, bring up the plane catapult and keep the deck torpedo tubes loaded and ready. It's best to be prepared; God knows what's going on ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... shaft, the numbers of the floors passing almost too rapidly to be distinguished. The elevator was new and so was the boy, and it was the pride of his soul to land each passenger at his own particular floor, as if he had been propelled upward from a catapult. But he did not go too rapidly for this passenger, at least, though a paper parcel or so was dropped in the transit and had to be picked up when ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... replied Adonis. "We use one of our regular drivers—the best is called the 'celestial catapult.' Ph[oe]bus sells 'em at the Caddie House for five hundred dollars apiece. If you strike a ball fair and square with the 'celestial catapult,' and neither pull nor slice, it can't help ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... it is published in 'The Graphic.' Those who come to look at it in its glass case think it is a bunch of grapes, or possibly a monkey: those who see its photograph say that it is more probably an irregular catapult-stone or a ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... I say, let's go gently and attend to things one by one: after I've attended to this, then I'll attend to that: I'll train my catapult on the old fellow for the two hundred first. If I shatter the tower and outworks with the said catapult, the next minute I'll plunge straight through the gate into the ancient and time-worn town; in case I capture it, you two can carry off gold to your lady ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... sign from him the legionaries ascended to the seats allotted to the philosophic portion of the audience, and a torrent of wisdom in their persons, including that of Leaena, flung forth with the energy of a catapult, descended abruptly and violently to the earth. They were instantly seized and dragged into an erect attitude by the remainder of the soldiery, who, amid the most tempestuous peals of laughter ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... doorway, shouting after her). Dearest HEDDA, not those dangerous things, eh? Why, they have never once been known to shoot straight yet! Don't! Have a catapult. For my sake, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... he was, in a measure, for something strange, he never bargained for what happened. It was as if he had been fired from some catapult of the ancient Romans. Through the air he hurtled, like some great flying animal, covering fifty feet from a ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... long. But Richard's experiences in France had robbed him of any particular fear of rats. If anything he welcomed their appearance and devoted the short periods when the light was on to shooting at them with a catapult fashioned from the elastic of a sock suspender and a piece of angle iron detached from the underside of a broken armchair. For ammunition he used a few bits of anthracite coal which he found in the sitting room ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... be a painted accident—I shouldn't value it. I am prouder to have climbed up to where I am just by sheer natural merit than I would be to ride the very sun in the zenith and have to reflect that I was nothing but a poor little accident, and got shot up there out of somebody else's catapult. To me, merit is everything—in fact, the only thing. All ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... legs stiff and head between his knees. For an instant the man miraculously kept his place. With another vicious plunge and a cork-screw twist the maddened brute went up again, and this time the man was flung from the saddle as from a gigantic catapult, to fall upon his shoulders and back in the corral dust, where he lay still. The horse, rid of his enemy, leaped again; then with catlike quickness and devilish cunning whirled, and with wicked teeth bared and vicious, blazing eyes, rushed for the ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... junior—for he was prolific in unpleasant words and jeers, whenever the companions came within hearing—had results in the shape of reprisals. Vince was not going to see Mike Ladelle's ear bleeding from a cut produced by a forcibly propelled oyster-shell, without making an attack upon the young human catapult; and Mike's wrath naturally boiled over upon seeing a piece of rock pushed off the edge of the cliff, and fall within a foot of where Vince was lying on the sand at the foot. But the engagements which followed seemed to do ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... floor, and sifting them. There were two pocket-handkerchiefs of fine texture, and exceedingly dirty, as if they had been there for months (the one she used she carried in the bosom of her dress or up her sleeve), a ball of string, a catapult and some swan shot, a silver pen, a pencil holder, part of an old song book, a pocket book, some tin tacks, a knife with several blades and scissors, etc.; also a silver fruit knife, two coloured pencils, indiarubber, and a scrap of dirty paper wrapped round a piece of almond toffee. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... herself for the night," the housekeeper sat late rocking alone in her rooms, while the hollow tick of the hall clock sounded doubly lonely in the cheerless night. The modern castle's walls were proof against the wildest rain and even the blows of a catapult, and so the dashing storm never even stirred the heavy leaded diamonded panes. "Thanks be to God, auld Andrew never ventured to cross on this raging sea! He'll no be here the morrow, neither. I must send down for telegrams in the morning," she mused when she had finally laid her spectacles ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment masses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers, with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hugeness of the To-day and To-morrow building turned her again into a worm. It did not so much scrape the sky as soar into it, and when she timidly murmured the words "editorial offices" she was shot up to the top in an elevator as in a perpendicularly directed catapult. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... there, do you remember? That's where you killed your first rabbit ... with a catapult! Ah, even in those days you promised to be a good shot ... the best at Saint-Elophe, as I live!... But I was forgetting: you have given up your gun! A fellow of your build! Why, sport, my boy, is the ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... went down before the big rancher as though struck by a catapult; and the force of his fall against the stony earth stunned him so that he lay beneath his enemy ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... with blue eyes; especially when, swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and brandishing her sallow arms of enormous size, she begins to strike blows mingled with kicks, as if they were so many missiles sent from the string of a catapult. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent—Jesse Bulrush—who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and adroitness by a perspiring gaiety ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had secured apartments, and in the bustle of getting in the packets, exploring the rooms, exclaiming at the beautiful view from the balcony, and Bertie's sudden discovery that it was a glorious place to test the powers of a pea-shooter or catapult, he forgot all about Uncle Clair's words and Aunt Amy's sorrowful smile; and even Eddie thawed a little, and agreed that a beautiful full-rigged ship, with the bright sun shining on her snow-white sails, was a pretty-enough picture to please even ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... palfries. Bales of silks and satins had been long since conveyed thither from distant Paris, in anticipation of the coming marriage; and the old Norman castle that had once resounded with the clashing of arms, the snap of the cross-bow and the clang of the catapult now echoed with the merry stir and flurry of peace; a bee-hive of activity wherein were no drones; marshal, grand master, chancellor and grand chamberlain preparing for mysteries and hunting parties; dowagers, matrons and maids making ready for ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... was an extraordinary experience for Vaughan—everything sloping away from him. Then the back straightened suddenly and the hoofs struck the ground with such impact that, if the boy had not been very firmly in the stirrups, he would have been tossed in the air like a stone from a catapult. ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... and a laugh of amusement at his own failure, the boy was just turning to retrace his steps, when suddenly the bush rustled at his side, and a brown body leapt into the air as if it had been shot from a catapult. ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... could reach the door out came his cousin, as if fired by a catapult. His eyes were staring and his face as white ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... second or two was he subjected to this torture. Suddenly Ziffak ran toward the Xingu and then let go of the ankles. The black, limp object went spinning far out in the air, as if driven from some enormous catapult. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... case during the battles in Northern France and Flanders, wherever the trenches approached one another within flinging distance. There also, on occasion, where the troops facing one another were further apart, and beyond reach of a throw by hand, an improvised catapult of the classic type has been devised by our men for slinging hand-bombs; utilising a metal spring bent back and held fast in a notch, to be released on the lighting of the fuse. An illustration of a catapult appeared in the "Illustrated ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 21, Dec. 30, 1914 • Various
... warned him was right. He must jump overboard and take his chance in the river, for it was too late now to slow down and put his motor in reverse. In the impending crash that was only a matter of seconds, The Laird would undoubtedly catapult from the stern sheets into the water—and if he should drift in under the logs, knew the river would eventually give up his body somewhere out in the Bight of Tyee. On the other hand, should he be thrown ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... lumbago; he may have a rheumatic pain. None of these things matters to him on the way "in." He can bend his back quickly enough as he passes along. There are always a few bullets dropping near by. One will hit the mud somewhere around his feet. The boy nearest springs as from a catapult until he is close to the comrade ahead of him. No; he never springs back. If he did ... he would be the man ahead. He would be in front. Nuffin' doin'—the whole idea is to keep behind; there is no ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... did heave—vigorously and together, so that the fierce man went out from their grasp like a huge stone from a Roman catapult. There was a hideous yell, and, after a brief but ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... interruption into the Professor's speech, who at once in stentorian tones orders that the disturber of the harmony of the evening shall be summarily consigned to the lunatic asylum. I see him ejected with something like the force of a stone from a catapult and have no reasonable doubt that he will spend the night an inmate of "Craig Duncan." The speeches over bargaining recommences moistened by toddy, which fluid appears to exercise an appreciable softening influence on the "dourness" ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... was quite well. It was rather embarrassing to be called "dear." He attempted to hide his confusion by wiping his nose; but in producing his handkerchief, he pulled out with it a forked catapult stick and a broken metal pen-holder, which clattered to the ground and had to ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... his great tail struck the door-casing resounding whacks, as he lashed it from side to side. Only a moment he stood there, and then the great striped body hurtled through the air as if shot from a catapult, and covering a good twenty feet in the spring it landed fair on Bombay, one of the largest tigers in the group. The aim was a true one and the sound of breaking bone mingled with a scream of pain from his victim, as Bombay sank under the weight of ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... touch the long, ripe, brown capsules on the top with one timid finger, and then jump away, half laughing, half terrified, when the mild-looking little plant goes off suddenly with a small bang and shoots its grains like a catapult point-blank in ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... first time in his life he seemed able to keep his eye on the ball, and the way he sent it flying through the air was a caution. Diogenes and Simple Simon had both had their second stroke and Solomon drove off. His ball sailed straight ahead like a missile from a catapult, flew in a bee-line for Diogenes, struck him at the base of his brain, continued on through, and landed on the edge ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... Joan seems throughout that day's fighting to have watched over the Duke's safety with much anxious care; at one hour of the day she bade him leave a position from which he was watching the attack, as she told him that if he remained longer in that place he would get slain from some catapult or engine, to which she pointed on the walls. Hardly had the Duke left the spot when a Seigneur de Lude was struck and killed by a shot from the very engine about which Joan ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... were in the thick of the timber, searching the small trees and saplings for Y-forks to serve as catapult handles. In half an hour they returned with a dozen of varying degree ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... action by the loyalty of his townsmen and the sight of the rebel standard floating from the walls of his own castle, the boy knight led the assault upon the outworks, and proved in this, his first deed of arms, the truth of his biographer that he was one who "knew when to strike and how to strike." Catapult and balista, battering-ram and arbalast, cloth-yard shaft and javelin did their work, a breach was made in the walls, and only the darkness put ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... the best throwers were mounted upon the improvised balcony. They had rigged up a rude catapult from some lumber and ropes. They had barrels of nails and spikes for ammunition. Odin wished for some good bowmen, but the bow was as foreign to the Lorens as it was to the Brons. There was nothing left to do except move all the workshop's water-pails ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... it, slaughtered the inhabitants without mercy, and captured the unfortunate prince Vinayaka Deva.[41] The Sultan "commanded a pile of wood to be lighted before the citadel, and putting Nagdeo in an engine (catapult), had him shot from the walls into the flames, in which he was consumed." After a few days' rest the Sultan retired, but was followed and harassed by large bodies of Hindus and completely routed. Only 1500 men returned to Kulbarga, and the Sultan himself ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... can kill the partridges which Middleton is going to send over in the next ten minutes," he said, "you could shoot anything of the sort that comes along in East Africa, with a catapult. If you will stand just a few paces there to the left, Henry, Terniloff by the gate, Stillwell up by the left-hand corner, Mangan next, Eddy next, and I shall be just beyond towards the oak clump. Will you ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but just then the current turned the log, so that the opposite end pointed to the fall. On it went, with even greater rapidity than at first; then balancing for an instant on the brink, the end to which he held was lifted up high in the air, and he was sent from it as from a catapult, far out into the calm water below the caldron! I never expected again to see him, but he rose uninjured to the surface; and being a good swimmer, struck out boldly till he was picked up by one of several canoes which put off instantly to his assistance. Tim Nolan, I have ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... the tide, and anchor beneath the walls. Aware of these great preparations, the Scots, under the encouragement and direction of their governor, laboured incessantly to be in a situation to render them unavailing. By Crab, the Flemish engineer, machines similar to the Roman catapult, moving on wheels, and of enormous strength and dimensions, were constructed and placed on the walls at the spot where it was expected the sow would make its approach. In addition to this, they fixed a crane upon the rampart, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... three altars for the man's soul, turned, mounted, and galloped. He forded Wan. A horseman met him on the further bank, shouting. Prosper lowered his head and shot at him as from a catapult. The spear drove deep, the man threw his arms out, sobbed, and dropped like a stone. Prosper went on ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... came a ladder as if shot from a catapult. Edelwald sprung up the rounds and both of D'Aulnay's officers seized him. He had drawn one of his long pistols and he clubbed it on their heads so that they staggered back. The sentinels and advancing men fired on him, but by some muscular flash he was flat upon the top of the wall, ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... curtain of fire before them, no artillery preparation to help them. And the order to charge came. So, right into the German guns, in the face of those terrible Prussian Guards, our lads went "over the top" with a great shout, and poured like a flame, like a catapult, across the space between them—No-Man's Land, they called it then—it was only thirty-five yards—to the German trench. So fast they rushed, and so unexpected was their coming, with no curtain of artillery to shield them, that the Germans were for a moment taken aback. ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... O'Neil ordered. He set his back against the opposite wall, then launched himself like a catapult. The patrolman followed suit, but although the panels strained and split the ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... July 2, when plants of sage, Salvia interrupta, were ripening their fruit, we found it difficult to collect any seeds, but seedlings were observed in abundance on every side of the plant, some to the distance of six feet. Plants dispersing seeds in this manner have been called catapult fruits. Examine ripening fruits of blue curls, pennyroyal, germander, balm, horehound, dittany, hyssop, basil, marjoram, thyme, savory, catmint, skullcap, self-heal, dragon's head, motherwort, and various dry ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... chickens. Perhaps I would have gone farther and mentioned my misgivings but just then Sami came and I forgot all about them. I don't believe I have ever seen any child so frightened as that little Indian! He simply fell through the bushes behind the chicken house and shot, like a small, brown catapult, into Desire's arms. His round face was actually grey with fear. And he huddled in her big apron shivering, for all the ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... his jaws being momentarily helpless. His abdominal muscles were in splendid order. Like a lynx, Sourdough drew in and up his powerful hind quarters, and, as if they had been a missile launched from a catapult, slashed his two hind feet along Jan's belly, as a carpenter might rip a board down ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... the blackboard duster under the impression that it was his handkerchief. Meanwhile Tommy had eaten three apples, caught four flies, written "Kiser" in chalk on the back of the boy in front of him, exchanged a catapult with Jones minor for a knife, cut his finger, and made faces at each of the four new boys. Mr. Smith caught him in one of these contortions, but he was speaking of Louvain at the moment and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... man in his arms, he whirled him around until he could get sufficient impetus, and then threw him against the wall as if he had been fired from a catapult. If you have never witnessed the fury of genuine fright it is to be hoped you never will, for there is something hideous about it. The ruffian had hardly hit the wall before the negro was upon him again, making a noise in his throat ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... a second too late. The little boat's stern shot up; for a moment it was almost on end, and then it rose to the top of the wave and a moment later as the crash came and the sweep in toward shore began the frail craft was flung forward as if from a catapult. ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... over the city the whole bay side was in process of destruction. Wreckage was thrown with the force of a catapult against houses which still offered resistance. Electric light and gas plants were flooded and the city ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... sent the shot away at a tangent. Fosgill had turned his head to speak to the measurer and never saw his danger. Tanner let out a shout of warning, and others echoed it. But it was Patsy who acted. He threw himself like a little catapult at Fosgill and sent him staggering across the turf. Then Patsy and the ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... did Pollock, who knew that he could have no chance at the double rails. But Calder Jones came to infinite grief, striking the top bar of the second rail, and going head-foremost out of his saddle, as though thrown by a catapult. There we must leave him. Grindley, rejoicing greatly at this discomfiture, made for the gate; but the country gentleman with the fresh horse accomplished the rails, and ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... gained two yards and Dean, who had reserved his captain for the final efforts, then gave the signal that called upon the full-back to carry the ball. Neil went into the line as if he had been hurled from a catapult. He dove into the opening that Tom Curwood, with a last burst of desperate strength, had made, took three steps and was astride the goal line. Norris made the tackle, but he was an instant too late; the big captain ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... was always Alexander's picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges that cut the air above ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... solid wall for I heard his low muttered curse. Nothing else to indicate that we were blocked with his goal in sight. He never touched the speed controller, but took the two blocks as though shot from a catapult. The two? No, one, and three-quarters of the next, for when within a score of yards of the black wall he jammed down the brakes, and the iron mass ground and shook as though it would rend itself to atoms, but it stopped ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... the 'Zoologist' for 1874 as having been killed at Cobo on the 28th of September of that year. This seems rather an early date. When I was in Guernsey in November, 1875, I saw a few flocks of Snow Buntings, and one—a young bird of the year—which had been killed by a boy with a catapult, was brought into Couch's shop about the same time, and I have one killed at St. Martin's, Guernsey, in November, 1878; and Captain Hubbach writes me word that he shot three out of a flock of five ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... he entered school before he got "mixed up" in one of the many college rushes of those days. In that particular rush Taft went crashing through the sophomores like a catapult. One, a man of his own weight, leaped in front of him. Then Taft let forth a joyous roar and charged! He grappled with the other Ajax, lifted him bodily, and heaved him over his head. No wonder he got the nickname of ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... turned him over but he caught the edge of the box. His loose purple "jumper" of cotton and silk ballooned at the back as he swung by one hand in the on-rushing water, thick and yellow with sand, filled with the grinding boulders that came down as, though shot from a catapult, drowning completely his, agonized cry ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... in undress, with a jacket and cap of the police. He is licking his chops: "I met some pals and we've had a drink. You see, to-morrow one starts scratching again, and cleaning his old rags and his catapult. But my greatcoat!—going to be some job to filter that! It isn't a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... a man to send messages nor to depend upon telephones. He was as direct as a catapult, and was just as regardful of ceremony. The fact that it was his and everybody else's dinner hour did not hold him back an instant from having himself driven to the Foote residence and demanding instant ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... fun was to drive the birds into a panic. This he did by flying furiously around the room, feathers rustling, and squawking as loud as he could. He usually managed to fly just over the head of each bird, and as he came like a catapult, every one flew before him, so that in a minute the room was full of birds flying madly about trying to get out of his way. This gave him ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the night began to race by Tristram's ears as his horse leapt forward. The motion became easier, but the pace was terrifying to a desperate degree; for it seemed that he sat upon nothing, but was being whirled through the air as from a catapult at the heels of his father, who pounded furiously through the darkness a dozen yards ahead. For three minutes at least he felt at every stride an extreme uncertainty as to his chances of realighting in the saddle. It reminded him of cup-and-ball, and he reflected with ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fury of a thousand conflicts—and the exultation. For the glory of such moments it is well worth dying. One minute flying through the air—the old catapult tackle—and the next a crashing of bone and sinew. We rolled over, head on, and across the floor. Curses and execrations; the deep bass voice ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... accidental coincidence, no doubt, but I saw That Boy put his hand in his pocket and pull out his popgun, and begin loading it. It cannot be that our Scheherezade, who looks so quiet and proper at the table, can make use of That Boy and his catapult to control the course of conversation and change it to suit herself! She certainly looks innocent enough; but what does a blush prove, and what does its absence prove, on one of these innocent faces? There is nothing in all this world that can lie and cheat like the face and the ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... customary allowance of fat. His loss of weight (in avoirdupois) has been computed at five-sixteenths of the integral cubit of a patent accumulator's vertical boiling power, divided by the fractional resistance of a plate-glass window to a two-horse-power catapult. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... and dials, he spun several of them—the repulsion-ray full—the attraction-ray full. And when they were set, he picked up the bar he had dropped and smashed the controls so that they were helplessly jammed. He could almost feel the planet catapult through the heavens. ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... force of the stroke was fatal to him; the ball went at first bound right into Compton's hands, who instantly flung it back, like a catapult, at ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spearman and my catapult! Oh! my swift horseman! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of foolishness! [An ANGEL, in a dress the color of embers, and carrying a blossoming apple bough in his hand and with a gilded halo about his head, stands upon the threshold.] ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... footlights the beset man darted, and like a desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled over ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the gorse, at once jumped into it, knowing the passage through. Lord Rufford, who for the last five or six minutes had sat perfectly still on his horse, started down the hill as though he had been thrown from a catapult. There was a little hand-gate through which it was expedient to pass, and in a minute a score of men were jostling for the way, among whom were the two Botseys, our friend Runciman, and Larry Twentyman, with Kate Masters on the pony close behind him. Young Hampton jumped a very ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... handkerchief, and climb on to the porch with Grumper's longest fishing-rod, you might be able to relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any good he could fire sweets up with a catapult." ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Karl is jocund and gay of mood, He hath Cordres city at last subdued; Its shattered walls and turrets fell By catapult and mangonel; Not a heathen did there remain But confessed himself Christian or else was slain. The Emperor sits in an orchard wide, Roland and Olivier by his side: Samson the duke, and Anseis proud; Geoffrey of Anjou, whose arm was vowed The royal gonfalon to rear; Gereln, and his fellow ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... you were very destructive. You ruined all the young fir trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all the cucumber frames with your catapult. You set fire to the common: the police arrested Tavy for it because he ran away when he ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... old Joel, the three brothers, and the school-master, who were standing in the road. Instinctively, Chad swung on in spite of the roar of laughter and astonishment that greeted him and, as Tom banged the gate, the ram swerved and Chad shot off sidewise as from a catapult and dropped, a most unheroic little knight, in the mire. That ended Chad's chivalry in the hills, for in the roars of laughter that greeted him, Chad recognized Caleb Hazel's as the loudest. If HE laughed, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... knife from his pocket, he carefully cut the ropes wound about her. Alberdina bounded out of the chair like a big, fleshy catapult. ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... the walls; Now shake the ramparts, now a buttress falls, But, still no breach—"Once more one mighty swing "Of all your beams, together thundering!" There—the wall shakes—the shouting troops exult, "Quick, quick discharge your weightiest catapult "Right on that spot and NEKSHEB is our own!" 'Tis done—the battlements come crashing down, And the huge wall by that stroke riven in two Yawning like some old crater rent anew, Shows the dim, desolate city smoking thro'. But ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... something of the inert helplessness of the lesser animal, crouching, as if fascinated by the cruel, claw-armed tyrant, waiting to make its spring. And he knew that at any moment this beast might come at him as if discharged from a catapult. But all the same the brain grew more and more acute in its endeavours to find him a way of escape. If he had only had a short bayonet fixed at the end of his gun, that he might hold it ready with the butt upon ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... seeing visions, meanwhile, of the boat and myself being toppled off the side of the rock, into the boulders and waves below. My rowing had no effect whatever, but the boat was grabbed by the returning wave and shot, as if from a catapult, back and around to the right, through the sloping narrow channel,—my returning course describing a half circle. Instead of rising, the pointed bow cut down into the waves until the water was on ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... tried to get my boot on; I pulled it with my hands, I pushed with all the strength of the muscles of my leg, making the most unheard-of efforts, when suddenly, the two tags of my boot remained in my hands, and my foot struck out like a catapult." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... that he should be killed while attempting to measure certain heights at a difficult point; for when he had put his head out beyond the wall in order to let a plumb-line down, a priest who was with the enemy (who feared the genius of Cecca more than the might of the whole camp) discharged a catapult at him and fixed a great dart in his head, insomuch that the poor fellow died on the spot. The fate and the loss of Cecca caused great grief to the whole army and to his fellow-citizens; but since there was no remedy, they sent him back in a coffin to Florence, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... like as a boy, Dad? Aunt Rosamund says that you used to get into white rages when nobody could go near you. She says you were always climbing trees, or shooting with a catapult, or stalking things, and that you never told anybody what you didn't want to tell them. And weren't you desperately ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his sleeping-place in a hollow limb. She learned to hold a frenzied fox-terrier at the mouth of a hollow log, ready to pounce on the kangaroo-rat which had taken refuge there, and which flashed out as if shot from a catapult on being poked from the other end with a long stick. She learned to mark the hiding-place of the young wild-ducks that scuttled and dived, and hid themselves with such super-natural cunning in the reedy pools. She saw the native companions, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... victims were pressed closer and closer together in their flight, half of them seemed to go insane. They raced to and fro, laughing and screaming, flinging their arms aloft in extravagant gestures. One young fellow, rushing across the ground, hurled himself like a bolt from a catapult into the heart of the grisly mass, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... monkey leaped out of a tree top just as I stepped from behind a bush, and he saw me instantly. For a full half minute he hung suspended by one arm, his round head thrust forward staring intently; then launching himself into the air as though shot from a catapult he caught a branch twenty feet away, swung to another, and literally flew through the tree tops. Without a sound save the swish of the branches and splash after splash in the leaves, the entire herd followed him down the hill. It was out of range for the shotgun ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... upon a rescue. The chauffeur who had brought round the motor surrendered his place to Molly, whom Jack had taught to drive the new car, and I was given the seat of honour beside her. By this time the streets were comparatively clear of traffic, and we shot away as if we had been propelled from a catapult, Molly contriving to combine a rippling flow of words with intricate tricks of steering, in an extraordinary fashion which I would defy any male expert to imitate without ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the door of the barn. A curious crackling, snapping noise issued. Craig gently tried the door. It was bolted on the inside. As many of us as could threw ourselves like a human catapult ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... supreme—by force of fact, not by election—and there was no meddling from the outsider. The mighty warrior would no more have ventured to offer a design for the temple of Pallas Athene than would the sacred poet have proffered a plan for constructing the catapult. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... heard a yell as from a man in terror. He looked back of him and saw the Frisco car coming down the grade as if shot from a monster catapult! ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... sight and smell of blood, the blow that had been dealt it, was crouching for a spring. The red-brown hair was bristling, the eyes were terrible. I was before it, but those glaring eyes had marked me not. It passed me like a bar from a catapult, and the man whose heel it had felt was full in its path. One of its forefeet sank in the velvet of the doublet; the claws of the other entered the flesh below the temple, and tore downwards and across. With a cry as awful as the panther's scream the Italian threw himself upon the beast ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... said Monty, and went past me through the door like a bolt from a catapult. Fred followed me, and when he saw us both out on the landing Monty started down ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... from me. For a short instant I was free; my impetuous attack seemed to have startled the enemy; I gathered myself up on my knees. But my advantage was not to last long. Another man, whom I had not seen, sprang suddenly on me like a bullet from a catapult. His fierce onset overthrew me; I was stretched on the ground again, on my back now, and my throat was clutched viciously in strong fingers. At the same moment my arms were again seized and pinned. The face of the man on my chest bent down towards ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... locate the Hun machine from which that bomb had been shot downward like a projectile from a catapult, passing through a tube with a forward slant in the bottom of the big ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... and made a cut at its head with all the force that lay in my arm. Where the blow fell I know not, but apparently it was ineffective, for, with a quick vicious turn of its paw, the bear struck my weapon from my hand with such violence that it flew over the tree-tops as if shot from a catapult, and I ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... cried, rushing indiscriminately at his companions. 'Get me a catapult, lower boy, I say! Stones, peashooter, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... veritably, if he gets orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact, and not a shadow. Alive in this year Forty-three, able and willing to do his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far earlier, he began; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch to percussion-cap; equipments, circumstances, have all changed and again changed; but the human battle-engine, in the inside ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of exceeding life-likeness, the Mummy first drew up its right knee so as to bring it nearly in contact with the abdomen, and then, straightening the limb with inconceivable force, bestowed a kick upon Doctor Ponnonner, which had the effect of discharging that gentleman, like an arrow from a catapult, through a window into ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... chin. Yet another ounce of pressure, and it seemed his neck must snap like a dry twig. Suddenly his spine bent limp. Muscles relaxed. The whole body capitulated. Then the man behind stooped a little, and Rodrigo began to rise. Slowly at first, and next, as from a catapult, the brigand shot backward over the man's shoulder and struck his ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... puny blow. He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and gave me a shove with his hand. It was only a shove, a flirt of the wrist, yet so tremendous was his strength that I was hurled backward as from a catapult. I struck the door of the state-room which had formerly been Mugridge's, splintering and smashing the panels with the impact of my body. I struggled to my feet, with difficulty dragging myself clear of ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... sensation than that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... at this same siege, there were brought to him two iron cuirasses from Cyprus, weighing each of them no more than forty pounds, and Zoilus, who had forged them, to show the excellence of their temper, desired that one of them might be tried with a catapult missile, shot out of one of the engines at no greater distance than six and twenty paces; and, upon the experiment, it was found, that though the dart exactly hit the cuirass, yet it made no greater impression than such a slight scratch as might ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... intent on giving him that last kick of which he had spoken. He saw Gualtier's start, and he himself sprang after him with fearful force. Coming up to him, he administered to him one single blow with his foot, so tremendous that it was like the stroke of a catapult, and sent the unhappy wretch headlong to ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... her ladyship wrestling vainly with the window behind me. What would have happened next I can't tell, except that I was in a mood to fight for our car till the death, even if knives flashed out; and I think I was gasping "Police! Police!" but at that instant Mr. Jack Dane hurled himself like a catapult from the hotel. He dashed the weedy youths out of his way like ninepins, jumped to his seat, and the car and ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Zion hill, with earth's revolving hours Under the changing centuries of heaven, It stood upon the solemn altar block, By every Gentile who had heard abhorred— The holy light of Israel of the Lord; Until that Titus and the legions came And battered the walls with catapult and fire, And bore the priests and candlestick away, And, as memorial of fulfilled desire, Bade carve upon the arch that bears his name The stone procession ye may see today Beyond the Forum on the Sacred Way, Lifting ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket Baikal hummed over us like a tracer bullet with ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... the construction of the catapult may be found in almost any junk pile, and the only work required, outside of what can be done at home, is to have a few threads cut on the pieces of pipe. The fittings can be procured ready to attach, except for drilling a ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the group. The matrons ceased to gossip; the royalists left off talking politics, and all gathered about to witness the scene. Joshua's companion held the woman's arms, and he stooped to bind her feet to the chair, when one flew out like a bolt from a catapult, planting the toe in the pit of poor Joshua's stomach, causing him to roll over on the ground and howl with pain. The sheriff by this time came on the scene and summoned sufficient help to bind her to ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... preceptor—and in a short time William John was so full of romance that we could not trust him to black our boots. He and Primus had a scheme for seizing a lugger and becoming pirates, when Primus was to be captain, William John first lieutenant, and old Poppy a prisoner. To the crew was added a boy with a catapult, one Johnny Fox, who was another victim of the tyrant Poppy, and they practised walking the plank at Scrymgeour's window. The plank was pushed nearly half-way out at the window, and you walked up it until it toppled and you were flung into the quadrangle. Such was ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... some of them garrison Munichia and some the south shore. The Assembly also elects two trainers, with subordinate instructors, who teach them to fight in heavy armour, to use the bow and javelin, and to discharge a catapult. The guardians receive from the state a drachma apiece for their keep, and the youths four obols apiece. Each guardian receives the allowance for all the members of his tribe and buys the necessary provisions for the common stock (they mess together by tribes), ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... chariots, not to paddle in mud. And almost the first thing they saw in Crown Square was the car of Jupiter in its glory, flying all the Signal colours; and other cars behind. They did not rush now; they sprang, as from a catapult; and alighted like flies on the vehicles. Men insisted on taking their papers from them and paying for them on the spot. The boys were startled; they were entirely puzzled; but they had not the habit of refusing money. And off went the procession to the music of its own ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... porch to find her Uncle Dick smoking a cigar and reading the paper in a warm corner. Like a stone from a catapult she flung herself into ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... repeat his blow, the Moorish Scaevola, with a fate very different from that of his Roman prototype, was pierced with a hundred wounds by the attendants, who rushed to the spot, alarmed by the cries of the marchioness, and his mangled remains were soon after discharged from a catapult into the city; a foolish bravado, which the besieged requited by slaying a Galician gentleman, and sending his corpse astride upon a mule through the gates of the town ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... suggestion didn't seem to appeal to Simmonds, who merely grunted and continued his examination of the catapult. ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... deal of spring to the concern, and the motion is by no means disagreeable. Sometimes the bands slip from the shafts, and in such case the machine comes to the ground with a disagreeable thump; if the traveler happens to be asleep at the time he can easily imagine he is being shot from a catapult. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... great battle-field in Europe she had not trod upon. She knew them so well that she could people each field with the familiar bright regiments, bayonets and sabers, pikes and broadswords, axes and crossbowmen, matchlock and catapult, rifles and cannon. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Slain without fault, Life smacks but tastelessly Lacking your salt! Stuck in a bog whence naught May catapult me, Come from the grave, long-sought, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... middle distance he seemed like a young angel. How was the watcher to know that the thought behind that far-off gaze was simply a speculation as to whether the bird on the cedar tree was or was not within range of his catapult? Certainly Maud had no such suspicion. She worked hopefully day by day to rouse Albert to an appreciation of the ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... seat and the back as if ejected from a catapult shot two figures, and flew together up the front walk, a tall boy and a little girl, just as the sun dropped low and swung a deep red light into the sky, flooding the front yard with glory, and staining the heavens far up ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... terminal yell, and saw the maniac bound over the fire towards him, but he saw and heard no more, for his limbs became suddenly endued with something like electric vitality. He turned and shot over a small precipice, as if flung from an ancient catapult. What he alighted on he did not know, still less did he care. It was sufficiently ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... know that I ever kicked a man with more success. He shot out as if he had been heaved by a catapult. There was a dreadful uproar behind me, and I expected every moment to be stormed by the waiter-and-pot-boy regiment. However I could hear some of the ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the furnace and consumed him. Many more attempts were made to cast Abraham into the furnace, but always with the same success—whoever seized him to pitch him in was himself burnt, and a large number lost their lives. Satan appeared in human shape, and advised the king to place Abraham in a catapult and sling him into the fire. Thus no one would be required to come near the flame. Satan himself constructed the catapult. Having proved it fit three times by means of stones put in the machine, they bound Abraham, hand and foot, and were about to consign ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... from the deck as though shot from a catapult. The swirling waters engulfed her. She knew that her end had come, only the most powerful of swimmers might hope to win through that lashing hell of waters to the beach beyond. For a girl to do it was too hopeless ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony's grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a quarter ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... and none too fresh at that)—her crouching body thrown well back upon the haunches, her tail, enlarged to double the usual size, waving sinuously from side to side in leisurely calculation of distance and chances. Suddenly she launched her supple body into space like a catapult, caught the meat between her claws, swung in the air for a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... picture of the siege. Whatever of mechanism or method was known to Greeks or Romans was employed by besiegers and besieged. Stones, fireballs, bunches of arrows, heavy beams were fired into the city by ballista and catapult, and were fired back with equal skill and abundance. The battering-rams breached the wall and found new walls rising just within. The besieged fished with iron hooks from the top of the walls, and hauled the captured Crusaders alive to their death at the summit. Stripped, they were used ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... admit of pity and forgiveness because they were committed involuntarily, through ignorance, instances 'the man who did not know a subject was forbidden, like Aeschylus with the Mysteries,' and 'the man who only meant to show how it worked, like the fellow who let off the catapult' ([Greek: e deixai Boulemos apheinai, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "a stubborn generation," of "the iniquity of the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation?" So that the text comes to-day with the force of a projectile hurled from mightiest catapult: "Whose son art ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... way, Ned," said Jack excitedly, and gathering a half-dozen or so smaller stones in his right hand, he hurled them catapult fashion right at the advancing heads, with the result that the two reptiles turned sharply, and went off at full speed in beneath the abundant growth of plants, while at the end of a few minutes the missiles thrown in ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... tactics. A brewer fancies that he can set fire to this block of masonry by pumping over it spikenard and poppy-seed oil mixed with phosphorus. A young carpenter, who has some archaeological notions, proposes to construct a catapult. Some of them think that they have seized the governor's daughter, and want to burn her in order to make the father surrender. Others set fire to a projecting mass of buildings filled with straw, and thus close up the passage. "The Bastille ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... something shot from a catapult, he sprang to the door, whisked through it, banged it behind him, turned the key, and went racing down the corridor ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Captain too Jumped overboard, and dropped from view Like stone from catapult; And when he reached the Merman's lair, He certainly was welcomed there, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... brought out of their tents by the noise, were filled with horror when they learned the imminent peril from which they had escaped. The mangled body of the Moor was taken by the people to the camp and thrown into the city from a catapult. The Gomeres gathered up the body with deep reverence as the remains of a saint; they washed and perfumed it and buried it with great honor and loud lamentations. In revenge of his death they slew one of their principal Christian ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Stoughton, Michigan, presented itself as a ramshackled, filthy wooden town of bar-rooms, eating-rooms, pool-rooms, and unspeakable hotels. The joys and excitements he had known over such deals as the buying and selling of the Catapult, the Peppermint, and the Etna mines were as flat now as the lees of yesternight's feast. "I'm not in love with her," he kept saying, doggedly, to himself; and yet the thought of leaving Olivia Guion and her interests to this intrusive stranger, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... What sort of cat makes you think of reflected sounds? (Catacoustics.) 3. What sort of cat unites well with a toilet article? (Catacomb.) 4. What sort of cat requires a physician's attention? (Catalepsy.) 5. What sort of cat is feared by soldiers? (Catapult.) 6. What sort of cat is bad for the eyes? (Cataract.) 7. What sort of cat is to be dreaded? (Catastrophe.) 8. What sort of cat is allowed on the table? (Catsup.) 9. What sort of cat goes to Sunday school? (Catechism.) 10. What ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... terror like the terror of that sound to me. When I hear a trumpet or a drum or the clash of steel or the hum of the catapult as the great stone flies, fire runs through my veins: I feel my blood surge up hot behind my eyes: I must charge: I must strike: I must conquer: Caesar himself will not be safe in his imperial seat if once that spirit gets loose ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than Niagara, falling upon an ordinary collection of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Firishtah, or "Filampatan," according to the author of the BURHAN-I-MAASIR. He seized it, slaughtered the inhabitants without mercy, and captured the unfortunate prince Vinayaka Deva.[41] The Sultan "commanded a pile of wood to be lighted before the citadel, and putting Nagdeo in an engine (catapult), had him shot from the walls into the flames, in which he was consumed." After a few days' rest the Sultan retired, but was followed and harassed by large bodies of Hindus and completely routed. Only 1500 men returned ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... go gently and attend to things one by one: after I've attended to this, then I'll attend to that: I'll train my catapult on the old fellow for the two hundred first. If I shatter the tower and outworks with the said catapult, the next minute I'll plunge straight through the gate into the ancient and time-worn town; in case I capture it, you two can carry off gold ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... liest. I spring from loftier lineage than thine own.' He spake; and all at fiery speed the two Shocked on the central bridge, and either spear Bent but not brake, and either knight at once, Hurled as a stone from out of a catapult Beyond his horse's crupper and the bridge, Fell, as if dead; but quickly rose and drew, And Gareth lashed so fiercely with his brand He drave his enemy backward down the bridge, The damsel crying, 'Well-stricken, kitchen-knave!' Till Gareth's shield was cloven; but one stroke Laid him ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... bands slip from the shafts, and in such case the machine comes to the ground with a disagreeable thump; if the traveler happens to be asleep at the time he can easily imagine he is being shot from a catapult. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... hours Under the changing centuries of heaven, It stood upon the solemn altar block, By every Gentile who had heard abhorred— The holy light of Israel of the Lord; Until that Titus and the legions came And battered the walls with catapult and fire, And bore the priests and candlestick away, And, as memorial of fulfilled desire, Bade carve upon the arch that bears his name The stone procession ye may see today Beyond the Forum on the Sacred Way, Lifting the golden ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... men!... Knapp, if I were you I'd swing my eight-inchers out, bring up the plane catapult and keep the deck torpedo tubes loaded and ready. It's best to be prepared; God knows what's ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... was not a man to send messages nor to depend upon telephones. He was as direct as a catapult, and was just as regardful of ceremony. The fact that it was his and everybody else's dinner hour did not hold him back an instant from having himself driven to the Foote residence and demanding instant speech with ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... mountains sawed into the sky until they vanished in the distance. Unseen below, the old caravan-trail climbed one side of the pass and slid down the other, a sheer five hundred feet below the parapet and the two corner catapult-platforms which now mounted 90-mm guns. On the little hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was parked, and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... knees in a moment, emptying the contents of her pocket on to the floor, and sifting them. There were two pocket-handkerchiefs of fine texture, and exceedingly dirty, as if they had been there for months (the one she used she carried in the bosom of her dress or up her sleeve), a ball of string, a catapult and some swan shot, a silver pen, a pencil holder, part of an old song book, a pocket book, some tin tacks, a knife with several blades and scissors, etc.; also a silver fruit knife, two coloured pencils, indiarubber, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... driving in great form. For the first time in his life he seemed able to keep his eye on the ball, and the way he sent it flying through the air was a caution. Diogenes and Simple Simon had both had their second stroke and Solomon drove off. His ball sailed straight ahead like a missile from a catapult, flew in a bee-line for Diogenes, struck him at the base of his brain, continued on through, and landed on the edge ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... pull up with might and main, but it was too late, his steed stumbled, shooting him as from a catapult, right on the top—not of a humble padre, but of a bishop of the holy Roman Empire, when his floundering steed upsetting the leading bearer, bishop and midshipman rolled over together, the former shouting for help, the ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... cleared away from the great wooden catapult, leaving two of their number to discharge it. One in a scarlet cap bent over it, steadying the jagged rock which was balanced on the spoon-shaped end of the long wooden lever. The other held the loop of the rope which would release the catch and send the unwieldy missile hurtling through the air. ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... like a missile from a catapult. His right fist grazed Percy's cheek. Roused from his policy of inaction, Percy shot in a stinging blow that found its mark under Jabe's right ear and sent him staggering. The fight was ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled over flat ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... head, but it was a puny blow. He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and gave me a shove with his hand. It was only a shove, a flirt of the wrist, yet so tremendous was his strength that I was hurled backward as from a catapult. I struck the door of the state-room which had formerly been Mugridge's, splintering and smashing the panels with the impact of my body. I struggled to my feet, with difficulty dragging myself clear of the wrecked ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... enough to keep all the ordnance on the castle walls busy for two. But indeed he had not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... allowance of fat. His loss of weight (in avoirdupois) has been computed at five-sixteenths of the integral cubit of a patent accumulator's vertical boiling power, divided by the fractional resistance of a plate-glass window to a two-horse-power catapult. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... He was upon his feet, the big, swaying body oddly like a clumsy black bear's, his big hands lifted in front of him. And then he threw himself forward, close to two hundred and fifty pounds of brawn and bone hurled like a boulder from a catapult. Some one had turned up the lantern wick. The black head and the red head from which the hat had dropped came together, there was the thud of two strong bodies meeting with an impact that brought a little coughing grunt from ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... was absent. There was none to defend him and, though he would not have given up easily, there could have been but one ending to the fight had not a strange interruption occurred. The young wolf was suddenly hurled backward as from a catapult, his neck being broken as he struck the ground, while upon the rock beside the old leader appeared a great white wolf, fangs bared and eyes glowing with savage fire. For a moment the pack stood aghast. Never had such a wolf been seen in all the ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... fatal issue—so proximate as to seem already present—no wonder that our hearts were dismayed at sight of the waggon moving towards us. As the inhabitants of a leaguered city behold with fear the advance of the screened catapult or mighty "ram," so regarded we the approach of that familiar vehicle—now a very monster in our eyes. We were not permitted to view the spectacle in perfect security. As the waggon moved forward, those who carried the muskets drew still nearer under ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... apartments, and in the bustle of getting in the packets, exploring the rooms, exclaiming at the beautiful view from the balcony, and Bertie's sudden discovery that it was a glorious place to test the powers of a pea-shooter or catapult, he forgot all about Uncle Clair's words and Aunt Amy's sorrowful smile; and even Eddie thawed a little, and agreed that a beautiful full-rigged ship, with the bright sun shining on her snow-white sails, was a pretty-enough picture to please ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... fall. On it went, with even greater rapidity than at first; then balancing for an instant on the brink, the end to which he held was lifted up high in the air, and he was sent from it as from a catapult, far out into the calm water below the caldron! I never expected again to see him, but he rose uninjured to the surface; and being a good swimmer, struck out boldly till he was picked up by one ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... interjects a whiskyfied interruption into the Professor's speech, who at once in stentorian tones orders that the disturber of the harmony of the evening shall be summarily consigned to the lunatic asylum. I see him ejected with something like the force of a stone from a catapult and have no reasonable doubt that he will spend the night an inmate of "Craig Duncan." The speeches over bargaining recommences moistened by toddy, which fluid appears to exercise an appreciable softening ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... watched his chance and darted in with murderous knife at Milo's breast while the dreadful club was at his back. Cool as a mountain spring, the giant immediately let go his man, letting him fly far behind him like a stone from a catapult. In a twinkling of an eye, the great hands that released the one captive closed afresh on the new assailant in front, and now the giant gave no further grace. His fingers tightened on the man's throat and the desperate face went black. Then, keeping the fellow ever before him, he ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... to have climbed up to where I am just by sheer natural merit than I would be to ride the very sun in the zenith and have to reflect that I was nothing but a poor little accident, and got shot up there out of somebody else's catapult. To me, merit is everything—in fact, the only thing. All else ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... different from that of his Roman prototype, was pierced with a hundred wounds by the attendants, who rushed to the spot, alarmed by the cries of the marchioness, and his mangled remains were soon after discharged from a catapult into the city; a foolish bravado, which the besieged requited by slaying a Galician gentleman, and sending his corpse astride upon a mule through the gates of the town into the Christian ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... all," replied Adonis. "We use one of our regular drivers—the best is called the 'celestial catapult.' Ph[oe]bus sells 'em at the Caddie House for five hundred dollars apiece. If you strike a ball fair and square with the 'celestial catapult,' and neither pull nor slice, it can't ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... slaughtering-room, And by the child Despair born red therefrom As, thank the secret sire picked out to cram With spurious spawn thy misconceiving dam, Thou, like a worm from a town's common tomb, Didst creep from forth the kennel of her womb, Born to break down with catapult and ram Man's builded towers of promise, and with breath And tongue to track and hunt his hopes to death: O, by that sweet dead body abused and slain, And by that child mismothered,—dog, by all Thy curses thou hast cursed mankind ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "We are almost there. And there, to the right, is the Tversha. It is like a great catapult. Gott! what a wonderful night! No wonder these Russians are romantic. What a night for a pipe and a long chair! This horse of mine is tired. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... trench mortar was actually got into use, and did a certain amount of damage to the Boche trenches, but naturally produced considerable retaliation. Further efforts to fire rifle grenades met with some success, whilst a "Gamage" catapult introduced to throw bombs provided, at any rate, a little amusement. In patrolling considerable progress was made. Second Lieut. A. Hacking did some very daring work at "Peckham Corner," and near Petit Bois; 2nd Lieut. Hollins and L.-Corpls. Heath and G. Gadd of B Company made splendid reconnaissances ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... us again, in undress, with a jacket and cap of the police. He is licking his chops: "I met some pals and we've had a drink. You see, to-morrow one starts scratching again, and cleaning his old rags and his catapult. But my greatcoat!—going to be some job to filter that! It isn't ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... He set his back against the opposite wall, then launched himself like a catapult. The patrolman followed suit, but although the panels strained and ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... came like a shot from a catapult. Enid's face grew colder. Bell drew a long tube of discoloured paper carefully tied round ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... and who hardly reached to Julia Crosby's shoulder, felt herself carried along with such velocity that the breath left her body, her knees gave way and she fell down in a limp little bundle. Julia Crosby instantly let go her hand and the impetus of the rush shot her like a catapult far over the ice into the midst of a crowd ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... grotesquely till he rose to end its troubles. Or a misguided frog, pursued perhaps by some enemy on land, would dive in and swim by with long, webbed toes. At this sight the master of the pool would dart from his lair like a bolt from a catapult. Frogs were much to his taste. And once in a long time even a wood-mouse, hard pressed and panic-stricken, would leap in to swim across to the meadow shore. The first time this occurred the trout had risen slowly, and followed below the swimmer ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... experiments. He also exhibited a ball made partly of thin iron; the globe represented the earth, for the purposes of the experiment, and the ball a meteorite of somewhat large relative size. The ball was then discharged at the globe from a little catapult; sometimes the globe attracted the ball to its surface, and held it there, sometimes it missed it, but altered its curve of motion through the air. So was it, said the lecturer, with meteorites when they neared the earth. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... was charter, there was challenge; in a blast of breath I gave; You can be all things other; you cannot be a slave. You shall be tired and tolerant of fancies as they fade, But if men doubt the Charter, ye shall call on the Crusade— Trumpet and torch and catapult, cannon and bow and blade, Because it was My challenge to all the ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... blocked the crossing. Bob must have seen the solid wall for I heard his low muttered curse. Nothing else to indicate that we were blocked with his goal in sight. He never touched the speed controller, but took the two blocks as though shot from a catapult. The two? No, one, and three-quarters of the next, for when within a score of yards of the black wall he jammed down the brakes, and the iron mass ground and shook as though it would rend itself to atoms, but it stopped with its dasher and front wheels wedged in between a car and a dray. It had ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... first of all make the circuit of the temples; then they proceed to Piraeus, and some of them garrison Munichia and some the south shore. The Assembly also elects two trainers, with subordinate instructors, who teach them to fight in heavy armour, to use the bow and javelin, and to discharge a catapult. The guardians receive from the state a drachma apiece for their keep, and the youths four obols apiece. Each guardian receives the allowance for all the members of his tribe and buys the necessary provisions for the common stock (they mess together by tribes), and generally ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... you, my enemy, Slain without fault, Life smacks but tastelessly Lacking your salt! Stuck in a bog whence naught May catapult me, Come from the grave, long-sought, Come ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... his deep blue eyes and their sweet, pensive expression as they searched the middle distance he seemed like a young angel. How was the watcher to know that the thought behind that far-off gaze was simply a speculation as to whether the bird on the cedar tree was or was not within range of his catapult? Certainly Maud had no such suspicion. She worked hopefully day by day to rouse Albert to an appreciation of the ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Running under a little cart which stood in the way, he skinned his teeth, and growled to himself, 'By the prophet, but I can almost love her again; she distinguished herself by that kick, which was aimed with infinite tact; it went right to the spot, and struck me like a discharge from a catapult, drove all the wind out of me, and left an absolute vacuum, as if a stomach-pump had sucked me out. Yap—yow—eaow—yeaow—yap—snif—xquiz;' and, after a good deal of panting and distress, he at last yawned so wide as nearly to dislocate ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Indians. Near me two half-breeds were righting their saddles. I also was tightening the girths, which was not an easy matter with my excited broncho prancing round in a circle. Suddenly there was the whistle of something through the air overhead, like a catapult stone, or recoiling whip-lash. The same instant one of the half-breeds gave an upward toss of both arms and, with a piercing shriek, fell to the ground. The fellow caught at his throat and from his bared chest protruded ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... brilliant suggestion didn't seem to appeal to Simmonds, who merely grunted and continued his examination of the catapult. ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... speed. Suddenly he dropped the lazy stroke, and it seemed as though he were imbued with new life. His arms and legs worked together with the precision of a machine and he shot through the water like a catapult. ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... left knee suddenly as the infuriated beggar rushed in upon him in catapult fashion, with his body doubled and his head bent low, Mick at the same time, with all the force of his good right arm, struck downwards at the darkey's exposed ear, which was about the size of a small plate, catching him thus between his knee and fist like ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... his knees, his face and mouth gory from the catapult's stroke, moaned with agony as he clawed blindly. Patrolman White was tugging at the gangster who had been knocked unconscious by Burke's club. Outside two of the uniformed men were reverently lifting the corpse of Terence Maguire, who was on his ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... Shouts filled the air,— "St. George!" "St. Denis!"—as here and there The shock of the battle shifted; There were catapult-shots and shots by hand, Ladders with desperate climbers manned, Rams and rocks, hot lead, and sand On the heads ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... shot up; for a moment it was almost on end, and then it rose to the top of the wave and a moment later as the crash came and the sweep in toward shore began the frail craft was flung forward as if from a catapult. ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spearman and my catapult! Oh! my swift horseman! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of foolishness! [An ANGEL, in a dress the color of embers, and carrying a blossoming apple bough in his hand and with a gilded halo about his head, ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... two was he subjected to this torture. Suddenly Ziffak ran toward the Xingu and then let go of the ankles. The black, limp object went spinning far out in the air, as if driven from some enormous catapult. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... when the soldiers were carrying the banner of the saint round the walls of the town, followed by the citizens chanting hymns, one of the bearers of the holy relics, named Gozbert, was struck by a stone from a catapult. The man who had fired it fell dead, while Gozbert continued his promenade in no way injured by the blow. The Abbe D'Abbon vouches for these miracles on the part of St. Germain in defence of ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... ee-koo, ee-ko, coolie, coolie, ee-koo. This happened in the scrub at sunset, and came, I think, from a bird smaller than the Australian minah, and of a greenish yellowish hue, larger, but similar to the members of the feathered tribe known to young city 'knights of the catapult' as greenies. It was while returning to camp from fishing that I noticed this bird, which ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of Socotra is entitled to a salute of fourteen popguns and one catapult. Before approaching the throne of the Duke of the Djibouti one is required to take ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... or more, exchanging a passing word now and then with the sentinel, when two men entered the battery, chatting busily together. One was in complete armor; the other wrapped in the plain short cloak of a man of pens and peace: but the talk of both was neither of sieges nor of sallies, catapult, bombard, nor culverin, but ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... death; and as Hauck's fingers loosened at his neck he heard with the snarling and roaring and tumult the crushing of great jaws and the thud of bodies. Hauck was rising, his face blanched with a strange terror. He was half up when a gaunt, lithe body shot at him like a stone flung from a catapult and Baree's inch-long fangs sank into his thick throat and tore his head half from his body in one savage, snarling snap of the jaws. David raised himself and through the horror of what he saw the Girl ran to ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... His voice came like a stone from a catapult. The merchant turned calmly and without haste, showing an aquiline face covered with wrinkles, tufted with white hairs, lit by eyes that shone with the cruel expressiveness of a falcon's. After a short colloquy in Arabic he raised himself from his haunches, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the Guards Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... Irish servant Michael standing near one of the friars. At this point in the conversation the Irishman plucked me by the sleeve, pointed to a friar, and whispered a word in my ear. Like a stone from a catapult I sprang on the friar indicated, threw him to the ground, and drew from under ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... for 1874 as having been killed at Cobo on the 28th of September of that year. This seems rather an early date. When I was in Guernsey in November, 1875, I saw a few flocks of Snow Buntings, and one—a young bird of the year—which had been killed by a boy with a catapult, was brought into Couch's shop about the same time, and I have one killed at St. Martin's, Guernsey, in November, 1878; and Captain Hubbach writes me word that he shot three out of a flock of five in Alderney in ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... of the ladder he stopped. From that spot he hurled his first rock. His was a young, powerful arm and the missile sped upward as if shot from a catapult. It struck the face of the cliff a short distance above the head of the climber and glanced off to go hurtling down ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... one of the two square towers that flanked the main gate, but, being come thither, he paused to behold Giles, who chancing to be captain of the watch, sat upon a pile of great stones beside a powerful mangonel or catapult and stared him dolefully upon the lightening east: full oft sighed he, and therewith shook despondent head and even thus fell he to soft and doleful singing, groaning to himself 'twixt each verse, on ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... David is charming: he is a saucy fellow who has gone in for it for the fun of the thing—knew he could bring down a hawk with his catapult, and therefore why not a Goliath also? If he failed, he need but cut and run, and everybody would laugh and call him plucky for doing even that much. So he does it, brings down his big game by good luck, and stands posing with a sort of irresistible stateliness to suit the result. ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... like two points of flame, the hair on his neck and back stood up like bristles, and his great tail struck the door-casing resounding whacks, as he lashed it from side to side. Only a moment he stood there, and then the great striped body hurtled through the air as if shot from a catapult, and covering a good twenty feet in the spring it landed fair on Bombay, one of the largest tigers in the group. The aim was a true one and the sound of breaking bone mingled with a scream of pain from his victim, as Bombay sank under the weight of the blow, his cervical vertebrae crushed ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... back into his throat by the jump of the Green Imp. She shot out of the driveway like a stone out of a catapult, and was off down the mile road to the station, All conveyances going to that train had passed quarter-hour before, and the course was ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... an exclamation of genuine wrath. For, with astonishing swiftness, the big hand had flown to the hip of the ragged trousers, had plucked a short-bladed fishing knife from its sheath, and had hurled it, dexterously, with the strength of a catapult, straight at ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... looks. There were other bridge-builders in the world, certainly, but it was always Alexander's picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges that cut the air ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... have gone farther and mentioned my misgivings but just then Sami came and I forgot all about them. I don't believe I have ever seen any child so frightened as that little Indian! He simply fell through the bushes behind the chicken house and shot, like a small, brown catapult, into Desire's arms. His round face was actually grey with fear. And he huddled in her big apron shivering, for all the world like ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... in a measure, for something strange, he never bargained for what happened. It was as if he had been fired from some catapult of the ancient Romans. Through the air he hurtled, like some great flying animal, covering fifty feet from a ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... felt that he could no longer endure the strain, the dragging sensation ceased. Like a stone from a catapult Jack was projected up again to the surface of the sea. The sky, the ocean, everything burned red as flame as he regained the blessed air and sucked it in in ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... to drive a car!" she snapped; and for further answer she threw the speed lever into the intermediate gear and released the clutch. Like a projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue, and with a jerk of the lever into the "high" the second race ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... they raised by main force; whilst the two others, arming themselves each with a trestle, and using it like a great sledge-hammer, knocked down at a blow eight sailors upon whose heads they had brought their monstrous catapult in play. The floor was already strewn with wounded, and the room filled with cries and dust, when D'Artagnan, satisfied with the test, advanced, sword in hand, and striking with the pommel every ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... time the act was repeated, this time a tiny stone being brought to the surface, and, after a brief pause at the doorway, was jerked to a distance as from a catapult. I now concluded to try the power of this propelling force, and taking a small stone, about three-quarters of an inch in length and a quarter-inch in thickness, laid it over the mouth of the tunnel. A few minutes passed, when I noticed a slight motion in the stone, immediately followed ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... generation of the righteous," of "the generation of vipers," of an "untoward generation," of "a stubborn generation," of "the iniquity of the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation?" So that the text comes to-day with the force of a projectile hurled from mightiest catapult: "Whose son art ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... and the distance between himself and the guard was well calculated. He launched himself like a catapult-dart against the slim figure, and was fortunate enough to seize the gun. Frank was an adept at the Japanese ju-jitsu game, and, much to the astonishment of the Filipino, he soon found himself, minus his gun, dropping to the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... tart or two and some bread-and-jam and some chicken and cake and toffee and things in a handkerchief, and climb on to the porch with Grumper's longest fishing-rod, you might be able to relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any good he could fire sweets up with a catapult." ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... who were standing in the road. Instinctively, Chad swung on in spite of the roar of laughter and astonishment that greeted him and, as Tom banged the gate, the ram swerved and Chad shot off sidewise as from a catapult and dropped, a most unheroic little knight, in the mire. That ended Chad's chivalry in the hills, for in the roars of laughter that greeted him, Chad recognized Caleb Hazel's as the loudest. If HE laughed, chivalry ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... the pistol, and amid a roar from the spectators the five athletes sprang ahead as though released from a catapult. Elbows pressed against their sides, heads up, they made a thrilling picture, and the crowd cheered wildly. At first they kept well together, but they were setting a fast pace, and soon one of the men began to lag behind. ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... plainly not of the agent, being himself. But what he is doing a man may be ignorant, as men in speaking say a thing escaped them unawares; or as Aeschylus did with respect to the Mysteries, that he was not aware that it was unlawful to speak of them; or as in the case of that catapult accident the other day the man said he discharged it merely to display its operation. Or a person might suppose a son to be an enemy, as Merope did; or that the spear really pointed was rounded off; or that the stone was a pumice; or in striking ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... to take away the tea-things; to sweep the hearth; and to alter the position of two pictures. By the time all this was accomplished she had regained her wonted calm and was airing some rather strong views on the subject of two little boys who lived with a catapult ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... power of cats, and felt something of the inert helplessness of the lesser animal, crouching, as if fascinated by the cruel, claw-armed tyrant, waiting to make its spring. And he knew that at any moment this beast might come at him as if discharged from a catapult. But all the same the brain grew more and more acute in its endeavours to find him a way of escape. If he had only had a short bayonet fixed at the end of his gun, that he might hold it ready with the butt upon the ground, ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... raising them in turn to the dominion of the world, and undoing them by too careless prosperity. The manner and the shape of one or the other art, of one or other industry, has changed; the steam-engine has replaced the rowing-bench, and cannon replaced the catapult; but, as a whole, even your country, which you are proud to hear styled "the living wonder of the world"—yes, even your country in the New World, and England in the Old—England, that gigantic workshop of industry, surrounded with a beautiful evergreen garden; ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... Roman catapult with a modern trench mortar seems absurd. Yet the only basic difference is the kind of energy that sends ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... of the prison grounds amongst little patches of highly-cultivated market gardens and clumps of palms, and these long pumps like the ancient catapult with bronze men sweating at them pulling down the long arm of the balanced yard to let the bucket down the well, then tipping the water out into gutters of mud to irrigate. They do it pretty much ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... very large animal. When it sees a bird in the air it draws in its breath so strongly that it draws the birds into its mouth too. Marcus Regulus, the consul of the Roman army was attacked, with his army, by such an animal and almost defeated. And this animal, being killed by a catapult, measured 123 feet, that is 64 1/2 braccia and its head was high above all the trees ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... departs, and the lion as usual after him. They journeyed until they came to a baron's fortified place, which was completely surrounded by a massive, strong, and high wall. The castle, being extraordinarily well protected, feared no assault of catapult or storming-machine; but outside the walls the ground was so completely cleared that not a single hut or dwelling remained standing. You will learn the cause of this a little later, when the time comes. My lord Yvain made his way directly toward the fortified place, and seven ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... altars for the man's soul, turned, mounted, and galloped. He forded Wan. A horseman met him on the further bank, shouting. Prosper lowered his head and shot at him as from a catapult. The spear drove deep, the man threw his arms out, sobbed, and dropped like a stone. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... almost at the same instant there sprang from the side of Mr. Gibbs another figure, with a face livid with agitation. This was Mr. Marcy, who had noticed the foreigner's excitement and had been watching him. Like a stone from a catapult, Mr. Marcy rushed towards Rovinski, taking a course diagonal to that of the latter, and, striking him with tremendous force just before he reached the ring, he threw him against the rail with such violence that the momentum given to his head and body carried them completely over it, and ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... this centre of bliss, that rose in which lies our wealth, our substance, our loves, and our fortune. Do you know that it is a living flower, which should be fondled thus, and not used like a trombone, or as if it were a catapult of war? Now this was the gentle way of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... and closer together in their flight, half of them seemed to go insane. They raced to and fro, laughing and screaming, flinging their arms aloft in extravagant gestures. One young fellow, rushing across the ground, hurled himself like a bolt from a catapult into the heart of the grisly mass, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... in a church choir, and the hugeness of the To-day and To-morrow building turned her again into a worm. It did not so much scrape the sky as soar into it, and when she timidly murmured the words "editorial offices" she was shot up to the top in an elevator as in a perpendicularly directed catapult. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... sunk into the lake. Walky, as though shot from a catapult, described a parabola over his horse's head and landed with a crash on all fours directly under ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... Gathering, that involuntarily his adversary pressed both hands to his ears. With a sudden application of his knee Malcolm sent the door wide, and entered the hall, with his pipes in full cry. The house resounded with their yell—but only for one moment. For down the stair, like bolt from catapult, came Demon, Florimel's huge Irish staghound, and springing on Malcolm, put an instant end to his music. The footman laughed with exultation, expecting to see him torn to pieces. But when instead he saw the fierce ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... back—the position of all others most dreaded—in order to bring his feet into play, his jaws being momentarily helpless. His abdominal muscles were in splendid order. Like a lynx, Sourdough drew in and up his powerful hind quarters, and, as if they had been a missile launched from a catapult, slashed his two hind feet along Jan's belly, as a carpenter might rip a board ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... same siege, there were brought to him two iron cuirasses from Cyprus, weighing each of them no more than forty pounds, and Zoilus, who had forged them, to show the excellence of their temper, desired that one of them might be tried with a catapult missile, shot out of one of the engines at no greater distance than six and twenty paces; and, upon the experiment, it was found, that though the dart exactly hit the cuirass, yet it made no greater ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... principle of the balista that of the sling, of the catapult that of the bow. Ammianus Marcellinus (xv. 12) speaks of "the snowy arms" of the Celtic women dealing blows "like the stroke of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... from a clear sky, came a bolt of common-sense to Tim, and he realized he had been a fond and foolish jay. And that was why, when he had finished prep that evening, he exchanged a copy, bound in calf, of Victor the Valiant for two oranges and a catapult. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... incredulously, for the voice rumbled heavily an octave below his own bass. Either the look of the stocky catapult, as he launched himself on the fleeing servant, or the invidious servility of the innkeeper, sobered the landlord, and he ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... jerked from a catapult, the old carcajou sprang clear out, snatching at the muzzle of the nearest wolf. He dodged, but not quite far enough; and she caught him fairly in the side of the throat, just behind the jaw. It was a deadly grip, and the wolf rose on ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... by the fire in the drawing-room, a room full of flowers and books, and lit by four long windows. Two of the windows looked on to the lawns, and the stone figures chipped by generations of catapult-owning boys; the other two looked across the river into the Hopetoun Woods. The curtains were not drawn though the lamps were lit, for Mrs. Hope liked to keep the river and the woods with her as long as light lasted, so the warm bright room looked warmer and brighter in contrast with ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... gamester, a fiend, a catapult. With a yell of "Hellsfire!" like a bursting shell, he would rowel his saddle-mule and lead the Train through flood or flame. His was a curse and a blow. He seemed a devil, condemned ever to pound miles behind him—bloody miles. Sometimes, there was a sullen ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest. Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs. It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult. "She flew from one danger to another," relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, "till the current drove her on a rock. The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... and the night began to race by Tristram's ears as his horse leapt forward. The motion became easier, but the pace was terrifying to a desperate degree; for it seemed that he sat upon nothing, but was being whirled through the air as from a catapult at the heels of his father, who pounded furiously through the darkness a dozen yards ahead. For three minutes at least he felt at every stride an extreme uncertainty as to his chances of realighting in the saddle. It reminded him of cup-and-ball, and he reflected with envy that the ball ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... L20, and the pouch with twenty golden pieces, must by no means have lessened the zeal and pride of the City castellan as he led on his trusty archers, or urged forward the half-stripped, sinewy men, who toiled at the catapult, or bent down the mighty springs of the terrible mangonel. Many a time through Aldgate must the castellan have passed with glittering armour and flaunting plume, eager to earn his hundred shillings by the siege of a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Ned," said Jack excitedly, and gathering a half-dozen or so smaller stones in his right hand, he hurled them catapult fashion right at the advancing heads, with the result that the two reptiles turned sharply, and went off at full speed in beneath the abundant growth of plants, while at the end of a few minutes the missiles thrown in their track produced ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... unusual jealousy. Watching her opportunity, she had whisked into the corridor, in extreme deshabille; and gone, like the wild roe, towards Majesty's Suite of Rooms; through Majesty's glass door, like a catapult; and emerged as we saw,—in petticoat and shift, with hair streaming, eyes glittering, arms cut, and the other sad trimmings. O Heaven, who could laugh? There are tears due to Kings and to all men. It was deep misery; deep enough "SIN and misery," as Calvin well ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... once or twice so close that the wind they made stirred her hair. The sight fascinated her and took her mind from her own sufferings. She could see the soldiers working at the levers and pulleys till the strings of the catapult or the boards of the balista were drawn to their places. Then the darts or the stones were set in the groove prepared to receive it, a cord was pulled and the missile sped upon its way, making an ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... very force of the stroke was fatal to him; the ball went at first bound right into Compton's hands, who instantly flung it back, like a catapult, at Wright's wicket. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... cat in the garden laying for a rat, There's a boy with a catapult a-laying for the cat, The cat's name is Susan, the boy's name is Jim. And his father round the corner is a-laying ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Monty, and went past me through the door like a bolt from a catapult. Fred followed me, and when he saw us both out on the landing Monty ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... of the discovery, Fred concentrated all his energies in one effort, and bounded forward like a catapult. The distance was precisely what it should have been, and, as he threw out his hands, he struck the Indian squarely in the back with the whole momentum of the body. In fact, the daring boy nearly overdid the matter. He not only came near driving ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... bits of fun was to drive the birds into a panic. This he did by flying furiously around the room, feathers rustling, and squawking as loud as he could. He usually managed to fly just over the head of each bird, and as he came like a catapult, every one flew before him, so that in a minute the room was full of birds flying madly about, trying to get out of his way. This ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... several times and he had heard technical talks of inventions, the sole reason for whose presence in the world was that they had the power to blow human beings into unrecognisable, ensanguined shreds and to tear off limbs and catapult them into the air. He had heard these powers talked of with a sense of natural pride in achievement, in fact with honest ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... down over the city the whole bay side was in process of destruction. Wreckage was thrown with the force of a catapult against houses which still offered resistance. Electric light and gas plants were flooded and the city was ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... haunches, her tail, enlarged to double the usual size, waving sinuously from side to side in leisurely calculation of distance and chances. Suddenly she launched her supple body into space like a catapult, caught the meat between her claws, swung in the air for a victorious half-second—and ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... without a sound, and in imagination Archie could see its fiery, glaring eyes distended with a gaze that seemed to pierce the woven wall, as, with the soft white fur of its under parts brushing the earth, it gathered itself up ready to dash like some living catapult clean through the frail partition to his ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... scramble, escalade[obs3], surmount; shin, shinny, shinney; scale, scale the heights. [cause to go up] raise, elevate &c. 307. go aloft, fly aloft; tower, soar, take off; spring up, pop up, jump up, catapult upwards, explode upwards; hover, spire, plane, swim, float, surge; leap &c. 309. Adj. rising &c. v. scandent|, buoyant; supernatant, superfluitant|; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... suddenly that I was shot out of the apparatus as if it had been a catapult; it broke the pitcher, extinguished the lamp, and landed me in the middle of the kitchen at midnight, with no fire and the air not much above the zero point. The truth is, I had miscalculated the distance of the descent—instead of falling one foot, I had fallen five. My first impulse ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... no artillery preparation to help them. And the order to charge came. So, right into the German guns, in the face of those terrible Prussian Guards, our lads went "over the top" with a great shout, and poured like a flame, like a catapult, across the space between them—No-Man's Land, they called it then—it was only thirty-five yards—to the German trench. So fast they rushed, and so unexpected was their coming, with no curtain of artillery to shield them, that the Germans were for a moment taken aback. Not a shot was fired ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... love to touch the long, ripe, brown capsules on the top with one timid finger, and then jump away, half laughing, half terrified, when the mild-looking little plant goes off suddenly with a small bang and shoots its grains like a catapult point-blank in ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... travelling-apparatus, means of dissemination that allow large families to disperse quickly over the country, so that each member may have his place in the sun without injuring his neighbour; and these apparatus, these methods vie in ingenuity with the elm's samara, the dandelion-plume and the catapult of the squirting cucumber. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... over but he caught the edge of the box. His loose purple "jumper" of cotton and silk ballooned at the back as he swung by one hand in the on-rushing water, thick and yellow with sand, filled with the grinding boulders that came down as, though shot from a catapult, drowning completely his, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... most miraculous feats ever beheld in the amphitheater. He did not dodge but ducked slightly, the wide-spread, taloned paws missing his head on each side. His arms shot out as the lion sprang, and, though the brute came at him through the air like a log-arrow from a catapult, his hands gripped each side of the wide-open mouth and his thumbs pushed the inner corners of the lips between the parted upper and lower cheek-teeth. Therefore to close his jaws on his victim the lion had to crush a roll or fold of his own lips. This incredibly ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... courageous to a degree (the Saxons, not the pigs). They were fearless navigators and reckless warriors. Armed with their rude meat-axes and one or two Excalibars, they would take something in the way of a tonic and march right up to the mouth of the great Thomas catapult, or fall in the moat with a courage that knew not, recked ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... progress. Many must have been trodden under foot, many killed by its murderous trunk, but only their cries came to us. The golden castle, with its canopy of royal snakes, was swayed and tossed, so that we two occupants had much ado not to be shot off like stones from a catapult. But I took a brace with my feet against the front, and one arm around a pillar, and clapped the spare arm round Phorenice, so as to offer myself to ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... automatic gun, automatic pistol; escopet[obs3], escopette[obs3], gunflint, gun-lock; hackbut[obs3], shooter, shooting iron * [U.S.], six-shooter [U.S.], shotgun; Uzzi, assault rifle, Kalashnikov. bow, crossbow, balister[obs3], catapult, sling; battering ram &c. (impulse) 276; gunnery; ballistics &c. (propulsion) 284. missile, bolt, projectile, shot, ball; grape; grape shot, canister shot, bar shot, cannon shot, langrel shot[obs3], langrage shot[obs3], round shot, chain shot; balista[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... bellow he raised his heavy poker in both hands, and plunged into the thick of the conflict. There was no stopping him now. His rush was irresistible. He bore down upon the foe like a human catapult. ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... machine was shot into the air by a catapult. Motion having once been imparted to it, the only thing necessary for the motor was to ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... bystander is always conclusive. Games between experts are watched with interest by quite a number of lookers-on, of every age. The Indian method of shooting a marble is to use the middle finger of the right hand as a sort of catapult. The marble is held with the left hand against this finger, and bending it back, it is suddenly let go. The effect of this is to volley the marble with great force and accuracy. The English boy's method is tame by comparison. ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... coming on behind him. Then it seemed to him as though the head of the oncoming sled, like the cowcatcher on an engine, had picked him and the dogs up, and in an instant more, he said, he was sent flying as from a catapult into the drift, the instant the sled left the track. So far ahead was he thus shot, that the sleds stopped before they reached him, and so, although he was deeply buried, he was ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and brandishing her sallow arms of enormous size, she begins to strike blows mingled with kicks, as if they were so many missiles sent from the string of a catapult. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... ship rolled so much from side to side, that, as I looked up and saw the mastheads forming arches in the sky, I could not help fancying that I should be sent off when I got up there like a stone from a sling, or an ancient catapult, right into the water. The idea made me hold on very tight, let me tell you; yet, as it would never do to give it up, on I went with my teeth pretty closely clenched, and my eyes fixed on the top, which seemed to grow farther and farther away from ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the construction of the catapult may be found in almost any junk pile, and the only work required, outside of what can be done at home, is to have a few threads cut on the pieces of pipe. The fittings can be procured ready to attach, except for drilling a hole ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Mike, as he rode at the chief with the force of a catapult. Down went the Spaniard, horse and all; and before he could disentangle himself, Mike was upon him, his knee ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... I ever kicked a man with more success. He shot out as if he had been heaved by a catapult. There was a dreadful uproar behind me, and I expected every moment to be stormed by the waiter-and-pot-boy regiment. However I could hear some of ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... who had brought round the motor surrendered his place to Molly, whom Jack had taught to drive the new car, and I was given the seat of honour beside her. By this time the streets were comparatively clear of traffic, and we shot away as if we had been propelled from a catapult, Molly contriving to combine a rippling flow of words with intricate tricks of steering, in an extraordinary fashion which I would defy any male expert to imitate without committing ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... to shoulder, singing one of their rousing ditties. Some people who had been standing on their hired rolling chairs had narrow escapes from being flung upon the shoulders of those in front. Some did not escape—Mary for instance, who landed between us as if shot from a catapult. ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... The human catapult sailed through the air and struck two of the enemy as it fell, carrying them to the ground, knocking the breath from the bodies of ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... huge black monkey leaped out of a tree top just as I stepped from behind a bush, and he saw me instantly. For a full half minute he hung suspended by one arm, his round head thrust forward staring intently; then launching himself into the air as though shot from a catapult he caught a branch twenty feet away, swung to another, and literally flew through the tree tops. Without a sound save the swish of the branches and splash after splash in the leaves, the entire herd followed him down the hill. It was out ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... with impudent effrontery. Me he quite ignored, while his insulting eyes raked her fore and aft. My anger seethed, boiled over. Forward slid my foot behind his heel, my forearm under his chin. I threw my weight forward in a push. His head went back as though shot from a catapult, and next moment Sir James Craven measured his length on the ground. With the girl on my arm I pushed through the company to the door. They cackled after me like solan-geese, but I shut and locked the door in their faces and led Aileen to her room. She marched up the stairs like a goddess, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
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