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More "Mainstay" Quotes from Famous Books



... the cabin. After his day's work with Boreland, he had his meals to prepare. There were brown beans to clean and cook, and sourdough hotcakes to set for the morning. Kayak had taught him to prepare his sourdoughs—a resource which was to become the food mainstay of all on the Island. Harlan learned from the old man that the sourdough hotcake, or flapjack is as typical of Alaska as the glacier. The wilderness man carries, always, a little can filled with a batter of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... remarks were not exactly what he had expected, and he did not know, at such short notice, how to answer them. Suddenly a hymn was started by a voice which every one knew, though they seldom heard it in prayer-meeting. It belonged to Judge Prency's wife, who for years had been the mainstay of every musical entertainment which had been dependent upon local ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton

... the mid 1990s followed a World Bank- and IMF-led policy of privatization and liberalization. This strategy placed the country on a slow and steady growth path from an extremely low level. Agriculture, including fishing and forestry, is a mainstay of the economy, accounting for more than one-fourth of GDP and employing 80% of the population. Exports of apparel have boomed in recent years primarily due to duty-free access to the US. Deforestation and erosion, aggravated by the use of firewood ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Brazils, and a gale came on, that I never seed the like of. We were obliged to have three men stationed to hold the captain's hair on his head; and a little boy was blown over the moon, and slid down by two or three of her beams, till he caught the mainstay, and never ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... which had beaten the O.B.s had not had the benefit of his assistance, Lorimer appearing in his stead. Lorimer was a fast right-hand bowler, deadly in House matches or on a very bad wicket. He was the mainstay of the Second Eleven attack, and in an ordinary year would have been certain of his First Eleven cap. This season, however, with Gosling, Baynes, and the Bishop, the School had been unusually strong, and ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse

... is as old as Engineering; it is the "practical man's" mainstay, his "unanswerable argument." The so-called practical man will construct a building, and test it either with loads or by practical use. Then he will modify the design somewhere, and the resulting construction will be tested. If it passes through this ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... appearance, his face showing plainly that he was not at ease. His manner was as flambuoyant as ever: "Where is this mainstay of the only panorama on earth? Come here, boy, I want to talk to you ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... Howe's retirement. The same change of administration, in the spring of 1782, that led to the recall of the older man, brought Howe again into service, to replace the mediocrities who for three campaigns had commanded the Channel Fleet, the mainstay of Great Britain's safety. Upon it depended not only the protection of the British Islands and of the trade routes converging upon them, but also the occasional revictualling of Gibraltar, now undergoing the third year of the famous siege. Its operations extended to the North Sea, where the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... unless under better regulation than at present." Waldo to Pepperrell, 20 May, 1745.] [Footnote: Waldo had written four days before: "Captain Hale, of my regiment, is dangerously hurt by the bursting of another gun. He was our mainstay for gunnery since Captain Rhodes's misfortune" (also caused by the bursting of a cannon). Waldo to Pepperrell, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... several hundred head of cattle. Mrs. Miller was a dignified, reserved woman who maintained shiny order in her house. "She even scalds her dishes," folks said, which by the water-hauling populace was considered unpardonable aristocracy. Imbert was the pride and mainstay of his parents. There were warm fires, clean soft beds, and a real Christmas dinner. There was corn-popping, and bob-sledding with jingling bells behind a prancing team, with Imbert and Ida Mary ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... Brahman Schools preach Nirwana (comparative non-existence) and Parinirwana (absolute nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the 200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation, protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds, because it "unfits men for the business and duty of life by fixing their speculations on an unknown world." And even its votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... overview: Tourism is the mainstay of the small, open Aruban economy, with offshore banking and oil refining and storage also important. The rapid growth of the tourism sector over the last decade has resulted in a substantial expansion ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... become as gentle as a lamb. It was in a wheedling voice, and with tearful eyes, that she called upon these "good gentlemen" to witness the shameful injustice with which she was treated—she, an honest woman. Was she not the mainstay of her family (since her son Polyte was in custody, charged with pocket-picking), hence what would become of her daughter-in-law, and of her grandson Toto, who had no one to ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau

... like success for two years disappeared, and a gloomy cloud hung over the land, portentous of disasters and dismay. Evils thickened, entirely unexpected, which brought out what was greatest in the character and genius of Washington; for he now was the mainstay of hope. The first patriotic gush of enthusiasm had passed away. War, under the most favorable circumstances, is no play; but under great difficulties, has a dismal and rugged look before which delusions rapidly disappear. England was preparing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... contributed to his own undoing by failing to heed the urgent requests of Morillo for reinforcements to fill his dwindling ranks. More decisive still were the services of some five thousand British, Irish, French, and German volunteers, who were often the mainstay of Bolivar and his lieutenants during the later phases of the struggle, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... granted it extensive trading-privileges. In another charter, given by the lord of the manor in 1305, the first allusion is made to Welsh coal, for the people among other privileges are allowed to dig "pit-coal in Ballywasta." Thus began the industry that has become the mainstay of prosperity in South Wales. Warwick's Castle at Swansea has entirely disappeared, the present ruins being those of a castle afterwards built by Henry de Gower, who became Bishop of St. David's. What is left of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... a London goldsmith.[24] Oswald Cary, who settled in Middlesex in 1659 was the son of an English merchant.[25] There was no man in the colony during the second half of the 17th century that exerted a more powerful influence in political affairs than Philip Ludwell. He was for years the mainstay of the commons and he proved to be a thorn in the flesh of more than one governor. He was admired for his ability, respected for his wealth and feared for his power, an admitted leader socially and politically in the colony, yet ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... master. All that he can make over his actual rations and Shelter money should belong to his creditor. Of course such an arrangement might be varied indefinitely by private agreement; the repayment of instalments could be spread ever a longer or shorter time, but the mainstay of the whole principle would be the execution of a legal agreement by which the man makes over the whole product of his labour to the Bank until ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... and embarrassed, looked around for his mother, but that mainstay was nowhere in sight. He thought of whistling, so as to appear unconscious of her tears, but concluded that would be merely rude. To take up a paper or book and read it in the face of a woman's weeping appeared hideous, although for the first ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... beast in Asia, but hardly were my escort come up to view the spoil and acclaim my prowess, than there arrived also a wretched cultivator, swearing with tears and howls that I had wantonly destroyed the friend of his family, the mainstay of his lowly cot. I held a court on the spot, and desired to know what sum would compensate him for this cruel loss. The opportunity of taking in the stranger was too promising to resist, and he requested leave to retire and consult with his friends—an interval ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... He himself was wont to laugh at these names—for he was a man who could laugh—and to declare that his only ambition was to fight the devil under whatever name he might be allowed to carry on that battle. And he was always fighting the devil by opposing those pursuits which are the life and mainstay of such places as Littlebath. His chief enemies were card-playing and dancing as regarded the weaker sex, and hunting and horse-racing—to which, indeed, might be added everything under the name of sport—as regarded the stronger. Sunday comforts ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... childish religious faith departing from him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united—odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and herself very religious—belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,. resident at Varaville, near by. M. Feuillet, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... girlhood. Some people find religion a burden; others regard it as an indifferently useless institution, in which they desire no share, and concerning which they never trouble themselves; others, again, look upon it as the mainstay of their lives. ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... the arrangement of the original work, and unite two sections which Mr. Rarey has divided, either because when he wrote them he was not aware of the importance of what is really the cardinal point, the mainstay, the foundation of his system, or because he wished to conceal it from the uninitiated. The Rarey system substitutes for severe longeing, for whipping and spurring, blinkers, physic, starving, the twitch, tying the tail down, sewing the ears together, ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... also gotten us into commercial and political difficulties. Yet I give to them—a little—it is a matter of conscience with me to identify myself with all the enterprises of the Church; it is the mainstay of social order and a prosperous civilization. But the best forms of benevolence are the well-established, organized ones here at home, where people can see them and know what ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke

... in the neighbourhood proved himself a mainstay of help and consolation during this time of general anxiety and suspense, and this was Julian Adderley. He was always at hand and willing to be of service. He threw his 'dreams' of poesy to the winds and became poet in earnest,—poet in sympathy ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... watched by the elders, and offenders were judged in kirk-sessions. Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were the most prominent and popular sins. The mainstay of the system is the idea that the Bible is literally inspired; that the preachers are the perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must imitate the old Hebrew persecution of "idolaters," that is, mainly Catholics. All this meant ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... whilst we were in the midst of our labours, and warmly begged us to leave everything to her, as she would put our things away for us. The red-haired young lady had sent her, and she became a mainstay of practical comfort to us during our visit. She seemed a haven of humanity after the conventions of the drawing-room. From her we got incidental meals when we were hungry, spirits of wine when Fatima's tooth ached, warnings when we were near to being late for ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... pretence whatever to piety; and when they said Goodbye, their eyes were bright with the goodwill and pity of the human race, who know trouble not inflicted as yet upon monkeys. Mr. Twemlow's heart fell when the sailor was gone, quite as if he had lost his own mainstay; but he braced himself up to the heavy duty of imparting sad news to his wife and daughter, and worst of all to Faith Darling. But the latter surprised him by the way in which she bore it; for while she made no pretence to hide her tears, she was ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... now, and the end draws near. For half a century I have loved and served Him. I have known trials and sorrows not a few, but His presence has upheld me. The promise he gave his disciples the night before his death has been my mainstay: "Lo, I am with you alway!" In the faith of that promise I have seen men and women die with the light of heaven on their faces, heroic amid the flames, triumphant before the lion's eyes. I have heard them once and again protesting with ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell

... century and two centuries later. It followed that when native industries were forbidden or their output monopolized not only by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherlands, but by other companies elsewhere in the colonies, that ownership of land became the mainstay of large private fortunes with agriculture as an accompanying factor. Subsequently the effects of this continuous policy were more fully seen when England by law after law paralyzed or closed up many forms of colonial ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... provokes the most boisterous and at the same time the most innocent laughter with a scene which might have been made insupportably vulgar. A perfectly respectable young married woman gets very drunk with the equally respectable husband of one of her friends. The scene is the mainstay, the raison d'etre, of the play, and it furnishes the material for the better part of one act; yet young and old, rich and poor, philistine and superman alike, delight in it. To make such a situation irresistible and universal in its ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... the witness-box, or when, upon the accounts of Metellus Numidicus[99] being as usual handed round, a Roman jury refused to look at them. The compliment paid me, I repeat, was much greater. Accordingly, as the jurymen were protecting me as the mainstay of the country, it was by their voices that the defendant was overwhelmed, and with him all his advocates suffered a crushing blow. Next day my house was visited by as great a throng as that which escorted ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... the speculators who fitted them out. Nor was this all. Such was the attraction of the privateer's life that it drew to it seamen from every branch of the maritime calling. The fisheries and the West India trade, which had long been the chief mainstay of New England commerce, were ruined, and it seemed for a time as if the hardy race of American seamen were to degenerate into a mere body of buccaneers, operating under the protection of international law, but plunderers and spoilers ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... had not arrived; so after his meal Mr. Bumpkin looked into the other room to see how Joe was getting on, for he was extremely anxious to keep his "head witness" straight. "Joe was his mainstay." ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris

... for those two hundred bedrooms. The chance travelers are but chance additions to these, and are not generally the mainstay of the house. As a matter of course the accommodation for travelers which these hotels afford increases and creates traveling. Men come because they know they will be fed and bedded at a moderate ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... was permitted to discourse as he pleased: his wife was wholly given to the recent visitor to Earlsfont, whom she informed that Caroline was the youngest daughter of General Adister, her second brother, and an excellent maiden, her dear Edward's mainstay in his grief. At last she rose, and was escorted to the door by all present. But Captain Con rather shame-facedly explained to Patrick that it was a sham departure; they had to follow without a single spin to the claretjug: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... used to provide the means by which work can be made productive. Nobody is helped if our industries are sucked dry of their life-blood. There is something just as sacred about a shop that employs thousands of men as there is about a home. The shop is the mainstay of all the finer things which the home represents. If we want the home to be happy, we must contrive to keep the shop busy. The whole justification of the profits made by the shop is that they are used to make doubly secure the homes dependent on that shop, and to create ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... freedom we must be strong. But what is the secret of strength? It is fundamental to the whole question to understand this rightly, and, once grasped, make it the mainstay of individual existence, which is the foundation of national life. So much has the bodily power of over-riding minorities been made the criterion of absolute power, that to make clear the truth requires patience, insight, and a little mental study. But the end is a great ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... might have been called a game of cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles—stocks, shares, currency—but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game. There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... first cell, when victualled and sealed, is followed by another, having as its support, in addition to the twig, the cells already built. From six to ten chambers are thus grouped side by side. Lastly, one coat of mortar covers everything, including the twig itself, which provides a firm mainstay for ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... the use of six grains an hour, or fifty and sixty grains of quinine in one day or remission to be absolutely imaginary." He is "convinced that it is not a stimulant," and with many apologies he cautiously sanctions alcohol, which should often be the physician's mainstay. As he advocated ten-grain doses of calomel by way of preliminary cathartic, the American missionaries stationed on the River have adopted a treatment still more "severe"—quinine till deafness ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... conform to the plans and purposes of the man's life. I wonder if it is woman's real, true nature always to abnegate self." Miss Foster had developed unusual ability and for a number of years had been Miss Anthony's mainstay in the suffrage work, and had grown very close into her heart; it is not surprising, therefore, that she learned of the coming marriage with dismay. She accepted the situation as gracefully as possible, however, and, although too far away to attend the wedding, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... Braiding, his mainstay, was irrevocably gone. He realised that, and it was a severe blow. He must accept it. As for Mrs. Braiding managing, she would manage in a kind of way, but the risks to Regency furniture and china would be grave. She did not understand Regency furniture and china as Braiding ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... an allegorical group denoting Plenty, Wisdom, and Strength, typical of the City of Amsterdam. We had a little adventure in securing views of this hall. At one end is a small gallery, used as the mainstay for the temporary orchestra, which is erected on festal occasions. Thinking our work could be better shown from that point, we proceeded to it by a dark and winding staircase in ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... traffic in indulgences had been maintained throughout German Christendom, had served to increase from day to day the audacity of its promoters. Ranged on the side of these doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, the chief mainstay of this trade, stood the whole powerful order of the Dominicans. And to this order Tetzel himself, the sub-commissioner of indulgences, belonged. Already other doctrines of the Pope's authority, of his power ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... application, distinguish democratic Victoria's condition. Protection had been quite in abeyance under the old regime, beyond at least, an occasional sigh from agricultural Geelong for higher prices for the farmer, "the mainstay of every country." Even during the interregnum of semi-constitutionalism, 1851-55, the tendency had been effectually checked, chiefly by the energy of the Collector of Customs, Mr. Cassell, then one of the Official Legislative Members, who, supported ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... Aunt Debby knew also. That was why Aunt Judith lived so humbly and simply. She felt she was the mainstay of the family,—that both Aunt Debby and Aunt Meg looked to her for their livelihood; and so she strove hard to win and lay aside money, with the hope that if she were called away suddenly there would be sufficient to keep them snugly and comfortably after her death. She suffered from severe ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont

... the Treasury had faced a deficit at the end of each year, and had been compelled not only to spend its accumulated surplus on current needs, but to borrow heavily. The tariff duties, collected at the custom-houses, were, as they always had been, the mainstay of the revenue. But these had not met the needs of the three lean years before ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... him robed in his ancient dignity, a zealous and honoured official, without whose aid the services of the Church could scarcely have been carried on. In post-Reformation times he continued his career without losing his rank or status, his dignity or usefulness. We have seen him the life and mainstay of the village music, the instructor of young clerics, the upholder of ancient customs and old-established usages. We have regretted the decay in his education, his irreverence and absurdities, and have amused ourselves with the stories of his quaint ways and strange eccentricities. His unseemly ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... mainstay of England and now trodden down and neglected, cannot rise alone and without help from those above them. "What right have we to keep them down? . . . What right have we to say that they shall know no higher recreation than the hogs, because, forsooth, if we raised ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne

... compass their desire. Also they felt that the sooner they made the attempt to do so the better: Sir James might hear unfavorable accounts of them, if they gave him time to consort freely with his neighbors. Therefore, with the help of their literary mainstay, Wiggins, they composed a honeyed letter to him, asking leave to fish the Grange water. Sir James consulted Mr. Hilton about the letter, received an account of the Twins from him which made him loath indeed to give them leave; and since he had used a pen so little for so ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson

... Thus, though the mainstay of the analysis, or at least the original point of departure, is the difference in the names of the divine Being, many other phenomena, of vocabulary, style, and theology, are so distinctive that on the basis of them alone we could relegate many sections of Genesis with considerable confidence ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... in Kent's eyes was an honor indeed, for he belonged to the old school, and rarely condescended to praise modern actors. His own style was so admirable that he was justly considered the first comedian in the country, and was the pride and mainstay of the old theatre where he had played for years. Of course he possessed much influence in that little world, and being a kindly man used it generously to help up any young aspirant ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... sending numerous contributions for many years. During the first quarter-century of the review's existence, this trio, with the cooeperation of Sir James Mackintosh and a few others, constituted the mainstay of its success. Jeffrey's remarkable critical faculty was displayed to best advantage in the wide range of articles (two hundred in number) which he wrote during his editorship. It is true that his otherwise sound judgment was unable to grasp the significance of the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... had been the King himself in person. At first he would not have them do this, but at last, when he was nearly fifty-five years old, he began to find the treatment he had formerly contemned very pleasant; and reckoning himself the mainstay of all monasticism, he gave more care to the preservation of his health than had heretofore been his wont. Although the rules of his order forbade him ever to partake of flesh, he granted himself a dispensation (which ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... responsible set of public agents, who have power to approach the people by an indirect and stealthy taxation, there is reason to fear that prodigality will soon supersede those characteristics which have thus far made us look with so much pride and confidence to the State governments as the mainstay of our Union and liberties. The State legislatures, instead of studying to restrict their State expenditures to the smallest possible sum, will claim credit for their profusion, and harass the General ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson

... had come at last: the world no longer offered him the life of an elegant dawdler. He had a serious business before him,—to gain a competency for himself and his brother. The unpractical younger brother was to be after this the mainstay of the family fortunes. And what especially makes this the finest moment of his life is the sudden and clear perception that to gain this end he must depend upon the steady and fruitful exercise of his gift for writing. It was not to be taken up as a last resort, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... of her contact with him was invariably to give her a certain objective image of herself, an increased self-confidence and self-respect. For instance, by the light dancing in Mr. Tiernan's eyes as he regarded her, she saw herself now as the mainstay of the helpless family in the clay-yellow flat across the street. And there was nothing, she was convinced, Mr. Tiernan did not know about that family. So she said:—"I've come to see ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the events of which the XVth. and XVIth. chapters of La Politique Boer give a summary. The Jameson raid is, of course, the mainstay of the delegates' argument. After showing what this is really worth, and also discussing the arbitration question, ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... mother. Loving her mother with the whole of her affection, she had suffered all the pains and penalties of love from that repository. She was to-day upbraided for her want of coquetry and neatness; to-morrow, for proposing to desert her mother and elope with a person she had never thought of. The mainstay of the establishment, she was not aware of her usefulness. Accepting every complaint and outbreak as if she deserved it, the poor girl lived at the capital a beautiful scullion, an unsalaried domestic, and daily forwarded the food to the table, led in the chamber work, rose from bed unrested ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... the conservatism of China could endure. Within the few years since the dawn of the twentieth century the torpid leviathan of the East has shown decided signs of awakening. Most prominent among these indications is the fact that the ruling empress, but recently a mainstay of the conservative party, has entered the ranks of reform and given her imperial assent to radical changes in Chinese ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old gentleman that teaches elementary drawing to the little girls in the diocesan school, that's all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because Mr. Jay's water-colours are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he must be given a chance of expressing his opinion of them.' She handed me back the catalogue. 'I have never been really angry ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... Charlotte, the prop and mainstay of the house, for Anna had married Ephraim and moved into the cottage next door to Mrs. Bennett's. Angela, pulling her bow at a venture on that birthday night, so long ago now, had hit the truth when she said that Anna could not think ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... the order of Bernis, call for the next attention. I have reasons to hope good dispositions in the new ministry towards our commerce with this country. Besides endeavoring, on all occasions, to multiply the points of contact and connection with this country, which I consider as our surest mainstay under every event, I have had it much at heart to remove from between us every subject of misunderstanding or irritation. Our debts to the King, to the Officers, and the Farmers, are of this description. The having complied with no part of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... was glad and wept for excess of joy. But she said to herself, "By the truth of the Messiah, there remaineth no profit of my life, if I burn not his heart for his brother, Sharrkan, even as he hath burned my heart for King Hardub, the mainstay of Christendom and the hosts of Crossdom!" Still she kept her secret. And the Wazir Dandan and King Zau al-Makan and the Chamberlain remained sitting with Sharrkan till they had dressed and salved his wound; after which they gave him medicines and he began ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... convinced," he says in another place, "that the mainstay of an efficient reform is the adoption essentially of the Italian vowel system: it combines beauty, firmness and precision in a degree not equalled by any other system of which I have any knowledge. The little ragged ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord

... of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been speaking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... mentally. His success in maintaining his ground was undoubtedly largely influenced by the fact that two-thirds of the National forces had been sent to his succor, but his firm purpose to save the army was the mainstay on which all relied after Rosecrans left the field. As the command was getting pretty well past, I rose to go in order to put my troops into camp. This aroused the General, when, remarking that he had a little ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... that he was old before his time and not destined to many more years of life. With the perfect and self-sacrificing courage which he always showed, he did not shrink from this new demand, although Ezekiel was the prop and mainstay of the house. He did not think for a moment of himself, yet, while he gave his consent, he made it conditional on that of the mother and daughters whom he felt he was soon to leave. But Mrs. Webster had the same spirit as her husband. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... self-interest which the Japanese see in the relation of master and servant in most Christian countries? The whole tendency of life in other countries than his own is against this loyalty, which has been bred in his very marrow. How long, without the mainstay of religion, will the Japanese cling to this outworn but beautiful relic of his old life? And it must be confessed that religion is rapidly losing its hold on the men of Japan. Those who have been ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... now revealed. Ransom's secret, about the penny, was a very good one, so far as it went. But he had not really told the whole truth. He could not venture to tell his less fortunate comrade that the root of all domestic prosperity, the mainstay of all domestic comfort, is the wife; and Ransom's wife was all that a working man could desire. There can be no thrift, nor economy, nor comfort at home, unless the wife helps;—and a working man's wife, more than any other man's; for she is wife, Housekeeper, nurse, and ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... through their joint history. It was he who had always been the mainstay, the dependable one. Tom had laughed and rollicked, played hooky from school, disobeyed Isaac's commandments. To the mountains or the sea, or in hot water with the neighbours and the town authorities—it was all the same; he was everywhere save where ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... all, the old, happy, resonant cheerfulness gradually found its way back to Marsfield, as though nothing had happened; and poor broken Marty, who had always been our idol, became our goddess, our prop and mainstay, the angel in the house, the person for every one to tell their troubles to—little or big—their jokes, their good stories; there was never a laugh like hers, so charged with keen appreciation of the humorous thing, the relish ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... acquaintances, speak with admiration, seems already at this time to have been extraordinary. Of the theatricals which the young folks were wont to get up at the paternal house, especially on the name-days of their parents and friends, Frederick was the soul and mainstay. With a good delivery he combined a presence of mind that enabled him to be always ready with an improvisation when another player forgot his part. A clever Polish actor, Albert Piasecki, who was stage-manager on these occasions, gave it as his opinion that the lad was born to be a great actor. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... "Why, I'm the mainstay of the whole performance. Don't I bring you eight-and-twenty dancing men? all at once if you wish it, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... her consummate art, or rather natural gift of the art of narrative, is the mainstay of the fabric her imagination has reared. That incomparable style of hers is like some magic fairy-ring, that bears the wearer, safe and victorious, through manifold perils—perils these of prolixity, exaggeration, and disdain of careful construction. Both Indiana ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... estates without serf labour have not as yet been brilliantly successful. Those who have failed are in the habit of complaining that they have not received sufficient support from the Government, which is accused of having systematically sacrificed the interests of agriculture, the mainstay of the national resources, to the creation of artificial and unnecessary manufacturing industries. How far such complaints and accusations are well founded I shall not attempt to decide. It is a complicated ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... that required so much care and skill, nothing so thoroughly associated with the traditions of English farming as wheat, and yet nothing so disappointing. Foreign importations had destroyed this the very mainstay. Now, that crop which he had just left had 'tillered out' well; but what profit should he get from the many stalks that had tillered or sprung from each single grain, thus promising a fiftyfold return? It had been well got in, and, as the old saw had it, 'Well sown, half grown;' it had been ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... jealousy interstate trade continued a precarious existence and by no means sufficed to dispose of the surplus products, so that foreign markets were necessary. The people were especially concerned for the establishment of the old trade with the West India Islands, which had been the mainstay of their prosperity in colonial times; and after the British Government, in 1783, restricted that trade to British vessels, many people in the United States were attributing hard times to British malignancy. The only action which seemed possible was to force Great Britain in particular, ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand

... generous tribute that our army would pay to the Germans in the field, and that is to the excellence of the leadership of Lettow, and the devotion with which he has by threats and cajolings sustained the failing courage of his men. Nor can one forget that in this war the mainstay of our enemy has lain in the discipline and devotion of the native troops. Here, indeed, in this campaign the black man has kept up the spirit of the white. Nor does this leave the future unclouded with potential trouble, for, in this war, the black man has seen the white, on ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... then living at Wananalua, the land on which Kauiki Hill stands) heard of it, he appointed Ku-ula to be his head fisherman. Through this pond, which was well stocked with all kinds of fish, the King's table was regularly supplied with all rare varieties, whether in or out of season. Ku-ula was his mainstay for fish-food and was consequently held in high esteem by Kamohoalii, and they lived without disagreement of any kind between ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... they stand a better chance, if they eat a large variety, of procuring the required quantity of different nutrients than when restricted to a very limited dietary, because, if the dietary be very limited they might by accident choose as their mainstay some food that was badly balanced in the different nutrients, perhaps wholly lacking in protein. It is lamentable that there is such ignorance on such an all-important subject. However, we have to consider things as they are and not as they ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon

... daylight the morning after that we knocked at the door of Montague's bedroom. When he woke up enough to open the door—it took some time, 'cause eating and sleeping was his mainstay—we told him that we was planning an early morning fishing trip, and if he wanted to go with the folks he must come down to the landing quick. He promised to hurry, and I stayed by the door to see that he didn't get away. In about ten minutes we had him ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln

... I've once made up my mind; and if a man has but ordinary capacity, and will set to work with heart and soul, and stick to it, he can do almost anything.' With this maxim, which has been pretty much my mainstay throughout life, I fortified myself in my determination to attempt the law. But how was I to set about it? I must quit this forest life, and go to one or other of the towns, where I might be able to study, and to attend the courts. This too required funds. I examined into the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... confidential, and little by little they unfolded to one another the story of their lives. One prisoner, well versed in law, who knew Antonio's father, showed the boy much sympathy. Another prisoner, a sailor, grieved over the old parents whose mainstay he had been for many years. "Oh," sighed he, "now hunger and want will overtake them." Another, a fisherman, somewhat older than the rest, was the saddest of them all. He sat apart at one end of the ship, holding his head in his hand and weeping silently. He was the father of five children. He grieved ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne

... among the members of a family, and having them collect the desired information, either by study of extant records, or by word of mouth. But the written records of value have been usually negligible in quantity, and oral communication has therefore been the mainstay. It has not been wholly satisfactory. Few people—aside from genealogists—can give even the names of all their great-grandparents, far less can they tell ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... tiller like the old one: her head fell off in an unlucky moment when seven waves were rolling in one, and, on coming to the windward again, she shipped a sea. It came in over her bow transversely; broke as high as the mainstay, and hid and buried the whole ship before the mast; carried away the waist bulwarks on both sides, filled the launch, and drowned the live stock which were in it; swept four water-butts and three men away into the sea, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... timber which they have never seen, sources of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyond the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and pack-sack are still the mainstay ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... of Pergamon had long been the mainstay of Rome's influence in the Orient. Her contact with the other protected princedoms was distant and fitful; but as long as her mandates could be issued through this faithful vassal, and he could rely on her whole-hearted ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... the anchor with?" he was saying. "Why, with yonder big rope that goes from masthead to bows." and he pointed to the great mainstay of our ship. "One must have a long purchase, if ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... her only companion. At first, the little girl noticed not the difference between their mode of living and that of the rest of the tribe, all the other members of which lived together, surrounding the spring of water, their life and mainstay; but very quickly, as the child grew older, she saw, only too plainly, that her grandmother was looked upon as different from the others: and the Indian regards all those of his kin, no matter how near, who display any peculiar form ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter

... a start of dismay when he saw her. He had been told that she worked in the cotton mill and was the mainstay of the family; and he had pictured a sturdy young woman, such as he had seen at home. Instead, here was a frail slip of a child scarcely larger than the others. Sophie was thirteen, as he learned afterwards; but she did not look to be ten by his standards. She was grave and ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... for sarcasm so delicate, pushed on with enthusiasm: "The safety-pin's the mainstay of bachelor life," said he rhetorically. "It's his badge of freedom. Why, I can even ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... assumed repeatedly that managers and authors are affected in the same way by the censorship. When a prominent author protests against the censorship, his opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of some prominent manager who declares that the censorship is the mainstay of the theatre, and his relations with the Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a cherished privilege and an inexhaustible joy. This error was not removed by the evidence given before the Joint Select Committee. The managers did not make their case clear ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... and gentlemen, with the sanction of the Club's President, a business man whose contributions were the financial mainstay of the Seven Arts, and who sincerely envied the gifted members, denying them nothing, invited James Kirkpatrick to be the guest of an evening and deliver an address on Socialism and the Proletariat. He replied that ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... can't say, Mr Nipper," rejoined the commander in an off-hand way, for he had just given the order to sway the yard aloft, and was watching whether the spar cleared the top and keeping a wary eye that it did not get foul of the mainstay, or something else aloft. ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... eighteen, but had not as yet been trained to any special work. The other children, George, aged fourteen; Martha, twelve; William ten, and Veronica, eight, were too young to do anything, and only made the problem of existence the more complicated. Their one mainstay was the home, which, barring a six-hundred-dollar mortgage, the father owned. He had borrowed this money at a time when, having saved enough to buy the house, he desired to add three rooms and a porch, and so make it large enough for them to live in. A few years were still ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... colonial days, the slaves were better fed and provided for than were the indentured servants. They were of greater money value and, particularly in the later years when slavery became the mainstay of Southern agriculture, a first class Negro, acclimated, healthy, willing and trustworthy, was ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... scholar in his way, and was now a schoolmaster, also at Warminster, and in great repute with the parson of the parish there. There was a second daughter, Fanny, at home, a girl as good as gold, the glory and joy and mainstay of her mother, whom even the miller could not scold,—whom all Bullhampton loved. But she was a plain girl, brown, and somewhat hard-visaged;—a morsel of fruit as sweet as any in the garden, but one that the eye would not select for its outside grace, colour, and roundness. Then there were the ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... never think of accomplishing anything without his help. He is our mainstay. But how do those letters ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... Arignotus, who was generally looked up to as a man of inspired wisdom—my incredulous attitude towards the supernatural was loudly condemned on all hands. However, I was not frightened by his long hair, nor by his reputation. 'Dear, dear!' I exclaimed, 'so Arignotus, the sole mainstay of Truth, is as bad as the rest of them, as full of windy imaginings! Our treasure proves to be but ashes.' 'Now look here, Tychiades,' said Arignotus, 'you will not believe me, nor Dinomachus, nor Cleodemus here, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... dominant strain in Selma Gordon's character—impulse and frankness. But she was afraid of Victor Dorn as we all are afraid of those we deeply respect—those whose respect is the mainstay of our self-confidence. She was moving toward him to pour out the violence that was raging in her on the subject of this flirtation of Jane Hastings. The spectacle of a useless and insincere creature like that trifling with her deity, and being permitted to trifle, was more than she could ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... horrid system may cease. All the country we traveled through is capable of growing cotton and sugar, and the people now cultivate a good deal. They would grow much more if they could only sell it. At present we in England are the mainstay of slavery in America and elsewhere by buying slave-grown produce. Here there are hundreds of miles of land lying waste, and so rich that the grass towers far over one's head in walking. You cannot see where the narrow paths end, the grass is so tall and overhangs them so. If our countrymen ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... will refuse to do many actions, and religion is of course a mainstay, though irrational accretions, fasting, and superstitious views of the Communion ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... these larvae spin a tiny cocoon, in which they lie quietly while they are being made over into ants—perhaps into a queen, like the mother, or a male, like the father; perhaps into a worker, which is the mainstay of the whole colony. This first family of babies the queen mother must look out for herself, but just as soon as the baby workers are grown up it is their ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody

... other creatures that live and breathe; before men we are seemingly extraordinary beings, greater, more refined, more perfect. The day that people, abandoning this respect and veneration which is the support and mainstay of monarchies,—the day that they regard us as their equals,—all the prestige of our position will be destroyed. Bereft of beings superior to the mass, who act as their leaders and supports, the laws will only be as so many black lines on white paper, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... under the personal direction of the proprietor, assisted by his manager, M. Otto Schenk, to whose ability and energy, M. Durend was always ready to acknowledge, it owed much of its success. The latter was now, of course, the mainstay of the business, and it was with every confidence in his ability that Madame Durend appointed him general manager ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill

... you would accept it on the spot. All the horror of that powerful arraignment of city life, and the equally powerful criticism of country life, was brought out on this evening we were together, and I was able to see just where, as a stage director, Clyde Fitch must have been the mainstay at rehearsals. He never lived to give the final touches to his manuscript of "The City,"—touches which always meant so much to him; he was dead by the time rehearsals were called, and there slipped from the performance some of the significant ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch

... sufferings, and with a sad absence of logic blamed her in her misfortune, just as though she had wilfully brought the maladies upon herself in order to vex them. Then, further, it was necessary always to minister to Sarah's illusion that Sarah was the mainstay of the house, that she attended to everything and was responsible for everything, and that without her governance the machine would come to a disastrous standstill: the fact being that she had grown feeble and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... "Uncle's right, Thursday. You're our friend, and the mainstay of the Millville Daily Tribune. We shall not allow you to desert us just because you've discovered ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... saved the Administration. Not for an instant could the President consider sacrificing the man who for ten years had been the mainstay of Republican power. Madison acted with unwonted promptitude. He refused to accept Gallatin's resignation, and determined to break once and for all with the faction which had hounded Gallatin from the day of his appointment and which had foisted upon the President an unwelcome ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... them that, if ever they had the imprudence to change any of their old laws, they would necessarily never have more than one meal a day as long as they lived. Finally, he recalled to their recollection that he had made the island what it was, that he was their mainstay, and that his counsel and exertions had rendered them the wonder of the world. Thus, between force, and fear, and flattery, the Vraibleusians paid for their corn nearly its weight in gold; but what did that signify to a nation with so many ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... He can't do without her. She has been his mainstay all through the winter. He would have ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... who needed her so badly. He died, and for a time she was broken-hearted; but gradually she came to prove the reality and comfort of her religion, and then, taking up the interests of those around her, she had cheerfully buried her own sorrow, and became the mainstay of her aunt and her household. Perhaps Agatha felt most keenly being shut out from her aunt's dying room, she certainly uttered with heartfelt fervour morning and evening, 'Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre

... means had produced such fine results, such political successes, dynastic principles covered so completely base workings, that no one in 1834 thought of the mud in which the roots of these fine trees, the mainstay of the State, were plunged. Nevertheless there was not a single one of those great bankers to whom the confidence expressed in the house of Mongenod was not a wound. Like English houses, the Mongenods made no external display of luxury. They lived in dignified ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac

... set in. Public sentiment, frequently reproached for its fickleness, but in reality protective in its vacillation, demanded a change. Federalism had lost prestige. Its leaders were at enmity. Washington, its unconscious mainstay, was dead. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... subsisted all through the Norse occupation, and it is hoped to show good reason for believing that the family of Moddan, with the Pictish or Scottish family of Freskyn de Moravia in later times, was the mainstay of Scottish rule in the extreme north until the shadowy claims of Norse suzerains over every part of the mainland were completely repelled, and ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... protected—who, while they devoted themselves to their religious practices in times of peace, exchanged the Darbah (sacrificial grass) in their hands for weapons which they used manfully when occasion required. The cow, the foster-mother of babes when their mother leaves them, the mainstay of the hard-worked peasant, the importer of strength to my people, whom I worshipped as my mother and protected more than my life, is taken daily to the slaughter-house and ruthlessly butchered by the unbelievers.... How ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... lose the fine courage that has been your mainstay through other troubles," Nellie said, as she laid a hand on his arm and looked steadfastly into the ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach

... drum for them, and Martin Tighe's proud boy was present with his fife. He had a great longing—strange enough in that peaceful, sheep-raising neighborhood—to go into the army; but he and his elder brother were the mainstay of their crippled father, and he could not be spared from the large household until a younger brother could take his place; so that all his fire and military zeal went for the present into martial tunes, and the fife was a safety-valve ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... President spoke of were natural enough. He was the founder and mainstay of the association—probably paid its expenses. The whole object of the institution, it may be suspected, was to exalt the founder. In such a state of things, it was natural that there should be an opposition, or discontented party, headed by "that Blotton." When Blotton ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald

... good or bad motives, where good motives were so often paraded to mask base actions, does not disguise their despicable character. Honest optimates would wish to maintain the Senate's preponderance from affection to it, and from belief in its being the mainstay of the State. Honest populares, like the Gracchi, who saw the evils of senatorial rule, tried to win the popular vote to compass its overthrow. Dishonest politicians of either side advocated conservatism ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley

... one of our men hanging on the mainstay, and roaring like a bull, as he tried to climb by it out of the water. Had he only remained quiet, he would have done well enough. The boat took him off first, and the others of the people who were clinging about the masts and rigging, including the baker ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... the other literature of the time, my mainstay throughout has been the Privatleben der Roemer of Marquardt, which forms the last portion of the great Handbuch der Roemischen Altertuemer of Mommsen and Marquardt. My debt is great also to Professors Tyrrell and Purser, whose labours have ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... said brokenly. "Dinna you break doon noo, for you hae been the mainstay o' us a', when we wad hae lost heart often. I used to think that oor lot couldna be harder, when the bairns were a' wee, an' we were struggling frae haun' to mooth, to see them fed an' cled. But wi' a' the hardships, ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... public man, a commercial man as we well know, yet his heart is in his home, and his joy in his affections; the presence of this immense assembly here this evening; of the industrious capitalists; of the intelligent middle class; of the pride and mainstay of England, the operatives of Newcome; these, surrounded by their wives and their children (a graceful bow to the bonnets to the right of the platform), show that they too have hearts to feel, and homes to cherish; that they, too, feel the love of women, the innocence ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything and... he can hardly tell the main-halliards from the mainstay. ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... the victory of Sluys and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance. ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... I had not traveled far into the South before we discovered that our comfort was likely to be considerably enhanced if, in hotels, we singled out an intelligent bell boy and, as far as possible, let this one boy serve us. Our mainstay in the Jefferson Hotel was Charles Jackson, No. 144, or, when Charles was "off," his "side partner," ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... there's a feeling about the old regiment too. I can excuse her, though I wish she had not been so impatient. I fancy that eldest daughter is really a good girl and the mainstay of ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... looking into the fire with mournful eyes. She thought of the marriages with which her destiny had been most intimately connected, her own ill- starred mating, the union of Herman and Ninitta, that of Fenton and Edith. She had long ago settled in her own mind that wedlock was not only the mainstay of society, but that it was largely a concession to the weakness of her sex; and yet instinctively she protested; that revolt against being a woman which few of her sex have failed at one time or another to experience taking the form of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... juicy fruit is suggested, another may be substituted. In place of the succulent vegetables named, others may be used. Any of the starches may be selected in place of the ones given. However, no mistake will be made in using the whole wheat products as the starch mainstay. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... warrior-priest, pointing to the enemy, and urging his spear-armed flocks to stand firm along the outer rim. We can also see, in the smoke and dust, the thin fringe of sailors who must be forming the mainstay of the defence. Perhaps, sprinkled along the compound walls, with harsh-speaking rifles in their hands, they are a sort of human incense, exorcising by their mere presence the devils in ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... mostly educated in one of the state Kadetten-Anstalten, military academies, of which Gross-Lichterfelde bei Berlin is the most famous. The real backbone and stiffening of the German army and navy is the noncommissioned officers recruited from the rank and file. In fact, this body of men is the mainstay of the thrones in the German Empire, especially of Prussia. These men, after about twelve years of service in an army where discipline, obedience, and efficiency are the first and last word, are then drafted into all the minor administrative officers of the state, ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... grown-upness. She ought to have noticed that the scissors and buttonhook were not hers. She had pounced on them with the ill-considered haste of twelve years old. She hadn't been a lady,—she whose business it was to be an example and mainstay to Anna-Felicitas, in all things going first, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... from scandalising a decent class of citizens. Why on earth should the landlord be named as a pariah among the virtuous classes? He is a capitalist who is tempted to invest money in a trade which is the mainstay of our revenue; he is hedged in with restrictions, and the faintest slip ruins him for ever. The very nature of his business compels him to be smart, obliging, ostentatiously friendly; yet with all this the Government treat him as if he were by ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... staysail—an old one, luckily—set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the staysail, which was, of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay. They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt's lee, learning to use a needle and palm. Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... troop, 12 men, in this trench in a root field, with the rest of the squadron about 100 yards each side of us, and a farmhouse, half knocked down by shells, just behind. We get our rations sent up once a day in the dark, and two men creep out to cook tea in the quiet intervals. Tea is the great mainstay on service, just as it was on manoeuvres. The men are splendid, and as happy as schoolboys, and we've got plenty of straw at the bottom of the trench, which is better than any feather bed. We only had one pelting night, and ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... beginning man's struggle was for life and the mainstay of life was food. Perhaps the original discoverer of wheat was a meat-eating savage who, in roaming the forests and fields, forced by starvation to eat bark and plant and berry, came upon a stalk of grain that chewed with strange satisfaction. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... 1592, deprived Philip of the genius which had for years past been the mainstay of his power. Henry's public announcement of his return to the Holy Catholic Church, in the summer of 1593, deprived the Spanish king of nearly all the support he had hitherto received in France. Before this Maurice had opened his attack on the two great cities which the Spaniards still ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... developing the industry of agriculture. We are not breeding in proportionate numbers a race of independent and independence-loving landowners, for a lack of which no growth of cities can compensate. Our farmers have been our mainstay in times of crisis, and in future it must still largely be upon their stability and common sense that this democracy must rely to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... Glencora was not to be snubbed, though she was very much given to snubbing others. She had attained this position for herself by a mixture of beauty, rank, wealth, and courage;—but the courage had, of the four, been her greatest mainstay. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... Arnould, who had a train of princes at her feet, was the principal exponent of Gluck's heroines, while Mile. La-guerre was the mainstay of the Piccinists. The rival factions made the names of these charming and capricious women their war-cries not less than those of the composers. The public bowed and cringed before these idols of the stage. Gaetan Vestris, the first of the family, known as the "Dieu ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... until, in his junior year, his income from newspaper correspondence and tutoring made further manual labor unnecessary. It is with profound regret that we cannot point to Harwood as a football hero or the mainstay of the crew. Having ploughed the mortgaged acres, and tossed hay and broken colts, college athletics struck him as rather puerile diversion. He would have been the least conspicuous man in college if he had not shone in debate and gathered up such ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... galled by the oppression of the West India Company, displayed their strength in a spirit of indocility which caused great embarrassment to the governor. Although in time of peace the freebooters kept the French settlements in continual danger of ruin by reprisal, in time of war they were the mainstay of the colony. As the governor, therefore, was dependent upon them for protection against the English, Spanish and Dutch, although he withdrew their commissions he dared not punish them for their crimes. The French ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring

... The Panama Canal will probably cut in two the distance to China, and give us a monopoly of the cotton goods trade in the Pacific; but I think cotton goods are unhealthful, and I don't want to go to China. The Suez Canal may be the mainstay of the British Empire, but I have no doubt that it would make just as satisfactory a mainstay for some other empire. My interest in the Erie Canal is connected entirely with the fact that when it was opened somebody said, "What hath God wrought!" or "There is ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... Jennie, and a younger daughter, Miss Lucy, aged about twelve, and a little son, aged about ten years. They occupied a neat cottage near his quarters. They were a nice, intelligent family, then in deep mourning for a son and brother, the hope and mainstay of the family, who had fallen in battle a few months before. Young Dean had proved so good a soldier and had so distinguished himself for personal bravery from all the battles through the Wilderness on down to Petersburg, that his officers had given ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott

... I do not say that it reflects any dishonour on the Christian apostles: I merely remark on it as a calamitous fact, and deduce that their precepts cannot and must not be made the sufficient rule of life, or they will still be (as they always have hitherto been) a mainstay of tyranny. The rights of Men and of Nations are wholly ignored[17] in the New Testament, but the authority of Slave-owners and of Kings is very distinctly recorded for solemn religious sanction. If it had been wholly silent, no one could have appealed to its decision: but ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... to discourse as he pleased: his wife was wholly given to the recent visitor to Earlsfont, whom she informed that Caroline was the youngest daughter of General Adister, her second brother, and an excellent maiden, her dear Edward's mainstay in his grief. At last she rose, and was escorted to the door by all present. But Captain Con rather shame-facedly explained to Patrick that it was a sham departure; they had to follow without a single ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united—odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and herself very religious—belongs ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... in it. I should have gone again to-day to the Davenport range, to see if I could find the quartz reefs by striking it more to the south-west, but it would be too much for the horses, which are my mainstay, and this water will not last longer than to-day; it is going very fast. I do wish to goodness it would rain, for I do hate going back. Muller returned at sundown. He has been about twelve miles down the ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... seeds. The export of cotton jumped from 192,000 lbs. in 1791 to 6,000,000 lbs. in 1795. Slave labour had been found, or was believed, to be especially economical in cotton growing. Slavery therefore rapidly became the mainstay of wealth and of the social system in South Carolina and throughout the far South; and in a little while the baser sort of planters in Virginia discovered that breeding slaves to sell down South was a ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... of Widow O'Neill," he answered, without trepidation, in the native Irish in which he was addressed, "and I am her mainstay and support. If you hang me you will bring the malediction of Heaven, and the widow's curse will rest upon you. If I know your secrets, I am not about to divulge them; I am too much of an Irishman to do that, if I give you my promise that I ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston

... page shows the quantity and value of the principal exports of the Dominican Republic since 1913 and is the best illustration of the fact that agriculture is the mainstay of the country. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... strain in Selma Gordon's character—impulse and frankness. But she was afraid of Victor Dorn as we all are afraid of those we deeply respect—those whose respect is the mainstay of our self-confidence. She was moving toward him to pour out the violence that was raging in her on the subject of this flirtation of Jane Hastings. The spectacle of a useless and insincere creature like that trifling with her deity, and ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... acting as cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges as had Juno—no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with real grief and great personal ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox

... life might have been called a game of cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles—stocks, shares, currency—but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game. There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... of stern dispute may have had their influence on the sturdy English soldier living in the midst of Dutch life and Dutch disputations, and made him lean to the side of Puritanism, even if never openly avowing it as his religious faith. It is, indeed, a singular fact that the mainstay and chief protector of the first Puritan colonists of America was neither of their communion nor of their connection, and is openly censured by Puritan writers as one who, so says Hubbard, "had been a soldier in the Low Countries and had never entered the school ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... and two centuries later. It followed that when native industries were forbidden or their output monopolized not only by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherlands, but by other companies elsewhere in the colonies, that ownership of land became the mainstay of large private fortunes with agriculture as an accompanying factor. Subsequently the effects of this continuous policy were more fully seen when England by law after law paralyzed or closed up many forms of colonial manufacture. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... were in the midst of our labours, and warmly begged us to leave everything to her, as she would put our things away for us. The red-haired young lady had sent her, and she became a mainstay of practical comfort to us during our visit. She seemed a haven of humanity after the conventions of the drawing-room. From her we got incidental meals when we were hungry, spirits of wine when Fatima's ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... reserved woman who maintained shiny order in her house. "She even scalds her dishes," folks said, which by the water-hauling populace was considered unpardonable aristocracy. Imbert was the pride and mainstay of his parents. There were warm fires, clean soft beds, and a real Christmas dinner. There was corn-popping, and bob-sledding with jingling bells behind a prancing team, with Imbert and Ida Mary sitting together as ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... her brother who was one of the instructors at the Seminary. That he should have fallen in love with her, and soon become engaged to her is therefore not surprising. They were married the year after his graduation, and she continued a faithful, industrious and uncomplaining wife; his mainstay in ill-health and misfortune till the end. They were not always happy together; but it is a rare marriage where that is the case. Wasson's struggle with the world was often reflected in his own family, disturbing the harmony and comfort of it. His wife once said quite gravely, that there were ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... non-existence) and Parinirwana (absolute nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the 200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation, protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds, because it "unfits men for the business and duty of life by fixing their speculations on an unknown world." And even its votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the next world ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... it would have been a profanation," said Felix. "I love you so deeply, with a tenderness so little proof against your wishes, that I promised a thing contrary to my conscience. Conscience, Celeste, is our treasure, our strength, our mainstay. How can you ask me to go into a church and kneel at the feet of a priest, in whom I can see only a man? You would despise me if ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... Revenue. I. Land Tax.—In China, as in most oriental countries, the land has from time immemorial been the mainstay of the revenue. In the early years of the present dynasty there was levied along with the land tax a poll tax on all adult males, but in 1712 the two were amalgamated, and the whole burden was thrown upon land, families not possessing land ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... up the anchor with?" he was saying. "Why, with yonder big rope that goes from masthead to bows." and he pointed to the great mainstay of our ship. "One must have a long purchase, if you know ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... day, however, when she laid her well-worn family Bible aside. It had been her mother's, and amid all the anxieties and tribulations incident to the life of a woman who had free negroes and a miserable husband to manage, it had been her mainstay and comfort. She had frequently read it in anger, page after page, without knowing what was contained in the lines. But eventually the words became intelligible and took meaning. She wrested consolation from it by mere ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... anxiously. "Precious sight, and reasons of his own, says you. Reasons of his own; that's the mainstay; as between man and man. Well, then"—still holding me—"I reckon you can go, Jim. And, Jim, if you was to see Silver, you wouldn't go for to sell Ben Gunn? Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you? No, says you. And if them pirates camp ashore, Jim, what would ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in another place, "that the mainstay of an efficient reform is the adoption essentially of the Italian vowel system: it combines beauty, firmness and precision in a degree not equalled by any other system of which I have any knowledge. The little ragged boys in the streets of Rome and Florence enunciate ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord

... seen Jesus saying to me: "Abandon Me to become My disciple." This thought sustained and emboldened me. I may say that from that moment my Vie de Jesus was mentally written. Belief in the eminent personality of Jesus—which is the spirit of that book—had been my mainstay in my struggle against theology. Jesus has in reality ever been my master. In following out the truth at the cost of any sacrifice I was convinced that I was following Him and obeying the ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... away of Lucy Stone, our president, the beloved pioneer of woman suffrage, who has been, ever since 1847, its mainstay and unfailing champion, the cause of equal rights in this State and throughout the Union has suffered an ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... is the mainstay of the small, open Aruban economy, with offshore banking and oil refining and storage also important. The rapid growth of the tourism sector over the last decade has resulted in a substantial expansion of other activities. Construction has ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... particularly beef, and in any of the big, popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay of the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to be sold in the ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... written down, at her old Anna's dictation, a list of groceries and other things needed at the Trellis House. And then she looked round, instinctively, towards the corner of the large shop where all that remained of what had once been the mainstay of Manfred Hegner's business was always temptingly set forth. This was a counter of Delicatessen. Glancing at the familiar corner, Mr. Hegner's customer told herself that her eyes must be playing her false. In the place of the familiar sausages, herrings, the pretty ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... of the natural increase in population, we are not developing the industry of agriculture. We are not breeding in proportionate numbers a race of independent and independence-loving landowners, for a lack of which no growth of cities can compensate. Our farmers have been our mainstay in times of crisis, and in future it must still largely be upon their stability and common sense that this democracy must rely to conserve its ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... account, for lack of evidence. To all appearances it was the wildest wild beast in Asia, but hardly were my escort come up to view the spoil and acclaim my prowess, than there arrived also a wretched cultivator, swearing with tears and howls that I had wantonly destroyed the friend of his family, the mainstay of his lowly cot. I held a court on the spot, and desired to know what sum would compensate him for this cruel loss. The opportunity of taking in the stranger was too promising to resist, and he requested ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... you to be presented to her," Colonel Maclvor said to Hector. "Everyone knows her reputation; she is the cleverest woman in France, and one of the most intriguing. She is the queen's greatest friend, and has been her mainstay in her struggle with Richelieu. Of one thing we may be sure, that she will not tamely see Mazarin step into his place, and she has, it is whispered, already thrown herself into the arms of 'The Importants,' ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty

... all food usually carried on expeditions, none is so complete in itself, nor contains so large a proportion of nutriment as pemmican. It is especially useful to those who undergo severe work, in cold and rainy climates. It is the mainstay of Arctic expeditions, whether on water, by sledge, or on foot. But, though excellent to men who are working laboriously, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... penalties will dishonesty ever be completely extirpated from our midst, for the reason that its roots have struck too deep, and that the dishonourable traffic in bribes has become a necessity to, even the mainstay of, some whose nature is not innately venal. Also, I know that, to many men, it is an impossibility to swim against the stream. Yet now, at this solemn and critical juncture, when the country is calling aloud for saviours, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... that example of fair and impartial justice—trial and execution." Jason coughed again and drained the bowl of water. "Didn't you ever hear of presumed innocence until proven guilty? It only happens to be the mainstay of all jurisprudence. And how could you possibly justify trying me on Cassylia for actions that occurred on this planet—that aren't crimes here? That's like taking a cannibal away from his tribe and executing him ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... were the mainstay of their living and to lose the hunt might mean privation. They were in need of the skins for clothing, kayaks and summer tents, and the flesh and blubber for food for themselves and their dogs, and the oil for their ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... Kadetten-Anstalten, military academies, of which Gross-Lichterfelde bei Berlin is the most famous. The real backbone and stiffening of the German army and navy is the noncommissioned officers recruited from the rank and file. In fact, this body of men is the mainstay of the thrones in the German Empire, especially of Prussia. These men, after about twelve years of service in an army where discipline, obedience, and efficiency are the first and last word, are then drafted into all the minor administrative ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... his meaning had depth to it. "Now I have formed a plan. There is old Uncle Israel and his wife; then there is the widow Manley, with four little children, suffering for want of the actual necessaries of life; and then there is Mrs. Williams—she is very poor. Her son Philip, who is her mainstay, was sick all the summer and fall, and is sick now; so the woman got nothing from her little patch of land, and is now absolutely reduced to beggary, with herself and sick son to support. Now let us take these three cases in ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... was bound to fail. Infidelity lives upon concealment. Shew it in broad daylight, hold it up before the world and make its hideousness manifest to all—then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief be numbered. WE have been the mainstay of unbelief through our timidity. Far be it from me, therefore, that I should help any unbeliever by concealing his case for him. This were the most cruel kindness. On the contrary, I shall insist ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... in hand, during the whole time of his conversation with Dr. Gilbert; who made many flattering and benedictory remarks to Mr. Richardson, declaring that he was the supporter of virtue, the preacher of sound morals, the mainstay of religion, of all which points the honest printer himself ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... their concert in a specially constructed "hall" in the desert. Sandbags were the mainstay of the platform and a large tarpaulin, G.S., formed the drop-scene. The walls were of rough canvas, upon which it was inadvisable to lean, lest the whole structure collapsed. Primitive, no doubt, but it suited the environment; and I have never seen in the most elaborate West-end theatre ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... are gifted with stronger wills than the nobler. In marrying us you style us, 'the mistress of the house,' and if the elders of the citizens grow infirm, in this country it is not the sons but the daughters that must be their mainstay. But we women have our weaknesses, and chief of these is curiosity.—May I ask on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... at these names—for he was a man who could laugh—and to declare that his only ambition was to fight the devil under whatever name he might be allowed to carry on that battle. And he was always fighting the devil by opposing those pursuits which are the life and mainstay of such places as Littlebath. His chief enemies were card-playing and dancing as regarded the weaker sex, and hunting and horse-racing—to which, indeed, might be added everything under the name of sport—as regarded the stronger. Sunday comforts were also enemies ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... room. The girls at this lunch room had long borne a bad reputation. Even in the days before the big hotel had been built, when the railroad company maintained merely a little red frame building there, known as the Eating House, these waitresses had been a mainstay of local bachelordom. Their successors were still referred to by their natural enemies, the respectable ladies of the town, as "those awful eating house girls"; while the advent of a new "hash-slinger" was always a matter of considerable interest ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... husband bent over her and chafed her hands. About the room, but not near enough to intrude upon the sacred grief of the stricken mother and husband, sat several of the good women whose friendship had been the mainstay of the three. Through the window, gaining brilliance from the ice-laden branches outside, fell the rays of the setting sun, glorifying the room and the bed. Scarce a word was spoken, but upon the request of the dying girl for music one of the visitors began to sing in low, tremulous tones, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... Americans, Davis and Young, his faithful friends and subjects, and they proved his mainstay in the work of conquest. It was no easy matter, even with his cannon and muskets. The chiefs of the other islands resisted him fiercely, and it took many years, with all the stern will and unyielding perseverance ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... this, again, hinged to some extent upon the course of fashions there. On one occasion the fashion of wearing low-crowned hats cut the value of beaver skins in two. Beaver was the fur of furs, and the mainstay of the trade. Whether for warmth, durability, or attractiveness in appearance, there was none other to equal it. Not all beaver skins were valued alike, however. Those taken from animals killed during the winter were preferred to those taken at other seasons, while new skins did not bring as high ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... personal form or features, but dress and manners came within the permitted range and the complaints were regularly mailed to the offenders. This surprised me a little as I would have thought that such a practice would have made the League unpopular, but on the contrary, it was considered the mainstay of the organization, for the recipient of the complaint, if a non-member, very often joined the League immediately, hoping ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... one juicy fruit is suggested, another may be substituted. In place of the succulent vegetables named, others may be used. Any of the starches may be selected in place of the ones given. However, no mistake will be made in using the whole wheat products as the starch mainstay. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... have most explosive results. It found expression first in a further revolt against the dominion of the Roman Church. Most of the sovereigns joined in a determined attack against the Jesuits, the enthusiastic and devoted priests who had become the mainstay of the papal power. After a long resistance, the Jesuits succumbed; their order was abolished by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... and beautiful Sophie Arnould, who had a train of princes at her feet, was the principal exponent of Gluck's heroines, while Mile. La-guerre was the mainstay of the Piccinists. The rival factions made the names of these charming and capricious women their war-cries not less than those of the composers. The public bowed and cringed before these idols of the stage. Gaetan Vestris, the first of ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... neighbourhood proved himself a mainstay of help and consolation during this time of general anxiety and suspense, and this was Julian Adderley. He was always at hand and willing to be of service. He threw his 'dreams' of poesy to the winds and became poet ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... official circle. He was then sent as the representative of Prussia to the restored Diet of Frankfort. As an absolutist and a conservative, brought up in the traditions of the Holy Alliance, Bismarck had in earlier days looked up to Austria as the mainstay of monarchical order and the historic barrier against the flood of democratic and wind-driven sentiment which threatened to deluge Germany. He had even approved the surrender made at Olmuetz in 1850, as a matter of necessity; but the belief now grew ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... first stone at the dictates of conscience and with a sort of holy joy in her own fitness to do so. For years she had been the richest woman in Middleborough, the head of everything charitable and religious, the mainstay of ministers, the court of final appeal in the case of sinners and backsliders. Now, in a moment, through no fault of her own, the whole fabric of her life had crumbled. Again had ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... to the horrible nature of such a proceeding. I will now relate a tale somewhat resembling those already given, but in this latter case, the supposed changeling became the mainstay of his family. I am indebted for the Gors Goch legend to an essay, written by Mr. D. Williams, Llanfachreth, Merionethshire, which took the prize at the Liverpool Eisteddfod, 1870, and which appears in a publication called ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... largely under the personal direction of the proprietor, assisted by his manager, M. Otto Schenk, to whose ability and energy, M. Durend was always ready to acknowledge, it owed much of its success. The latter was now, of course, the mainstay of the business, and it was with every confidence in his ability that Madame Durend appointed him general manager with ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill

... pot of his own manufacture is his mainstay. It resembles the ollas or earthen pots used so universally throughout the Philippines. In addition to this there is used, though very rarely among the remote Manbos, an imported cast-iron pan.[5] It is from 5 centimeters to 10 centimeters ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... the original proposition, eleven had been postponed for further consideration, and seventeen had been directly negatived. The hundred and seventh ordered the bodily searching of nuns for jesuitical symbols by aged clergymen, and was considered to be the real mainstay of the whole bill. No intention had ever existed to pass such a law as that proposed, but the government did not intend to abandon it till their object was fully attained by the discussion of this clause. It was known that it would be ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... Miss Lucy, aged about twelve, and a little son, aged about ten years. They occupied a neat cottage near his quarters. They were a nice, intelligent family, then in deep mourning for a son and brother, the hope and mainstay of the family, who had fallen in battle a few months before. Young Dean had proved so good a soldier and had so distinguished himself for personal bravery from all the battles through the Wilderness on down to Petersburg, that his officers had given ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott

... the elders, and offenders were judged in kirk-sessions. Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were the most prominent and popular sins. The mainstay of the system is the idea that the Bible is literally inspired; that the preachers are the perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must imitate the old Hebrew persecution of "idolaters," ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... spirit of indocility which caused great embarrassment to the governor. Although in time of peace the freebooters kept the French settlements in continual danger of ruin by reprisal, in time of war they were the mainstay of the colony. As the governor, therefore, was dependent upon them for protection against the English, Spanish and Dutch, although he withdrew their commissions he dared not punish them for their crimes. The ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring

... never find out. She's been jawing me no end about responsibility, and looking after the kids and supporting the mater and all that. Rubbed it in hard, I can tell you! Great Juggins! Do I look like the mainstay ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... Bett-Bett one of the shadows but she persisted that she was the mainstay of the staff. "Me all day dust 'im paper, me round 'im up goat" she would say. "Me sit ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... Rockingham became Premier, and a week later Burke, through the good offices of an admiring friend who had come to know him in the newly-founded Turk's Head Club, became Rockingham's private secretary. He was now the mainstay, if not the inspirer, of Rockingham's policy of pacific compromise in the vexed questions between England and the American colonies. Burke's elder brother, who had lately succeeded to his father's property, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... own seams, I'll miss my reckonin'. I've had a strong foreknowledge that we wouldn't get across in her. I saw the rats leaving in Jamaica—taking up their line of march, like marines on the fore. It's a sure sign. And then I'd a dream, which is as sure as a mainstay—never deceives me. I can depend on its presentiment. I have dreamed it several times, and we always had an awful passage. Twice we come within a bobstay of all goin' to Old Davy's store-house. I once ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... of the Controller-General. To prevent unnecessary expense on fitting out or refitting of any of the cruisers, the use of leather was to be restricted to the following: the leathering of the main pendants, runners in the wake of the boats when in tackles, the collar of the mainstay, the nip of the main-sheet block strops, leathering the bowsprint traveller, the spanshackle for the bowsprit, topmast iron, the four reef-earings three feet from the knot. All old copper, copper-sheathing, ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton

... as to the former, why should I not permit him to hang about a little longer? I see you do not quite take me. I will, therefore, endeavor to explain myself more clearly! If, for instance, I should be too quick in issuing a writ, I provide him in doing so with a species of moral support or mainstay—I see you are laughing?" (Raskolnikoff, on the contrary, had no such desire; his lips were set, and his glaring look was not removed from Porphyrius's eyes.) "I assure you that in actual practice such is really ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... spoke of were natural enough. He was the founder and mainstay of the association—probably paid its expenses. The whole object of the institution, it may be suspected, was to exalt the founder. In such a state of things, it was natural that there should be an opposition, or discontented party, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald

... the first, 50 miles and the other 40, till they reached the sea, pouring a flood of white hot lava into the ocean, destroying everything in their paths and killing in the waters of the ocean the fish, the mainstay of the inhabitants, who were reduced by the disaster, directly or indirectly, to less than five-sixths of their former strength; and third to that of Galungung, in 1822, which devastated such an immense area in Java; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... to the events of 1880. Finding that the Premier was no longer to be the mainstay of their hopes, the Boers began to renew their agitations. These agitations, it will be remembered, during the end of the Zulu war and Sir Garnet Wolseley's arrival in the Transvaal, were merely suppressed, because at that time British ascendency throughout the country seemed to be established. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... English sailors with a belief in their own invincibility, when opposed to the Spaniards. They looked, to a certain extent, upon their mission as a crusade. In those days England had a horror of Popery, and Spain was the mainstay and supporter of this religion. The escape which England had had of having Popery forced upon it, during the reign of Mary, by her spouse, Philip of Spain, had been a narrow one; and even now, it was by no means certain that Spain would not, sooner ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty

... leaving the party to make the best of their way to the heights above the valley where we had first encamped, and where plenty of food and water could be found for the ponies; these, in the event of anything having happened to the schooner, would become the mainstay of our hopes. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... of the road to the village, and nearly opposite the forge, was a small cabin of one room, the abode of the respectable Mrs. Wallop, the mainstay of Beechhurst as a nurse in last illnesses and dangerous cases—a woman of heart and courage, though perhaps of too imaginative a style of conversation. Although it was but a work-day, she was sitting at her own door in her Sunday black gown and bonnet, and, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... Barlow, graduates of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been speaking de la prose all his life. They assumed the title of Citizen, invented ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... seen on new farms, and that may fairly be termed the pioneer's mainstay, is a simple one of stakes. This is the kind we went in for, as we had the material for it in any quantity upon our ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... beyond the possibility of belief," he says, "thet them conglomerations uv ice, hard froze an' lookin' ez tight fixed ez a mainstay, for all thet hev a downard slitherin' motion, jest like a stream o' water, tho' in coorse thousands or millions o' ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid

... Reading, for the St. Quentins afterwards removed to 22 Hans Place, where they had under their charge Mary Russell Mitford. Still later, after the fall of Napoleon, the St. Quentins moved to Paris, together with Miss Rowden, who had long been the mainstay of the school. It was while the school was here that it received Fanny Kemble among ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... In another charter, given by the lord of the manor in 1305, the first allusion is made to Welsh coal, for the people among other privileges are allowed to dig "pit-coal in Ballywasta." Thus began the industry that has become the mainstay of prosperity in South Wales. Warwick's Castle at Swansea has entirely disappeared, the present ruins being those of a castle afterwards built by Henry de Gower, who became Bishop of St. David's. What is left of it is almost hidden by modern buildings. It has the remains of a curtain-wall and ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... perhaps—but they have also gotten us into commercial and political difficulties. Yet I give to them—a little—it is a matter of conscience with me to identify myself with all the enterprises of the Church; it is the mainstay of social order and a prosperous civilization. But the best forms of benevolence are the well-established, organized ones here at home, where people can see them and know ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke

... eastern Canada, following the fur trade. They have followed up the Red River and down the Athabasca, and they have overrun all the intervening tribes and elected themselves chiefs and bosses pretty much. You may call the Cree half-breed the mainstay of ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough

... Universal Ointment in from the bunk-house, and while that fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its origin probably warmed her lonely heart. I have suddenly wakened up to the fact that Struthers is getting on a bit. She is still the same efficient and self-obliterating mainstay of the kitchen that she ever was, but she grows more "sot" in her ways, more averse to any change in her daily routine, and more despairing of ever finally and completely capturing that canny old Scotsman whom we still so affectionately designate as Whinnie, in short for ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... curule ancestors, were united into one body with the patrician families, and became a sort of hereditary nobility. This body of exclusive families really possessed the political power of the State. The Senate was made up from their members, and was the mainstay of Roman nobility. The equites, or equestrian order, was also composed of the patricians and wealthy plebeians. Noble youths gradually withdrew from serving in the infantry, and the legionary cavalry became a closed aristocratic corps. Not only were the nobles the possessors of senatorial privileges, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... December 1592, deprived Philip of the genius which had for years past been the mainstay of his power. Henry's public announcement of his return to the Holy Catholic Church, in the summer of 1593, deprived the Spanish king of nearly all the support he had hitherto received in France. Before this Maurice had opened his attack on the two great cities which the Spaniards still ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... Overview: The mainstay of Andorra's economy is tourism. An estimated 13 million tourists visit annually, attracted by Andorra's duty-free status and by its summer and winter resorts. Agricultural production is limited by a scarcity of arable land, and most ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the son of a London goldsmith.[24] Oswald Cary, who settled in Middlesex in 1659 was the son of an English merchant.[25] There was no man in the colony during the second half of the 17th century that exerted a more powerful influence in political affairs than Philip Ludwell. He was for years the mainstay of the commons and he proved to be a thorn in the flesh of more than one governor. He was admired for his ability, respected for his wealth and feared for his power, an admitted leader socially and politically ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... he said brokenly. "Dinna you break doon noo, for you hae been the mainstay o' us a', when we wad hae lost heart often. I used to think that oor lot couldna be harder, when the bairns were a' wee, an' we were struggling frae haun' to mooth, to see them fed an' cled. But wi' a' the hardships, thae days were happy. We were baith young, an' I was ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... Xenocrates from taking an oath in the witness-box, or when, upon the accounts of Metellus Numidicus[99] being as usual handed round, a Roman jury refused to look at them. The compliment paid me, I repeat, was much greater. Accordingly, as the jurymen were protecting me as the mainstay of the country, it was by their voices that the defendant was overwhelmed, and with him all his advocates suffered a crushing blow. Next day my house was visited by as great a throng as that which escorted me home when I laid down the ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... producing constant revenue from year to year, mere fiction will accomplish little to make or save the publisher. The real sources of stability lie elsewhere, far beyond the ken of the superficial observer, and they are very commonly overlooked. In one instance, this mainstay is religious books; in another a cyclopaedia; in another medical books, or educational; in another a dictionary; in another a periodical; and fortunate the house that has not one, but two or three, such sources ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... ranks in the march of life, and perish by the wayside. And such comrades! Gone the brilliant, meteoric A'Beckett; fiery, impulsive, scathing Jerrold; playfully cynical Thackeray; and now—John Leech! There stood Shirley Brooks, who since Jerrold's death has been Punch's literary mainstay; Tom Taylor, working now in other channels, but still attached to the staff; Horace Mayhew and Percival Leigh, old colleagues of the dead man; F. C. Burnand and H. Silver, the youngest of the corps; ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... admiration, seems already at this time to have been extraordinary. Of the theatricals which the young folks were wont to get up at the paternal house, especially on the name-days of their parents and friends, Frederick was the soul and mainstay. With a good delivery he combined a presence of mind that enabled him to be always ready with an improvisation when another player forgot his part. A clever Polish actor, Albert Piasecki, who was stage-manager on these ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... the seas. A numerous and happy band of workmen look up to you as to a father. By calling new branches of industry into existence, you have laid the foundations of the welfare of hundreds of families. In a word—you are, in the fullest sense of the term, the mainstay of our community. ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen

... Nor was this all. Such was the attraction of the privateer's life that it drew to it seamen from every branch of the maritime calling. The fisheries and the West India trade, which had long been the chief mainstay of New England commerce, were ruined, and it seemed for a time as if the hardy race of American seamen were to degenerate into a mere body of buccaneers, operating under the protection of international law, but plunderers and spoilers nevertheless. Fortunately, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... his time and not destined to many more years of life. With the perfect and self-sacrificing courage which he always showed, he did not shrink from this new demand, although Ezekiel was the prop and mainstay of the house. He did not think for a moment of himself, yet, while he gave his consent, he made it conditional on that of the mother and daughters whom he felt he was soon to leave. But Mrs. Webster had the same spirit as her husband. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... mother died, and many brilliant visions of hope filled her ambitious little head. Yes, father would see that he was right in trusting her; Nell would discover that there was no one so clever as Polly; Mrs. Power would cease to defy her; Alice would obey her cheerfully; in short, she would be the mainstay and prop ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade

... each year, and had been compelled not only to spend its accumulated surplus on current needs, but to borrow heavily. The tariff duties, collected at the custom-houses, were, as they always had been, the mainstay of the revenue. But these had not met the needs of the three ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... time for evacuation. To his rage panic seized his men and they turned and fled, leaving him almost alone not a hundred yards from the enemy. A stray shot at that moment might have influenced greatly modern history, for, as events were soon to show, Washington was the mainstay of the American cause. He too had to get away and Howe's force landed easily enough. Meanwhile, on the west shore of the island, there was an animated scene. The roads were crowded with refugees fleeing northward from New York. These civilians Howe had no reason ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... that, if ever they had the imprudence to change any of their old laws, they would necessarily never have more than one meal a day as long as they lived. Finally, he recalled to their recollection that he had made the island what it was, that he was their mainstay, and that his counsel and exertions had rendered them the wonder of the world. Thus, between force, and fear, and flattery, the Vraibleusians paid for their corn nearly its weight in gold; but what did that signify to a nation with ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli









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