|
|
|
More "Stave" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amply sufficient for much larger boats than ours; but it was impossible always to avoid concealed dangers, over which the waters did not cause the slightest ripple. The large boat struck on a sharp rock, and with such violence as to stave her bottom; she was immediately unladen, and temporarily repaired without injury to the cargo. Although the river is extremely low, there is a very large body of water in it; the outer banks are nearly ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... old order changes. After their horse will come the little devil-guns that they can drag up to the tops of the hills, and, for aught I know, to the clouds when we crown the hills. If the tribe-council thinks good, I will go to Tallantire Sahib—who loves me—and see if I can stave off at least the blockade. Do I speak for ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... water, and then swam across from one side of the river to the other, the rattan at the end of the rope always showing his whereabouts. As he swam about, he approached disagreeably near to us, and we were not a little afraid that a whisk of his tail might stave in our canoe. Fortunately, he again turned, and he did not seem to wish to eat, the stick in his inside having probably spoiled his appetite. At last, when he found it was impossible to get free from this inconvenient ornament in the water, he scrambled on shore, where he lay hid among the ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... regained the detachment, and bade them heed carefully the orders they had received, viz., to avoid the direct charge of the Norman horse, but to take every occasion to harass and divert the stragglers; and then blithely singing a Saxon stave, as if inspired by Norman minstrelsy, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some wicked stave, Till thy drooping courage rise, And the glow-worm of the grave Glimmer in ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... well!" So saying, she shivered and covered her face. Now while Beltane yet stared, amazed by her saying, the bushes parted near by and a hooded figure stepped forth silent and soft of foot, at sight of whom all men gave back a pace, and Roger, trembling, drew a second cross in the dust with his bow-stave, what time ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... prose has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few and far between, unless ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... woad is; I remember reading about it in the histories of England; all the early Britons used it. And carrying nice, knobby stone creeks to stave in our heads! It would be nice to meet a hundred or a thousand of them, eh? Rather a different matter from dealing with a horde of those ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... was a sort of miracle, accomplished by his great desire to help the right thing to happen, to stave off any shadow of the wrong thing. Whatsoever the reason, Strangeways waited only a moment before turning to his book again. It seemed to be a link in some chain slowly forming itself to drag him back from his wanderings. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... farthing candle For either of them, or for Handel. Cannot a man live free and easy Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the earth with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his great surprise, ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... crouch behind him, the young fellow stood at bay, hooting, shouting, and waving his stave in a semicircle, within whose sweep the creatures were not anxious to intrude. Weary at length of trying to surprise the fortress by a flank movement, yet reluctant to abandon the hope of seizing Pike, the wolves finally seated themselves ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... mind, and it was at that very moment that the song of the bird broke out again, and just above my head in the larches an ugly, shrilling song of about a dozen notes with an accent on the two last, a stupid, tiresome stave that never varied. "What bird can it be," I cried out, "that comes to interrupt my meditations?" and getting up I tried to discover it amid the branches of the tree under which I had been lying. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... his men sit down, and freshen themselves with a little rest. There were religious services gone through: a matins-worship such as there have been few; sternly earnest to the heart of it, and deep as death and eternity, at least on Olaf's own part. For the rest Thormod sang a stave of the fiercest Skaldic poetry that was in him; all the army straightway sang it in chorus with fiery mind. The Bonder of the nearest farm came up, to tell Olaf that he also wished to fight for him "Thanks to thee; but don't," said Olaf; "stay at home rather, that the wounded may have some shelter." ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... himself," Paulette retorted, as if I were unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel caved in, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed without ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the odor, so near the cabin, would be unpleasant to every one, and might have a tendency to exasperate the owner of the liquor. He cast about him, therefore, for the means of removing the casks, in order to stave them, at a ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Verse is Poetry. Why shood I write; then? merrit[33] clad in inke Is but a mourner, and as good as naked. I will not write, my friend shall speake for me. Sing one stave more, my ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... followed so quickly that he caught up with him before he could enter. Just as he was about to grasp him he was struck on the head with some hard substance. He had been hit on the temple as with a stone. The blow was struck by Gavryl, who had picked up an oaken stave, and with it gave Ivan a terrible blow ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Union) were poured freely forth in honor of Queen Victoria. The Sergeant smiled like the carved head of a Swiss nutcracker, and the other gentlemen in my neighborhood, by nods and gestures, evinced grave approbation of so suitable a tribute to English superiority; and we finished our stave and sat down in an ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that so far as the positions of the notes on the stave are concerned, the key of A[b] is as easy to sing in as the key of A, D[b] as D, and so on. This fact is sometimes overlooked, and unnecessary difficulties are ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... many of 'em," said the dairyman. "Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... that they may live for ever! If, then, men spend such toil, such endeavour, so much money, so much anxiety, watchfulness, and care, in order to live only a little longer, what ought we not to do that we may live for ever? And if we call them prudent who take every possible precaution to stave off death, to live but a few days more, to save just a few days, then how foolish are they who so pass their days as to lose the Day ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... She could stave off the worst by not looking at him, by looking at other things, impersonal, innocent things; the bright, yellow, sharp gabled station; the black girders of the bridge; the white signal post beside it holding out a stiff, black-banded arm; the two rails curving there, with the flat white glitter ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... one used to being served on a tray outside the servants' quarters; and a German attendant with hands constructed especially for the purpose of kneading and gouging the innermost muscles of his master, who it appears had to be kneaded and gouged three times a day by a masseur in order to stave off paralysis, locomotor ataxia or something equally unwelcome ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... ter do it!" he virulently admonished his parent, a resentful light in his blue eyes. Then, as Bedell sang a stave in a full rich voice, "Bye-oh, Baby!" Bob vociferated anew, "Don't you begin ter dare do it!" every inch a man though ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... earthen jar, with a narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had been moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel; and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's wooden porringer (bicker), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of so foul a crime Be guilty? Ah! how nearly, thyself, Reft was the solace that we had in thee, Menalcas! Who then of the Nymphs had sung, Or who with flowering herbs bestrewn the ground, And o'er the fountains drawn a leafy veil?- Who sung the stave I filched from you that day To Amaryllis wending, our hearts' joy?- "While I am gone, 'tis but a little way, Feed, Tityrus, my goats, and, having fed, Drive to the drinking-pool, and, as you drive, Beware the he-goat; with his ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... neither wife nor child, nothing but his own carcass. One can always get one's self out of a difficulty, but the others who had households and brats! Rousselet had five. Matters were not going to be very cheerful at home. He must rely on charity or credit, he did not know what, but something to stave off that distress, real and sad distress, since ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... this, as I am a living sinner, the rosy-faced old boy took up his flute and blew a stave or two of "Come, Lasses ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... from the stroke of the Johnson boat, and his men strove to answer and stave off that terrible spurt. But they had spurted too often already, and another and a greater was more than they could bear. Their time became ragged; some splashed and dragged, and the boat was a beaten ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... beneath our hands, and we should sack it. But the son of Saturn afflicts me with bootless wranglings and strife. Achilles and I are quarrelling about this girl, in which matter I was the first to offend; if we can be of one mind again, the Trojans will not stave off destruction for a day. Now, therefore, get your morning meal, that our hosts join in fight. Whet well your spears; see well to the ordering of your shields; give good feeds to your horses, and look your chariots carefully over, that ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... being able even to write their names. By certain proceedings which took place at Christchurch Police-court on Tuesday, it would almost seem that some of the dark-faced wanderers already are educated a little too much. At all events, they occasionally manifest an ability to 'take a stave' out of the rest of the community. At the court in question a Gipsy woman named Emma Barney was brought to task for 'imposing by subtle craft to extort money' from a Bournemouth shopkeeper named Richard Oliver. It seems that Oliver is troubled ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... account of my little child.' There he stopped with a break in his voice. Harold, with intent to set his mind at ease and to stave off further expressions of ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... pang of disappointment. Somehow, he had hoped that his father and his friends might have been able to stave off ruin. As he approached nearer Tom was made aware that the crowd ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... contemptuous bearing that cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng, murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the body into the Tiber lest the people should make ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... explosive was originally in the form of powder or dust. The primitive formula burned slowly and gave low pressures—fortunate characteristics in view of the barrel-stave construction of the early cannon. About 1450, however, powder makers began to "corn" the powder. That is, they formed it into larger grains, with a resulting increase in the velocity of the shot. It was "corned" in fine grains for small arms and ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... removed The dead trunks and the fallen trees. He dressed and regulated The bushy clumps and the (tangled) rows. He opened up and cleared The tamarisk trees and the stave trees. He hewed and thinned The mountain mulberry trees. God having brought about the removal thither of this intelligent ruler, The Kwan hordes fled away[2]. Heaven had raised up a helpmeet for him, And the appointment he ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... in some few succeeding seconds, the diapason stop only was opened ... and how sweet and touching was the melody which it imparted! "Oh Dieu! (exclaimed our valet) que cela est ravissant, et meme penetrant." This was true enough. A solemn stave or two of a hymn (during which a few other pipes were opened) was then performed by the organist ... and the effect was, as if these notes had been chanted by an invisible choir of angels. The darkness of the heavens added much to the solemnity of the whole. Silence ensuing, we were asked ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... said, would mean war. The results of the second interview, which took place at two o'clock in the morning, were as negative as those of the first, notwithstanding a last effort, a final suggestion by M. Sazonoff to stave off the crisis. His giving in to Germany's brutal dictation would have been an avowal that ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... his insult to the gentlemen of Beauce," insinuated Bigot, leaning over to his angry guest, at the same time winking good-humoredly to Varin. "Come, now, De Beauce, friends all, amantium irae, you know—which is Latin for love—and I will sing you a stave in praise of this good wine, which is better than Bacchus ever drank." The Intendant rose up, and holding a brimming glass in his hand, chanted in full, musical voice a favorite ditty of the day, as a ready mode of restoring harmony ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... that this creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually a perfectly obvious consequence ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... stopped. A flush ran over her face and down to her neck. Hermione turned away her eyes. But they had read Vere's secret. She knew what her child was doing in those hours of seclusion. And she remembered her own passionate attempts to stave off despair by work. She remembered ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of contributing to each others' amusement, it is probable that "recourse to ourselves," in the exact sense of the phrase, was found ineffective—in Sterne's case, at any rate—to stave off ennui. To him, with his copiously if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... than the abandonment of Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful" in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... course there were no funds forthcoming, and credit was quite exhausted. Something was necessary to be done; the scandal of being seized would probably damage his hopes of success with Kate Waring; and he felt that if he could only stave off this difficulty for a week or a little more till the affair was concluded and her property in his power, that all might yet be well. When other persuasions, entreaties, and promises had failed to move his obdurate creditor, he at length ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... train, the clerk did remain Twenty years, squalling o'er a dull stave; Yet his mind was so evil, he'd swear like the devil, Nor repented on this ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,—this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which Browning brings ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... this flower bed is planted in an old dory filled with earth. She had outlived her usefulness down there in the Salt Pond, or even, it may be, out on the blue sea itself, but no vandal hands were laid upon her to stave her up for kindling wood. Instead, the Captain himself painted her a bright yellow, set her down in front of his dwelling, and filled her full of flowers. She is disintegrating slowly; already, after a rain, the muddy water trickles through her side and ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... gables black, Syrian airs like Orpheus Lull sequestered afrites to sleep, A witch smites her high biforous— A symbol of king Typhon's wrack! Where crystal lamps shine most glorious, Twin legions lie in cajons bleak,— Tokens of Hell invidious! Then fades the burnished light on high; Magicians stave their heads in dust, The vermin feed on reeking bones, Each gnome sobs to a green-horn'd toad. And monarchs of this dungeoned sky Untomb each son in sacred trust As vypers sound their rasping tones, Farewell the ancient Greek's abode! Then spectres of the tower'd night, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... pipe, made in sections from 8 to 12 ft. long, with the exterior surface covered with a heavy coat of asphalt, was selected in preference to unprotected, continuous, stave pipe. The diameters were not so great as to ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... good o' foolish tunes, the moilin' folks 'ud say, It's better teach the children work an' get the crock o' gold; Thin sorra take their wisdom whin it makes them sad an' gray,— A man is fitter have a song that never lets him old. A stave of "Gillan's Apples" or a snatch of "Come Along With Me" Will warm the cockles o' your heart, an' life will keep its prime. Yarra, gold is all the richer whin it's "Danny, sing a song for me" Or what's the good o' money if you're dead afore ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... will succeed," the doctor said. "There is nothing the matter with you except that you have been drawing on your reserve stock of strength to such an extent that you are on the verge of a collapse. The longer you stave it off the more complete it ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the real power of the kingdom might remain with Ansgar if he so willed. Determined not to be outwitted by the Norman, Ansgar (so the story goes) summoned a meeting of the eldermen (natu majores) of the City—the forerunners of the later aldermen—and proposed a feigned submission which might stave off immediate danger. The proposal was accepted and a messenger despatched. William pretended to accept the terms offered, and at the same time so worked upon the messenger with fair promises and gifts that on his return he converted his ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... goes on to specify what further measures the South demanded, in sharp, incisive terms, but this extract suffices to show that our leaders used every power of tongue and moral suasion to stave off bloodshed. ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... possible to stave death off for a time if a way could be found of setting up a reaction in the lower extremities; but if the symptoms do not abate by to-morrow evening, it will be all over with him, poor old fellow! Do you know what has happened ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... They'll use slugging tactics, sure, if they get a chance, or railroad me to some Pen or other, if possible. My one best bet is to keep out of their way; and I figure I'm ten times safer on the open road, with a few dollars to stave off a vagrancy charge, and with two good fists and this stick to keep 'em at a distance, than I would be on the railroads or in cheap dumps ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Royle, the falconer—diet a fighting-cock as well as Tom Shaw, the cock-master—enter a hound better than Charlie Crouch, the old huntsman—shoot with the long-bow further than any one except himself, and was willing to toss off a pot with him, or sing a merry stave whenever he felt inclined. Such a companion was invaluable, and Nicholas congratulated himself upon the discovery, especially when he found Lawrence Fogg not unwilling to undertake some delicate commissions for him, which he could not well execute himself, and which he ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... works with a rollicking stave at lip, And loud is the chorus skirled; With the burly rote of his rumbling throat He batters it down ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... "Stave the miller off him," said Murray, "or he will worry him dead. The Abbot, my lord, offers us the hospitality of the Convent; I move we should repair hither, Sir Piercie and all of us. I must learn to know the Maid of Avenel—to-morrow I must act as her father—All ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... o'clock, the drummers of the regiment began to beat their drums as hard as they could stave, and I saw men running in every direction, and the camp soon became one scene of hurry and excitement. I asked some one what all this hubbub meant. He looked at me with utter astonishment. I saw soldiers running to their tents and grabbing their guns and cartridge-boxes and hurry out again, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... humbled him. His was a simple soul, and took its responsibilities seriously. He sought not to inquire for what high purpose Providence had so signally intervened to stave off from the East and West Looe Artillery the doom of common men. He only prayed to be equal to it. The Doctor's statistics had, in fact, scared him a little. I am ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... clothes off their children on account of the heat, and their terrible water-swollen stomachs and the pitiful sticks of legs eloquently tell their own tale. Unable to find food, all are drinking enormous quantities of water to stave off the pangs of hunger. A man who has been in India says that all drink like this in famine time, which inflates the stomach to a dangerous extent, and is the forerunner ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song - O, you envy the blessed death ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... another short prayer, joined us with a face of angelic serenity. Having greeted each of us affectionately, he entered into conversation with us, until we were called, as we soon were, to table. I, who watched his actions most closely and ever found them regular and harmonious as a stave of music, was amazed at the brevity of this preparation and thanksgiving. In the evening, therefore, when we were alone together, I said, using the filial privilege which I knew was mine, "Father, it seemed to me this morning that your preparation ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... and sufferings, and incurring thereby a degree of obloquy fatal to any Ministry. They seemed, in fact, to imagine, as they went on, that the day of reckoning could never arrive, because they had resolved to stave it off from time to time, however near it approached, by a series of desperate expedients, really destructive of the national prosperity, but provocative of what served their purposes, viz. temporary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... want to take him something wherewith to stave off the pangs of hunger," says the younger Miss Beresford, with that grandeur of style she usually affects in moments of strong excitement, and with the vigor that distinguishes her. "I see; certainly." She grows abstracted. "There's a leg ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... "Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor breaks ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... up and down the social ladder did not stave off our craving for art; and there came about this time a very decisive event in our lives. Marshall's last and really grande passion had come to a violent termination, and monetary difficulties forced him to turn his thoughts to painting as a means of livelihood. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... they triumph, when success I cannot crock this Does their designs attend, stave. And then their ways, who thus ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... in 1770, met a native who had 'dead palsy,' affecting the whole of one side. He was dragged on a sledge, 'reduced to a mere skeleton,' and so was placed in the magic lodge. The first step in his cure was the public swallowing by a conjurer of a board of wood, 'about the size of a barrel-stave,' twice as wide across as his mouth. Hearne stood beside the man, 'naked as he was born,' 'and, notwithstanding I was all attention, I could not detect the deceit.' Of course, Hearne believes that this was mere legerdemain, and (p. 216) mentions a most suspicious circumstance. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... that during the most critical period of the 1862 campaign, the most glorious to the Confederacy, Lee was Commander-in-Chief of the Southern armies. But when Lee left Richmond for the Northern border, Davis once more assumed supreme control, retaining it until it was too late to stave off ruin. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... stave off defeat or prevent lines from being entered. It may be launched either at the enemy's strong or weak points depending on conditions. If enemy are beaten off and disorganized at some point, it may be good opportunity to follow up the advantage by counter attack. Also at other points where ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... Chief Engineer, built a number of culverts of concrete pipe with an interior diameter of 4 ft., and 6-in. shells. Fig. 176 shows the forms in which the pipe was molded. Both forms are of ordinary wooden tank construction. The inner form has one wedge-shaped loose stave which is withdrawn after the concrete has set for about 20 hours, thus collapsing the inner form and allowing it to be removed. The outer form is built in two pieces with 25/8-in. semi-circular iron hoops ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... delicacy. The vessel that goes in quest of 'beche-de-mer' takes several expert divers—usually Kanakas, or South Sea Islanders—and having arrived at the ground they propose fishing, a sort of head-quarters is established on some convenient island, where vegetables are planted, to stave off the scurvy that would otherwise soon attack the adventurers. This done the little vessel proceeds to the edge of the reef, and begins work ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... thirteenth century has a number of farced Kyries and Glorias, also a collection of Sequences. A Dublin Processionale of the fourteenth century contains the most elaborate form of the Officium Sepulchri, with musical notation on a four-line stave—the foundation of the Miracle Play of the Resurrection. Another Dublin Troper dates from 1360 and was used in St. Patrick's Cathedral. It contains the hymn, "Angelus ad Virginem", alluded to by Chaucer. The Christ Church Psaltery, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... foundations, a cannon was hurled a distance of more than 30 yards, and men as well as animals were lifted off their feet and carried several yards. The sea rose so high that it destroyed the fort and drove a vessel against the hospital with such force as to stave in the walls of that building. Of the 600 houses at Kingston, on the island of St. Vincent, 14 alone remained intact, and the French frigate Junon was lost. Alarming consequences were feared from the number of dead bodies which lay uninterred, and the quantity ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... that same week Field left Long at a point on the east side of the lake, to go to Bee; and half an hour after arriving there was out on the Leewell road, on horseback, galloping south, singing a stave of a song as he dashed along. There was a dance that night at the George Hotel, and Field was there, the handsomest and gayest of men; and there was no prettier girl in the rooms than the one he brought and danced so well with, and whom no one else ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... England, for from this edition of the Encyclopaedia the subject of philology was omitted. In fact, Babel and Philology made nearly as much trouble to encyclopedists as Noah's Deluge and Geology. Just as in the latter case they had been obliged to stave off a presentation of scientific truth, by the words "For Deluge, see Flood" and "For Flood, see Noah," so in the former they were obliged to take various provisional measures, some of them comical. In ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... so, but with vessels like we got and the seamen sailing out of Gloucester we'll stave 'em off a long time yet, and even as it is, give me a breeze and a vessel like this one under us and we'll beat out all the steam fishermen that ever turned ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... spare spars, Watkins, and fasten them to float in front of her bows like a triangle. Matthews, catch hold of that boat-hook and try to fend off any piece of timber that comes along. You get hold of the sweeps, lads, and do the same. They would stave her in like a ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... seeing Violet. Time and again she had hurried her away when she had seen Ranny coming, while the fear in her heart told her that those two were bound to meet. She had lived from hand to mouth on her precarious happiness, contented if she could stave off the evil day. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Spaniard was firing her guns as she came on, the Nashville was replying. Captain Long was working to stave off the impending disaster. Hastily the engineer got up steam. The gun-boat was well under ...
— Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser - A Brave Fight Against Odds • Walter Fenton Mott
... Wave was unfortunate enough to stave a hole in her bottom by running on a stump, and sunk in three feet of water. She can be raised with but little trouble. Her guns have been taken off, as well as the crew, coal, provisions, etc., and she will soon be afloat. What effect ...
— Kinston, Whitehall and Goldsboro (North Carolina) expedition, December, 1862 • W. W. Howe
... live in disgrace. Though frost knows me not, with winter I blend; And always to ice I'm a capital friend. I'm never in heat, though I live in the fire. Though never in want, I'm in every desire. I am I—, but the end of my paper I spy; So I'll wind up my stave and wish ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... with each man his shield upon his shoulder, of many a fold of tough bull's hide, and his sword of tempered bronze in his silver-studded belt, and in his right hand a pair of lances, of the heavy white-ash stave. ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Chancery Lane; he was with Sheridan. After mutual greetings, etc., Sheridan retired first. Before recurring to my own business, I could not help inquiring 'that' of Sheridan. 'Oh,' replied the attorney, 'the usual thing! to stave off an action from his wine-merchant, my client.'—'Well,' said I, 'and what do you mean to do?'—'Nothing at all for the present,' said he: 'would you have us proceed against old Sherry? what would be the use of it?' and here he began laughing, and going ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the social order. He is their embodiment: he is the most emblematic figure in the modern world that I know—in this country, at any rate—representing so much that is good in the great traditions which have got to go. And to stave off that day he will do almost anything. He would even—if he thought it would enable him the better to prick some of his bubbles—he would even take ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... the soul does make strongly for the recovery of the patient, through inspiring him with hope and confidence. But it cannot always stave off death. If, in spite of the operations of one soul-catcher, the patient's strength still sinks, some other practitioner is usually called in for consultation. In the case of a chief the help of three or even four may be invoked successively or together; ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... old Alardo conquer'd; and his limbs One were to show transpierc'd, another his Clean lopt away; a spectacle like this Were but a thing of nought, to the' hideous sight Of the ninth chasm. A rundlet, that hath lost Its middle or side stave, gapes not so wide, As one I mark'd, torn from the chin throughout Down to the hinder passage: 'twixt the legs Dangling his entrails hung, the midriff lay Open to view, and wretched ventricle, That turns th' englutted aliment to dross. Whilst eagerly I fix on him my gaze, He ey'd me, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... shy—unused to sing in company—nevertheless, if it was the wish of the party, and if it would oblige his good customer, Mr. Jorrocks, he would try his hand at a stave or two made in honour of the immortal Surrey. Having emptied his glass and cleared his windpipe, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... way. It seemed as if my gaiety had accumulated while suppressed, and that I was, in my present joyous mood, entitled to expend the savings of the previous week. But just as I was about to uplift a merry stave, I heard, to my joyful surprise, the voices of three or more choristers, singing, with considerable success, the lively ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... by the exercise of a little judgement. The penalty for non-appearance at a half-holiday game was a fine of sixpence. Constant absence was likely in time to lead to a more or less thrilling interview with the captain of cricket, but a very occasional attendance was enough to stave off this disaster; and as for the sixpence, to a man of means like Farnie it was a mere nothing. It was a bad system, and it was a wonder, under the circumstances, how Beckford produced the elevens it did. But it was the system, and Farnie availed himself ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... unthinkable compulsion. What mad adventure was this? Here he was at home hunting Charley Hannaford. Well, but his father was close at hand, and Father Halloran just below, who had always protected him. At this game he could go on for ever, if only it would stave off ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... him. His income would scarcely have kept her in flowers, and to supply her with jewels and dinners and a hundred other luxuries, as well as to repay money lost at cards, he had plunged deeper into the books of Benjamin and Company, hoping each time that some windfall would stave off disaster. Disregarding the advice of a few sincere friends, he had continued his mad course of dissipation. And now the blow had fallen—sooner than he had reason to expect. A bill for a large amount was due that very day, and Benjamin and Company refused to renew it; they demanded ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... with it, too; given to digest his victuals, and be peaceable with everybody. He had one rule, that stood in place of many: To keep out of every business which it was possible for human wisdom to stave aside. 'What good will you get of going into that? Parliamentary criticism, argument and botheration? Leave well alone. And even leave ill alone:—are you the tradesman to tinker leaky vessels in England? You will not want for work. Mind your pudding, and say little!' ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sign this paper, with the intention to publish it in the next morning's papers, for effect. While I was talking with Captain Folsom, Height came into the room to listen. I admitted that the effect of such a publication would surely be good, and would probably stave off immediate demand till their assets could be in part converted or realized; but I naturally inquired of Folsom, "Have you personally examined the accounts, as herein recited, and the assets, enough to warrant your signature to this paper?" for, "thereby you in effect become ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... ship was sheltered from the fury of the wind and the waves, and it was the proper situation in which to lower a boat into the water; for on the windward side these two powerful forces would be likely to stave the cutter against the side of ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... Swung over swarthy singing faces grouped Within the four small wooden walls that made Their home and shut them from the unfathomable Depths of mysterious gloom without that rolled All around them; or Tom Moone would heartily troll A simple stave that struggled oft with thoughts Beyond its reach, yet reached their hearts ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... left to play when Yale brought up on Harvard's three-yard line for a first down. Behind the battered and tottering Crimson wall a figure raved and ranted and roared, entreating his teammates to stave off the Bulldog's advance. He stamped from end to end in the churned up sod, prodding each player in a vicious manner. But there was no visible stiffening of the Harvard defense at the savage barking of its quarterback. The team ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... think it has been any particular element," she broke in, trying desperately to stave off what she felt in his tone. "I love the wild, where I can ride, and ride, and never meet a human being—where I can dream and dally and feast my eyes on a landscape man has not touched. I have lived most of my life in New York, and I love nature so well that I'm inclined ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... Cousin George, when he took his leave, promising to be ready to meet Sir Harry at twelve on the morrow, could almost comfort himself with a prospect of success. He might be successful, if only he could stave off the Walker and Bullbean portion of Mr. Hart's persecution! For he understood that the success of his views at Humblethwaite must postpone the payment by Sir Harry of those moneys for which Mr. Hart and Captain Stubber ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... crystal melody. Thereafter it purred of peace, it floated and stopped short as if content. But out of the dark another took up the song, and further off another, provoking our first musician to a new stave. Lucy, with parted lips, held her heart. Love was in this place, overshadowing her; her sightless eyes were wide, waiting upon it; and it came. She heard a step in the thicket; she stayed without motion, will or thought. Expectans expectavit. She was in ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... lads," cried the doctor, "every one of you take what I'll mix up for you directly, and have a good bathe and rub down. I am not going to have you all down with fever if I can stave it off." ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... volunteers a remark, nothing is the matter. But if he merely answers "No-o-o!" he means yes, and in order to stave off sea-sickness he ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... grandsire's time, and is yet to make rashers for posterity. His dinner is his other work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labour; he is a terrible fastner on a piece of beef, and you may hope to stave the guard off sooner. His religion is a part of his copy-hold, which he takes from his land-lord, and refers it wholly to his discretion: Yet if he give him leave he is a good Christian to his power, (that ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... she sits within her tepee making beaded deerskins for her father, while he longs to stave off her every suitor as all unworthy of his old heart's pride. But Tusee is not alone in her dwelling. Near the entrance-way a young brave is half reclining on a mat. In silence he watches the petals of a wild rose growing on the soft buckskin. Quickly the young woman slips ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... candle For either of them, or for Handel.— Cannot a man live free and easy, Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the world with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? So help me heaven, I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet, Than did the primitive Peruvians; Or those old ante-queer-diluvians That lived in the unwash'd world with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut. I care no more for Cimarosa, Than he did for ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... delay before he reached Brussels. During that time, the entire American diplomatic and consular staff was leaving Belgium; and the Emperor was arriving more or less secretly in Brussels (it was said in the hope that a personal talk with Brand Whitlock might stave off the American declaration ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... legislative way is Smoke Prohibition. It is exactly a matter for the interference of the state. The Athenian in the comedy, wearied of war, concludes a separate peace with the enemy for himself, his wife, his children, and his servant; and forthwith raises a jovial stave to Bacchus. Now all sensible people would not only be glad to enter into amicable relations with Smoke, but would even be content to pay a good sum for protection against the incursions from factory chimnies and other nuisances in their neighbourhood. But there ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... third stave, a bar of elm four feet long and as thick as a man's wrist, and came round to the mule again on the side away from Clare and Johnstone. He lifted the weapon high in air, and almost before they realised what horror he was perpetrating he had struck three or four tremendous ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... missed. Turning to Massieu, she asked him if he had a cross. He had not, nor could one be found; but an Englishman broke his stave into two pieces, and these tied together formed ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very "corrupt" ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... they wearied of their toil and asked for a little rest, Frodi answered: "Ye shall sleep no longer than the cuckoo is silent, or while I speak one stave." Then the giant-maids ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... about this, by reason of his anxiety regarding Tara herself. He felt that another bout of the illness in which she had nearly lost her life in the early days would almost certainly be fatal, and the steps he took to stave this off kept him very busy. In addition to this, a carpenter had to be set to work in a great hurry to put together a suitable bed for the new foster-mother in a shed in the orchard. Fortunately, the weather ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... strengthen their hold, a number of supports are nailed round the outside of the former, and also closely round the latter. The tar is then put into the barrel, and set on fire; and the remaining one being broken up, stave after stave is thrown in, until it is quite full. The 'cl[a]vie,' already burning fiercely, is now shouldered by some strong young man, and borne away at a rapid pace. As soon as the bearer gives signs of ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... mind of the haunting images. She knew the reason, too; darkness brought the knowledge. She had believed, had wished to believe, that the failure was her fault, a result of her unstable nature; whereas the whole undertaking had been merely a futile attempt to bolster up the impossible, to stave off the inevitable, to postpone the end. And it had all been in vain. The end! It would come, as surely as day followed night—had perhaps indeed already come; for how else could the nervous aversion be explained, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... I stave him off. I know what it is right enough, and I don't want to hear it; but I suppose I ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... very much at variance with the terms on which they had so lately stood together. At length the speed of the pseudo herald could save him no longer from the fangs of his pursuers; they seized him, pulled him down, and would probably soon have throttled him, had not the Duke called out, "Stave and tail!—stave and tail! [to strike the bear with a staff, and pull off the dogs by the tail, to separate them.]—Take them off him!—He hath shown so good a course, that, though he has made no sport at bay, we will not ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... by his brethren. No one deigned to call him "Reb" Zelig, nor to prefix to his name the American equivalent—"Mr." "The old one is a barrel with a stave missing," knowingly declared his neighbors. "He never spends a cent; and he belongs nowheres." For "to belong," on New York's East Side, is of no slight importance. It means being a member in one of the numberless congregations. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... he again with the mermaid; whereat the graver man clapped a hand before his mouth, and swore he should take her in wedlock, to have and to hold, if he sang another stave. 'And thou shalt be her pretty little bridemaid,' quoth he gaily to the graver man, chucking him under ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... seemed likely to carry him first past the post, and Bernard Hallam was sure of winning. Bandmaster, however, would not be denied, the horse divined there was danger of losing; being full of courage he resented this and put forth his strength and speed to stave off defeat. How he did it Colley could not tell, but by some almost magical power he drew level with Rainstorm again ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... demoiselle, reward me, if you will by letting me hear the stave you were going to sing ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... least there must be no warfare here in this warm patch of shelter snatched out of the cold and dark. His hand was on Old Crow's journal, Dick's inheritance, he thought, as well as his, and now a fortunate pretext to stave off ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... carry on a conversation, not unamiably, in a sort of hexametrical stichomythia. The maiden modestly seeks to restrain the amorous impatience of her lover, and the scene ends with a song between the two composed in 'Asclepiades.'[228] Of this literary curiosity Amyntas' opening stave may be quoted: ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... a sudden thought. With the rear rockets, I rolled us over. For a moment we were hull-down to the passing discs. From our hull gravity-plates I flung a full repulsion. Would it stave them off, bend their orbit outward? It did not. Their course ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... type a score of tempestuous raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go soberly down to his counting-house—humming a stave or two of "Spanish Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup worth a million to the depredator might ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... thought, "would ride on until she dropped? Would meet discomfort at every turn with a jest or a merry stave?" ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Germans eat six regular meals a day, and between times stave off their appetite with numerous Schweitzer cheese sandwiches, blutwurst ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible—and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now—this—this—" She broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been manicured since the morning. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... ye me Lord, Lord,' saith he, 'and do not, the things which I say?' (Luke 6:46) He cannot abide to be reputed the Lord of those that presume to profess his name, and do not depart from iniquity. (Ezek. 20:39) The reason is, for that such do but profane his name, and stave others off from falling in love with him and his ways. Hence he says again 'Behold, I have sworn by my great name, saith the Lord, that my name shall no more be named in the mouth of any man of Judah.' (Jer. 44:26; Rom. 2:24) 2. He regardeth not their prayers. 'If I regard iniquity in my heart, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a picture of 'Cassandra and Agamemnon,' and in July he received a commission to finish it for the Duke of Sutherland, who had more than once saved him from ruin. On this occasion the Duke's advances barely sufficed to stave off disaster. Studies, prints, clothes, and lay-figures were pawned to pay for the expenses of the work, and on October comes the entry: 'Directly after the Duke's letter came with its enclosed cheque, an execution was ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... cheerful-hearted fellow he was. Although differing so widely from Guyon Vidocq, he, without any effort to do so, and indeed unconsciously, disputed the palm of popularity with him. He was an active, powerful man too, and though terribly pockmarked, had a most agreeable countenance. He could troll a pleasant stave, and loved, when off hunting or at work with his axe sometimes, to sing one of our C—- Sunday hymns, and whenever there was a respectable party in the evening, instead of the usual rioting set, he would willingly give them "The Fireside at home," "Merrily row, the Boat row," or any of the good ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... Rogero, when he saw her so offended, Fixed himself firmly in his arms and seat, He rests his lance, but holds the stave suspended, So that it shall not harm her when they meet, She that to smite and pierce the Child intended, Pitiless, and inflamed with furious heat, Has not the courage, when she sees him near, To fling, or do him outrage ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... to fifteen, when the stave was concluded with a shrill "Spell, oh!" and the gang relieved streaming with perspiration. When the saltpetre was well mashed, they rolled ton waterbutts on it, till the floor was like a billiard table. A fleet of chop boats then began to arrive, so many per day, with the tea chests. Mr. Grey ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... and so the mace-bearers, being on their own ground forgot their manners, and peremptorily demanded their pay before they would allow us to move one step farther. At first I tried to stave the matter off, promising great rewards if they took us quickly on to Suwarora; but they would take no alternative—their rights were four wires each. I could not afford such a sum, and tried to beat them down, but without effect; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... matter how wild, a sudden faintness, anything, and run from him back into the cottage. And then she tried to think, think in a desperate sort of way of some subject of conversation that she might introduce that would stave off, postpone, defer the words that she knew were even now on his lips—nothing—she could think of nothing—only that she might have let the Flopper have his way, have let him tell Thornton that she had gone to bed with—the ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... must do something. We must both have money—that's quite evident," he said. "That last five hundred you gave me will stave off ruin for a week or so. But after that we must certainly be well supplied, or else there may be revelations well—which will be as ugly for yourself ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... so that even to lie to at the mouth made rather a ticklish job of it. The men looked at one another, and did not like it, for a badly handled oar would have cast them on the rocks, which are villainously hard and jagged, and would stave in the toughest boat, like biscuit china. However, they durst not say that they feared it; and by skill and steadiness they examined all three caves quite enough to be certain that ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... have to disavow her protege, which is a fact not unthought of by the house of Auersperg. By constant machination and intrigue the king's revenues have been so depleted that ordinary debts are troublesome. The archbishop, to stave off the probable end, brought about the alliance between the houses of Carnavia and Osia. My business here is to arrange for a ten years' renewal of the loan, and that is what the duchess wishes to prevent, mon ami. What's to become ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... fell a fringe of gray hair. His long beard was also gray, and he leaned upon an ivory staff carved with many strange signs. The inquiry was addressed to Captain Hyde. He paid no attention whatever to it, but, gayly humming a stave of "Marlbrook," watched the crush of wagons and pedestrians, in order to find a suitable moment to ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... victuals grow scant, And recall, with foul faces, the source of their want— When she thinks of their poor little mouths to be fed, And then thinks of her trade that is utterly dead, And even its pearlashes laid in the grave— Whilst her tub is a dry rotting, stave after stave, And the greatest of Coopers, ev'n he that they dub Sir Astley, can't bind up her heart or her tub,— Need you wonder she curses your bones, Mr. Scrub! Need you wonder, when steam has depriv'd her of bread, If she prays that the evil may visit your head— Nay, scald all the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... style, William Dent' cried Michael. 'There's fire for—your money! It may be a romantic visit from one of the young ladies—a sort of Cleopatra business. Have a care and don't stave in Cleopatra's head.' ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... upheld he walked, And ever the rain drove down; And now and again to himself he talked In the streets of Danbury town. And now and again he'd stop and troll A stave of music that seemed to roll From the inmost depths of his ardent soul; But the wind took hold of the notes and tossed them And the few who chanced to ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... Belzebub at the stave's end as well as a man in his case may do. Has here writ a letter to you; I should have given 't you to-day morning; but as a madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of history. The bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feasters and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge. In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still living and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... already made sure of the removal of the pro-Austrian Obrenovitches and being in close touch with Montenegro and Bulgaria was planning another coup in the Balkans. Albania was resisting it. The Turks under pressure from the Powers were striving to smooth matters down sufficiently to stave off the final crash that drew ever nearer. They arrested a number of headmen and exacted some punishment for Shtcherbina's death. Though if a consul chooses to take part in a local fight he alone is ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... utter amaze of the drunken listeners and astonishment of the Indians, the game old officer trolled off this stave: ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... honour, without inflicting grievous disappointment and sufferings, and incurring thereby a degree of obloquy fatal to any Ministry. They seemed, in fact, to imagine, as they went on, that the day of reckoning could never arrive, because they had resolved to stave it off from time to time, however near it approached, by a series of desperate expedients, really destructive of the national prosperity, but provocative of what served their purposes, viz. temporary popular enthusiasm. What cruelty! what profligacy! what madness! And all under the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... to Hardy's apprehensive eyes she seemed on the verge of tears. So he spoke, blindly and without consideration, filled with a man's anxiety to stave off this ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... fingers for love; but wine's the very heart of life. There's wisdom and truth in wine, there's valor in it, and it's powerful enough to make even good sound men fall in love. There's a stave I've heard which you may have if you will." And with much sound but little ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... you have the same way of looking at things," said he. "Our object is to keep things going for another twenty-four hours. After that it does not much matter what befalls us, for we shall be out of the reach of rescue. But how can we stave them off for ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... without my apprehensions on this head, yet I do not see that the measure could have been decently avoided, most certainly not, consistent with the letter and spirit of my instructions. I have endeavored to adapt the mode to the main end I have in view, that is, to stave off any question touching the expediency of the voyage at this time, or prior to my obtaining permission to make it; for the reasons mentioned in my letter of the 24th instant, as well as for others, which it may not be prudent to mention ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... called to show its sterling qualities. And with this in the hands of Thad Brewster, who was a perfectly fearless chap, according to his churns, who did not know that his boy heart could hammer in his breast like a runaway steam engine, why, they surely ought to be able to stave ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... trumpets, a compulsive stave Through all the bounds, from Beersheba to Dan; Come out! come out! who scorns to be a slave, Or claims ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... learned what a fool you're making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... to take him something wherewith to stave off the pangs of hunger," says the younger Miss Beresford, with that grandeur of style she usually affects in moments of strong excitement, and with the vigor that distinguishes her. "I see; certainly." She grows abstracted. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... that in doing lay her safety, and kept her fully employed, so much so, indeed, that from sheer lack of time she was able to stave off the faintness which had threatened to overpower her. After a time her father came to himself, and Erica's face, which had been the last in his mind in full consciousness, was the first which now presented itself to his awakening ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... stand up like a fort, and if we reach 'em in time we may stave off our pursuers. They're coming fast, and they're spreading out in a long line now. That helps 'em, because it's impossible for fugitives to run exactly straight, and every time we deviate from the true course some part of their line gains ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... nonce he was clear of his enemies, several other facts impressed themselves upon his mind—facts which were both important and unpleasant. In the first place, he had not eaten a mouthful of food since morning, and he was hungry. He had swallowed enough water to stave off the more uncomfortable sensation of thirst, but water is not worth much to appease the hunger. He felt the need of food ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... sing the same sweet stave, Her lights and airs are given, Alike, to playground and the grave,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... A flush ran over her face and down to her neck. Hermione turned away her eyes. But they had read Vere's secret. She knew what her child was doing in those hours of seclusion. And she remembered her own passionate attempts to stave off despair by work. She remembered ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... that man's humours, to see his mode of life, to be dependent on him, to belong to him." And then the doctor, hurrying on to Silverbridge, again met Dr Century at the old lady's bedside, and having made his endeavours to stave off the inexorable coming of the grim visitor, again returned to his own niece ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... an' soft music!' remarked a private known as 'Enery Irving throughout the battalion, and whistled a stave of 'We shall meet, but we ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... manifested by the public. Thus it seems—that, whilst he meditated only a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one for himself; and finally, to evade the suspicions which began to arise powerfully as to his true motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin, had found himself in a manner obliged to go forward and consummate the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of these three conditions would stave off recognition by foreign powers, until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to reduce ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... They have also read the synopsis of A Christmas Carol at the beginning of the lesson. If they have read the first four staves of the carol in a general way, they will be in a better position to study intensively the last stave, or chapter, which is the lesson in the Reader. They will understand the causes that have changed this "covetous old sinner" to the man "who knew how to keep Christmas Day well". This lesson should be taken ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... thing for the marquis to remain here any longer!' There spoke the owl. And here the lion, when the bad news came: 'I had asked for my recall after Ticonderoga. But since the affairs of Canada are getting worse, it is my duty to help in setting them right again, or at least to stave off ruin so long as ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... they fired upon him, and one bullet nicked his glove, but he was hopeful that after his long rest he might again stave them off. He sent back no defiant cry, but, settling into determined silence, ran at his utmost speed. The forest here was of large trees, with no undergrowth, and he noticed that the two parties did not join, but ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... resident males of full age the full vote, and he will have given the republic a stability and power which nothing else can. If he rejects all pleas of this kind, and persists in his present policy, he may possibly stave off the evil day, and preserve his cherished oligarchy for another few years; but the end will be the same.' The extract reflects the tone of all of the British press, with the exception of one or two papers which considered ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... work, and we may even take glad refuge in it to stave off depression, but we are then often adding fuel to the fire, and tiring the very faculty of resistance, which hardly ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the road that leads to the gaol. The place is often crowded at night—there is scarcely room to sit or stand, the atmosphere is thick with smoke, and a hoarse roar of jarring voices fills it, above which rises the stave of a song shouted in one unvarying key from some corner. Money pours in apace—the draughts are deep, and long, and frequent, the mugs are large, the thirst insatiate. The takings, compared with the size and situation of ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... excitement of climbing up and down the social ladder did not stave off our craving for art; and there came about this time a very decisive event in our lives. Marshall's last and really grande passion had come to a violent termination, and monetary difficulties forced him to turn his thoughts to painting ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... interfered with him, and that he really could cajole the old man better than Clint could; for when that fellow got wound up to talk he was allers going you five better. Some of the boys thought it rather risky, and they wanted Clint to write and say he had the typhoid fever, and so stave it off until he looked fit to go; but he knew that if he crossed his uncle now he'd likely enough lose everything, and so he thought it best to make sure and let Kirby go and see, anyhow. One thing that helped Kirby along was that ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... behind him, the young fellow stood at bay, hooting, shouting, and waving his stave in a semicircle, within whose sweep the creatures were not anxious to intrude. Weary at length of trying to surprise the fortress by a flank movement, yet reluctant to abandon the hope of seizing Pike, the wolves finally seated themselves upon their ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had been moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel; and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's wooden porringer (bicker), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a time puzzled us both not a little,—one ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the Eastfirth Quarter, and thou must always find something to say against them. At last your talk will come to Rangrivervale, and then thou must say, there is small choice of men left in those parts since Fiddle Mord died. At the same time sing some stave to please Hrut, for I know thou art a skald. Hrut will ask what makes thee say there is never a man to come in Mord's place; and then thou must answer, that he was so wise a man and so good a taker up of suits, that he never made a false step in upholding ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... the stave of a song as he sprang up the companion ladder after his rough breakfast in the galley, but the sound expired at the sight of the distant flutter of a woman's scarf in the stern of the ship. He halted and ran his fingers through his crisp hair with ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... or to him, had been the disturbing element in our political system ever since the African slave trade expired by limitation of the Constitution in 1808. The devices of human ingenuity (inspired, as we fervently believe, by the purest patriotism) to stave off the inevitable final settlement of this account, innumerable as they were, and only limited by the predestined decree of Supreme Benevolence (which is Supreme Justice), were, at last, exhausted. The statesmanship of '50 had been outgrown. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... question of the offer of the Kingship. Through two sittings that day, and again on March 25 (New Year's Day, 1657), there was a very anxious and earnest debate with closed doors, the opposition trying to stave off the final vote by two motions for adjournment. These having failed, the final vote was taken (March 25); when, by a majority of 123 to 62, the Kingship clause was carried in this amended form: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... towns, the torment and terror of all douce fogies, male and female,—even the Boys, I say, respected Captain Willis, so potent was the influence of his gentleness; nailed not up his shutters, nor tied fishing-lines across his doorway; tail-piped not his dog, nor sent his cat to sea on a barrel-stave; nor put live crabs into his pocket, nor dead dog-fish into his well; yea, even when judgment, too long provoked, made bare her red right hand, and the lieutenant vowed by his commission that he would send half-a-dozen of them to the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... straining chest. There was not a clash nor a falter, but, flash after flash, the blades came down chunking into the ever-widening notch. Summers had seen sword play in Montreal armories, and had heard the ax clang often on the side of Western firs, but—for Thurston was fighting to stave off ruin—this grim struggle in the face of a desperate risk surpassed any remembered exhibition of fencers' skill with the steel. The trunk was bending visibly beneath the hewers, the river frothed more at their feet, and the giant logs were rolling, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... old land is thine, And thou a traitor slave of it; Think how the Switzer leads his kine, When pale the evening star doth shine, His song has home in every line, Freedom in every stave of it! Think how the German loves his Rhine, And ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... under his arms, and whistling as he went the pathetic air of "Shule Aroon." It was the first time I had heard that tune; I was to hear it again, words and all, as you shall learn, but I remember how that little stave of it ran in my head after the free-traders had bade him "Wheesht, in the deil's name," and the grating of the oars had taken its place, and I stood and watched the dawn creeping on the sea, and the boat drawing away, and the lugger lying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wilt thou not put the scorn And instant tragic question from thine eyes? Do thy dark brows yet crave That swift and angry stave— Unmeet for this desirous morn— That I have striven, striven to evade? Gazing on him, must I not deem they err Whose careless lips in street and shop aver As common tidings, deeds to make his cheek Flush from the bronze, and his dead throat to speak? Surely some elder ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so foul a crime Be guilty? Ah! how nearly, thyself, Reft was the solace that we had in thee, Menalcas! Who then of the Nymphs had sung, Or who with flowering herbs bestrewn the ground, And o'er the fountains drawn a leafy veil?- Who sung the stave I filched from you that day To Amaryllis wending, our hearts' joy?- "While I am gone, 'tis but a little way, Feed, Tityrus, my goats, and, having fed, Drive to the drinking-pool, and, as you drive, Beware the he-goat; with his horn ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... drives across the wave, Marie; With triplets in the treble stave, Marie; The player pounds. With bulging eyes Th' excited vocalist replies; The maddened octaves ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... on to Elizabeth Castle whither they were bound, and await him there, he crossed over to Jean. By the time he reached the doorway, however, Jean had retreated to the veille by the chimney behind Maitresse Aimable, who sat in a great stave-chair ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... together. At length the speed of the pseudo herald could save him no longer from the fangs of his pursuers; they seized him, pulled him down, and would probably soon have throttled him, had not the Duke called out, "Stave and tail!—stave and tail! [to strike the bear with a staff, and pull off the dogs by the tail, to separate them.]—Take them off him!—He hath shown so good a course, that, though he has made no sport at bay, we will ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of the best. Capitaines of longe and of greate experience. Souldiers well trayned in Fflaunders to joyne with the younger. Harqubusshiers of skill. Archers, stronge bowmen. Bowyers. Ffletchers. Arrow head makers. Bow stave preparers. Glew makers. Morryce pike makers, and of halbert staves. Makers of spades and shovells for pyoners, trentchers, and forte makers. Makers of basketts to cary earthe to fortes and rampiers. Pioners and spademen for fortification. Salte peter makers. Gonne powder makers. Targett makers ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... from the sculptor, and turned back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her own soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said Owen, 'except that one shuffles off unpleasant subjects! I did fancy I could stave it off till Oxford was over, and I was free of the men there; but that notion might have been a mere excuse to myself for putting off the evil day. I was too much in debt, too, for an open rupture with you; and as to her, I can truly say that my sole shadow of an excuse is that ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... could get back! I told you the tunnel caved in, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed without looking at me, ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... across their gloom; while the merry voices of the college girls, passing by in the street outside, came floating in across their waiting silence. There was nothing in the world that he could do, except to be there and, now and then, to stave off a caller too insistent to be appeased by any bulletin issued by the maid. Among those callers was Prather, the novelist. Priest though he was, Brenton was conscious of a human and athletic wish to wring his neck, so palpably was his expression ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... pious, peaceful prebendary shares." "What is a Church?"—Our honest Sexton tells, "'Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells; Where priest and clerk with joint exertion strive To keep the ardour af their flock alive; That, by its periods eloquent and grave; This, by responses, and a well-set stave: These for the living; but when life be fled, I toll myself the requiem for the dead." 'Tis to this Church I call thee, and that place Where slept our fathers when they'd run their race: We too shall rest, ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... the master shoemaker was absent, the uninitiated prentice-boy did not feel competent to sell the shoes, but the buyer would not be put off. Thereupon young Jacob set an enormous price upon them, hoping to stave off the trade. The man, however, without any demur paid the price, took the shoes, and went out. Just outside the door the stranger stopped, and in a serious tone called out, "Jacob, come hither to me!" The man, with shining eyes looking him full in the face, took his ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... there was a clatter of metal upon wood, and then one voice, loud and rotund, struck up the first verse once more—"Says Billy Norris, Masulipatam"—The singer was in the middle of the stave when Desmond, rounding a privet hedge, came upon the scene. A patch of greensward, sloping up from a slipway on the riverside; a low, cozy-looking inn of red brick covered with a crimson creeper; in front of it a long deal table, and seated at the table a group ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... were at the water-side to cheer us welcome as the Gladiateur, with reversed engines, hung against the current above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands. And then the gang-plank was set ashore, and instantly beside it—standing in the glare of a great lantern—we saw our Capoulie, the head of all the Felibrige, ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... though he had not much of a voice, contrived to make his songs popular by the humour he threw into his tone, had sung about a stave or so, and Norris and the rest of the party, with laughing countenances, while listening to his song, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... thereon as if in piety, but it is, in truth, that his hold may be firm and his stab sure; yet the world know not that, and they trust him, and he is singled out as a pattern-man for youth to follow; and so—but we all play parts—all, all! And now for a stave of a song: Hurrah for the free trade!—a shout for the brave Buccaneers!—a pottle of sack!—and now, sir, I am myself again! The brimstone smell of that dark ruffian nearly overpowered me!" So saying, he passed his hand frequently ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... not, at the time, tie up with views about the Colorado trip. That was still the guiding star of all her hopes. She must study harder during the spring term and stave off the threatened and unspeakable calamity. It was a hard resolution to put through, especially when she conceived a marvellous idea-a "farce" like one Polly Currier told her about when she was home for her Easter vacation. Missy wrestled with ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... day, for there are lean days as well as fat ones for even the greatest of the jungle hunters. Oftentimes Tarzan went empty for more than a full sun, and he had passed through entire moons during which he had been but barely able to stave off starvation; ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a short tale, of a somewhat grisly character, which Abner had composed during the holiday season. Bond had taxed him with using this work as a buffer to stave off other work of a practical nature such as was abundantly offered by Giles and his father about the farm; and, to tell the truth, Abner had limited his physical exertions to half-hour periods that most ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... easy Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the earth with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... Germany would mobilize. A German mobilization, he said, would mean war. The results of the second interview, which took place at two o'clock in the morning, were as negative as those of the first, notwithstanding a last effort, a final suggestion by M. Sazonoff to stave off the crisis. His giving in to Germany's brutal dictation would have been an ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... can't stop it, or even keep it within bounds. Our customers will give them, and people who have too much money or too little sense, give not only dollar bills or five dollar bills, but fifty dollar bills and even hundred dollar bills. We have tried to stave off customers who do such things: we believe that in the long run it would pay us to; ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... used to say it kept at bay the night-air, cold, and damp, And cheer'd him on his journey home as though it were a lamp; Nought cared he then how black the clouds might gather overhead, His heart felt brave as he humm'd a stave and boldly onward sped. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... that, sir? Some promising opportunity might come up, and I don't see what could stop us from taking advantage of it. If there are only about twenty men on board this machine, I don't think they can stave off two Frenchmen and ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... at his men, but they rather avoided his eyes, and then his glance wandered to the old convict, but he did not appear to take the hint, and returned the stave with one of mildness. Fred's turn came next, and in him the right ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... once more. This run of luck, supplemented by the business capacity of the old merchant and the indomitable energy of young Dimsdale, made the concern look so flourishing that the former felt more than ever convinced that if he could but stave off the immediate danger things would soon right themselves. Hence he read with delight the letters from Africa, in which his son narrated the success of the conspiracy and the manner in which the miners had been hoodwinked. The old man's figure grew straighter and his step more ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... century, the first to promote the theoretical study of music; he is credited, amongst other things, with the invention of counterpoint, and was the first to designate notes by means of alphabetical letters, and to establish the construction of the stave. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... prayer, and crave Pardon, because thy lowlier stave Can do this plea no right, but wrong. Ask nought beside thy pardon, save Sweet water ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... A stave played by a 'cello called them to supper, and, as they returned to the hall, a burst of earnest music from the whole orchestra partially drowned the clap of thunder that again marked Richard's passage through the door. Sarah Brown felt sure that Lady Arabel arranged this on purpose. The wizard's ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... melody; but it is quite a mistake to suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually a perfectly obvious ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... lane. For this flower bed is planted in an old dory filled with earth. She had outlived her usefulness down there in the Salt Pond, or even, it may be, out on the blue sea itself, but no vandal hands were laid upon her to stave her up for kindling wood. Instead, the Captain himself painted her a bright yellow, set her down in front of his dwelling, and filled her full of flowers. She is disintegrating slowly; already, after a rain, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... human beings with even a theoretical civil character undecided. But many of the members, who saw the illogic quite plainly, voted for it, being dazzled if not seduced by the thought that it was a compromise which would stave off an irreconcilable conflict at least for the present; so Washington, who wished the abolition of slavery, voted for the compromise along with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the South Carolinian who regarded slavery as higher than any of the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... returning from the theatre. I can recall their conversation even now. They were disappointed with the piece they had seen. It was one of the later Savoy operas, and they spoke wistfully of the days of "Pinafore" and "Patience." One of them hummed a stave, and there was an argument as to whether the air was out of "Patience" or the "Mikado." They all got out at Surbiton, and I was alone with my triumph for a few intoxicating minutes. To think that I had succeeded where ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... meat to stave off their anxiety regarding the question of food, the men spent two days enjoying a badly needed rest; and then they pushed on, making forced marches which severely taxed their strength. Part of their way, however, lay across open country, for ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... follow many a stave. I know it well, so rings the book throughout; Much time I've lost in puzzling o'er its pages, For downright paradox, no doubt, A mystery remains alike to fools and sages. Ancient the art and modern too, my friend. 'Tis still the fashion as it used to be, Error instead of truth abroad to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... once, in the sincerity of his devotion to the family he served, he had thought of sacrificing all he possessed in an attempt to stave off final ruin; but a very little reflection had convinced him that all he had would be a mere drop in the flood of extravagance, and would forthwith disappear with the rest into ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... body itself, and Brice's right elbow held off the grip on the other side. At the same time the top of Brice's head buried itself under the beachcomber's chin, forcing the giant's jaw upward and backward. Then, safe inside his opponent's guard, he abandoned his effort to stave off the giant's hold, and passed his own arms about the other's waist, his hands meeting under the small of ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... I lay and listened, oh the river's sleepy tune Seemed to change its rippling music, like the cuckoo's stave in June, And the cannon's distant thunder and the engines' warlike drone Seemed to mingle with its burthen in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... created. But his enjoyment was short lived. Tabitha, now thoroughly aroused, and forgetful of her dignity, swooped down upon the tormentor, wrested his slingshot from his grasp, and before anyone could divine her intentions, seized a barrel stave from the woodpile and gave the surprised ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... time, but down through the valley, and by Stockbridge and Silvermills as hard as I could stave. It was Alan's tryst to lie every night between twelve and two "in a bit scrog of wood by east of Silvermills, and by south the south mill-lade." This I found easy enough, where it grew on a steep brae, with the mill-lade flowing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... If he be the possessor of a decent coat and hat, and can scrape any acquaintance with any one concerned, he may get introduced to that overworked and greatly perplexed official, the under-sheriff, who will stave him off if possible,—knowing that even an under-sheriff cannot make space elastic,—but, if the introduction has been acknowledged as good, will probably find a seat for him if he persevere to the end. But the seat when obtained must be kept in possession from morning to evening, and the fight ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... now, on a solitary island, I would mash his Hands with a Club or with my Feet, if he strove to grub up roots; that were I Alone with him, wrecked, in a shallop, and there were one Keg of Fresh Water between us, I would stave it, and let the Stream of Life waste itself in the gunwales while I held his head down into the Sea, and forced him to swallow the brine that should drive him Raving Mad. But this is unchristian, and I must go consult ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... earnestly. "I love the country," he said; "it's fed me and harbored me. But I wouldn't lift a finger to put a single patch on this makeshift of a government; I wouldn't stave off the crash if I could. And it's coming! You and I have seen something of the rottenness of the underpinning which props up empires. You and I, Scarlett, have learned a few of the shameful secrets which even an enemy to ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... say I like thy song, Master Peter," said Toft, as the sexton finished his stave, "but if thou didst see a corpse-candle, as thou call'st thy pale blue flame, whose death ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... very still, and the cold wind that comes before the dawn whistled down them. In the centre of the Square of the Mosque a man was bending over a corpse. The skull had been smashed in by gun-butt or bamboo-stave. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... can stave in two or three heads before any number of you could stop me," sneered the ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... they have echoed o'er the arsenal, Keeping due time with every hammer's clink, As a good jest to jolly artisans; Or making chorus to the creaking oar, In the vile tune of every galley-slave, Who, as he sung the merry stave, exulted He was not a shamed ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and his limbs One were to show transpierc'd, another his Clean lopt away; a spectacle like this Were but a thing of nought, to the' hideous sight Of the ninth chasm. A rundlet, that hath lost Its middle or side stave, gapes not so wide, As one I mark'd, torn from the chin throughout Down to the hinder passage: 'twixt the legs Dangling his entrails hung, the midriff lay Open to view, and wretched ventricle, That turns th' englutted aliment to dross. Whilst eagerly I ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... had blundered through three or four dreary passages concerning the Treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to this exalted stave in the Ladder of Learning for the astonishment of a visitor; and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard them exercised in simpler lessons, which ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the Great Brown Kingfisher of Australia; see Dacelo. To an Australian who has heard the ludicrous note of the bird and seen its comical, half-stupid appearance, the origin of the name seems obvious. It utters a prolonged rollicking laugh, often preceded by an introductory stave resembling the opening passage of a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... I dare say I shall become quite good again. Ah, your new Judaisms will never appeal like the old, with all its imperfections. They will never keep the race together through shine and shade as that did. They do but stave off the inevitable dissolution. It is beautiful—that old childlike faith in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, that patient waiting through the centuries for the Messiah who even to you, I dare say, is a mere symbol." ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... get paid for what they had allowed the sailors to take up upon credit. But the first lieutenant would not allow any of them to come on board until after the ship was paid; although they were so urgent that he was forced to place sentries in the chains with cold shot, to stave the boats if they came alongside. I was standing at the gangway, looking at the crowd of boats, when a black-looking fellow in one of the wherries said to me, "I say, sir, let me slip in at the port, and I have a very nice present to make you;" and he displayed a gold seal, which he held ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... lieutenant is the kind that takes you by storm, Captain Kirby is one that will lay siege. He doesn't come so often as the other, he doesn't stay so long, he doesn't say so much; but he is the kind that sticks. I may be able to stave off the lieutenant, but I shall have to have it ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... So as to stave in those ribs of yours that have grown callous to blows! (to trader) Out of my way, and let me murder the rascal that always sets me afire with rage, that never lets one order from me suffice for one job, the criminal, but keeps me ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... fur my little Em'ly. First, I'm going to stave in that theer boat and sink it where I'd a drownded him, as I'm a living soul; if I'd a known what he had in him! I'd a drownded him, and thought I was doin' right! Now I'm going to seek fur my Little Em'ly throughout ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... and the opposition to this measure acquired such intensity that the author of the bill was forced to retire. But his successor, De Broqueville, a man of conciliatory temperament, formed a new Catholic cabinet which, by falling back (p. 547) upon a policy of "marking time," contrived to stave off a genuine defeat. In the municipal elections held throughout the country October 15, 1911, the Liberal-Socialist candidates were very generally successful, but the parliamentary elections which ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found myself submitting, and following my friend's ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a good job now, Tom, that we anchored where we did, instead of in the direct line of the tide, for one of those timbers would stave a hole in her bow as if she were ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... he was irritable in the office and at the eleven o'clock drive of telephone calls and visitors he did something he had often desired and never dared: he left the office without excuses to those stave-drivers his employees, and went to the movies. He enjoyed the right to be alone. He came out with a vicious determination to do what ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... him as day after day slipped past. Only the ghost of a chance remained that Martin Ryder could fight away death for another fortnight; yet Pierre had seen many a man from the mountain-desert stave off the end through weeks and weeks of the bitterest suffering. His father must be a man of the same hard durable metal, and upon that Pierre ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... my boat to stop quiet with me. Presently I heard a yell from the camp, which was about three hundred yards away. 'That's mischief,' says I. I had scarce spoken when there was a yelling fit to make your har stand on end, and I heard pistol-shots. 'Quick,' lads, says I, 'catch up a hatchet and stave a hole in the other boats, and push ours a little way out from the bank.' We warn't long in doing that, and then we stopped ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... steel-cap cleft in twain, His good buff jerkin crimsoned o'er with many a gory stain; Yet still he waves his banner, and cries amid the rout, "For Church and King, fair gentlemen! spur on, and fight it out!" And now he wards a Roundhead's pike, and now he hums a stave, And now he quotes a stage-play, and now he fells ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... to the gentlemen of Beauce," insinuated Bigot, leaning over to his angry guest, at the same time winking good-humoredly to Varin. "Come, now, De Beauce, friends all, amantium irae, you know—which is Latin for love—and I will sing you a stave in praise of this good wine, which is better than Bacchus ever drank." The Intendant rose up, and holding a brimming glass in his hand, chanted in full, musical voice a favorite ditty of the day, as a ready mode of restoring ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... now," said Ralph, "so perhaps that has given it a flavour. Oh, you needn't distress yourself! Ants are quite wholesome, I assure you. There are a frightful lot of them crawling about here, though. I think we shall have to move on a stave." ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... without having to give an account of himself?" Sherm parried, still trying to stave off the mirth that ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... or I'll stave your head in!" commanded MacVeigh. "Face the enemy, Pelly, and give 'em hell. You've got three rifles there. You can do the shooting while I hustle on the dogs. And keep yourself in front of her," he added, pointing to the almost completely ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... out of skulls newly torn from the grave, Dancing round them the Spectres are seen: Their liquor is blood, and this horrible Stave They howl.—'To the health of Alonzo the Brave, And his ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... of these things, but looked up to where it seemed that I must be judged. I could make out one or two banners pitched and floating idly in the sunshine, and one seemed to have a golden cross at its stave head; but I could make out none of the devices on them, and so I looked idly back on the crowd again. And then men brought us food and ale, and at last, after some gruff talk among themselves, the guards untied my hands, though they left my ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... Algie Wetherby, was the only real friend Claire had made on the stage. A sort of shivering gentility had kept her aloof from the rest of her fellow-workers, but it took more than a shivering gentility to stave off Polly. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... go up gently towards the window. She may see me. She will see me as I step into the moonlight. At least I know an air by which she will recognize me, if I do but hum a stave." ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the other night, that made it incumbent on Cluffe, who had had two or three sharp little visits of his patrimonial gout, and no notion of dying for love, to get to his quarters as quickly as might be—he had no doubt that the last stave of their first duet rising from the meadow of Belmont, with that charming roulade—devised by Puddock, and the pathetic twang-twang of his romantic instrument, would have been answered by the opening of the drawing-room window, and Aunt Becky's imperious summons to the serenaders ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... The stave was instantly raised from the horizontal, and he passed and went up the steps in the wake of the usher. At the top, on the threshold of the chamber, he paused, and stayed ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... his gun, firing the bomb directly down the great livid cavern of a throat fronting him. Down went that mountainous head not six inches from us, but with a perfectly indescribable motion, a tremendous writhe, in fact; up flew the broad tail in air, and a blow which might have sufficed to stave in the side of the ship struck the second mate's boat fairly amidships. It was right before my eyes, not sixty feet away, and the sight will haunt me to my death. The tub oarsman was the poor German ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... not. When they held a book before him, he thrust his nose into the cream-bowl; when they spoke of Pathach and Segol, he shut one eye, and munched figs; and when, 'as a bird each fond endearment tries,' they set up a stave which might have made the very learned the Masorites to dance for joy, in the hope that instinctively, or by mere love of imitation, he might be led to join in the chorus, he only threw himself on his back, and fairly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... so many of 'em," said the dairyman. "Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two—that's the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... be gittin' the right scent on it," said Solomon, as he was ripping the hide off the other steer. "I reckon it'll start the sap in their mouths. You roll out the rum bar'l an' stave it in. Mis' Bones knows how to shoot. Put her in the shed with yer mother an' the guns, an' take her young 'uns to the sugar shanty 'cept Isr'el ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... been assigned his work. The crew of one of the boats, consisting principally of soldiers, were to land, to advance a short distance inland, and to repulse any attacks that the natives might make upon them. Another party were to stave in all the small canoes and, this done, they were to assist the third boat's crew in launching the war ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... coloured and hung her head. She was still quivering with the shame of her public torture. She could still see Manvers' eyes stare chilly at the wall before them, and believe them to grow colder with each stave of her admissions. Her one consolation lay in the thought that she could please him by amendment and save him by a conviction; so it was hard to be petted by Sister Chucha. She would have welcomed the whip, would have hugged it to her bosom—the rod of Salvation, she ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... tedious formality of a trial. Once his professional reputation is established, all the deaths in the neighbourhood may be set down at his door. If he gets wind of a plot to assassinate him, he may stave off his doom for a while by soothing the angry passions of his enemies with presents, but sooner or ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... default on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which eventually forced a desperate government to "dollarize" the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. The new president, Gustavo NOBOA has yet to complete negotiations for a long sought IMF accord. He will find it difficult to push through the reforms necessary to make "dollarization" work in the ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Abbott, Mr. Duraset, Mr. Ward, and all the others, have been as considerate and generous as possible. But the thing is doomed, and will go to the ground, in spite of every effort that can be made to stave the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... pianos and carved mahogany, his first ambition is for a handsome camphor-wood coffin, which he keeps in the best place in his room. The interest of money is thirty-six per cent, which, to be sure, we also give in hard times to stave off a stoppage, while with them it is the legal rate. We once heard a bad dinner described thus: "The meat was cold, the wine was hot, and everything was sour but the vinegar." This would not so much displease the Chinese, who carefully ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... that intervened between the issuance of the ultimatum and the actual declaration of war by Germany against Russia on Saturday, August 1st, various sincere efforts were made to stave off the world-shaking catastrophe. Arranged chronologically, these events may thus be summarized: Russia, on July 24th, formally asked Austria if she intended to annex Serbian territory by way of reprisal for the assassination at Sarajevo. On the same day Austria replied that it had ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... war of 1812, and it remained intact until a year or two after the town of York became the city of Toronto, when it was partly demolished and converted into a more profitable investment. The new structure, which was a shingle or stave factory, was burned down in 1843 or 1844, and the site thenceforward remained unoccupied until comparatively recent times. When I visited the spot a few weeks since I encountered not a little difficulty in ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... &c. adj.; tarry, wait, stay, bide, take time; dawdle &c. (be inactive) 683; linger, loiter; bide one's time, take one's time; gain time; hang fire; stand over, lie over. put off, defer, delay, lay over, suspend; table [parliamentary]; shift off, stave off; waive, retard, remand, postpone, adjourn; procrastinate; dally; prolong, protract; spin out, draw out, lengthen out, stretch out; prorogue; keep back; tide over; push to the last, drive to the last; let the matter stand over; reserve &c. (store) 636; temporize; consult one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... who wishes to communicate an emotion and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early "imitative" men had ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... visible embodiment of Bunyan from childhood up, and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright place itself, seen as to a stave of music, shining afar off upon the hill-top, the candle of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... practically suggesting to them the policy, or rather the impolicy, of imposing the heavy due of $1 per registered ton on all European Shipping entering their ports, whether in cargo or in ballast, scarcely tended to stave off their collapse, and the Borneans must have formed their own conclusions from the fact that when they gave up portions of their territory to the BROOKES and to the British North Borneo Company, the British Government no longer called for the observance of these provisions ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... could hear a hundred harsh and melancholy groaning and straining sounds rising from the hull, with now and again a mighty blow as from some spar or lump of ice alongside, weighty enough, you would have supposed, to stave the ship. But though the Laughing Mary was not a new vessel, she was one of the stoutest of her kind ever launched, built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer. Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... There are shrieks, intermingled with speeches, the last in accent of piteous appealing; there is moaning and groaning. But where are the shouts of the assailants? Where the Indian yell—the dread slogan of the savage? Not a stave of it is heard—nought that resembles a warwhoop ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... say, nor sing, Nor troll a lilting stave; And when the rest are cracking jokes He's ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... to take them on and from the 1st of February. And on the 3rd of February he found himself in the old quarters, Mrs. Bunce having contrived, with much conjugal adroitness, both to keep Miss Pouncefoot and to stave off the Equity draftsman's wife and baby. Bunce, however, received Phineas very coldly, and told his wife the same evening that as far as he could see their lodger would never turn up to be a trump in the matter of the ballot. "If he means well, why did he go ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... matter, they seldom hesitated to do anything they wished on account of the weather, as it was not so cold to the natives as to us. They played with balls, both large and small, and sleds of all descriptions; and if the latter were not to be had, or all in use, a barrel stave or board would be made to answer the same purpose. It was a rush past the window down the hill, first by a pair of muckluked feet, then a barrel stave and a boy, sometimes little Pete, and sometimes John. One barrel stave would hold only one coaster, ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... the tunnel caved in, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," she resumed ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... a guide to conduct me to the parlour, for I caught a hubbub of voices coming from my right hand, above which rose a roaring stave in chorus, interspersed with a clapping of hands and a rapping of mugs upon the table. I undid the door, meaning to slip in quietly, but no sooner did I pass my head into the room than the entertainment suddenly ceased, and the whole crew ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... inflicting grievous disappointment and sufferings, and incurring thereby a degree of obloquy fatal to any Ministry. They seemed, in fact, to imagine, as they went on, that the day of reckoning could never arrive, because they had resolved to stave it off from time to time, however near it approached, by a series of desperate expedients, really destructive of the national prosperity, but provocative of what served their purposes, viz. temporary popular enthusiasm. What cruelty! what profligacy! what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which forced a desperate government to "dollarize" the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. Gustavo NOBOA, who assumed the presidency in January 2000, has managed to pass substantial economic reforms and mend relations with international financial institutions. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... that. Now I thought nothing of these things, but looked up to where it seemed that I must be judged. I could make out one or two banners pitched and floating idly in the sunshine, and one seemed to have a golden cross at its stave head; but I could make out none of the devices on them, and so I looked idly back on the crowd again. And then men brought us food and ale, and at last, after some gruff talk among themselves, the guards untied my hands, though they left my feet bound under ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... the court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made one think of the "Arabian Nights," I offer my experience and my opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a glass of the best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty cents ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the war of 1812, and it remained intact until a year or two after the town of York became the city of Toronto, when it was partly demolished and converted into a more profitable investment. The new structure, which was a shingle or stave factory, was burned down in 1843 or 1844, and the site thenceforward remained unoccupied until comparatively recent times. When I visited the spot a few weeks since I encountered not a little difficulty in fixing upon the exact site, which is covered by an unprepossessing row ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Dacelo gigas, Bodd, the Great Brown Kingfisher of Australia; see Dacelo. To an Australian who has heard the ludicrous note of the bird and seen its comical, half-stupid appearance, the origin of the name seems obvious. It utters a prolonged rollicking laugh, often preceded by an introductory stave resembling the opening passage of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... disapprobation, from my long experience, I know that any kind of soft wood will not do in warm weather. Soft porus wood made up into mashing tubs when full of beer and under fermentation, will contract, receive or soak in so much acid, as to penetrate nearly thro' the stave, and sour the vessel to such a degree, in warm weather, that no scalding will take it out—nor can it be completely sweetened until filled with cold water for two or three days, and then scalded; I therefore strongly recommend the use of, as ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... streets were very still, and the cold wind that comes before the dawn whistled down them. In the centre of the Square of the Mosque a man was bending over a corpse. The skull had been smashed in by gun-butt or bamboo-stave. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... n't any such thing nowadays! I was only chaffing; but of course, the men to whom I am in debt can apply to father, and get me in a regular mess. I 've pawned my watch to stave one of them off. You see, Polly, I would rather die than do it; nevertheless, I would write and tell father everything, and ask him for the money, but circumstances conspire just at this time to make it impossible. You know he bought that great ranch ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... any of so foul a crime Be guilty? Ah! how nearly, thyself, Reft was the solace that we had in thee, Menalcas! Who then of the Nymphs had sung, Or who with flowering herbs bestrewn the ground, And o'er the fountains drawn a leafy veil?- Who sung the stave I filched from you that day To Amaryllis wending, our hearts' joy?- "While I am gone, 'tis but a little way, Feed, Tityrus, my goats, and, having fed, Drive to the drinking-pool, and, as you drive, Beware the he-goat; with his horn ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... master that will by a superior will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing more than authority behind it. For the very fear of that authority put in motion was an incentive to present resistance to stave off the day of trouble. The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and the murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the foolish replies of the Hudson's Bay Company's man to their demand for supplies. Arrowhead had killed him with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... minutes left to play when Yale brought up on Harvard's three-yard line for a first down. Behind the battered and tottering Crimson wall a figure raved and ranted and roared, entreating his teammates to stave off the Bulldog's advance. He stamped from end to end in the churned up sod, prodding each player in a vicious manner. But there was no visible stiffening of the Harvard defense at the savage barking of its quarterback. The team was crushed after having ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... second time. He said he knew I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and prepare for the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went down stairs and broke up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me with. Well, I had to think mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got a dried bladder in my room, one that me and my chum got to the slotter house, and blowed it partly up, so it would be sort of flat-like, and I put it down inside ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... with it, hence its frightful animation. What is to be done with this apparatus? How fetter this stupendous engine of destruction? How anticipate its comings and goings, its returns, its stops, its shocks? Any one of its blows on the side of the ship may stave it in. How foretell its frightful meanderings? It is dealing with a projectile, which alters its mind, which seems to have ideas, and changes its direction every instant. How check the course of what must be avoided? The horrible cannon struggles, advances, backs, strikes right, strikes ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... To stave off the ordeal he saw himself forced to invent a new set of doubts and objections. On his next visit to the house of Mitri, he owned himself convinced of the vanity of the Protestant faith, but hinted at ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... & Co.'s Improvements. The Simplest and Best in use. Also, Shingle, Heading and Stave Jointers, Equalizers, Heading ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... extravagance of a world gone mad with national excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... pleading on Ned's part, I gave in, and we agreed to meet down at the foot of our orchard, as soon as dinner was over, for Ned lived right across, on the next farm. In a corner of the barn, I found my old chestnut club, a hickory stave, well coiled with lead at the top. Shoving this under my jacket, so no prying eyes could see it, I joined Ned at the meeting-place, and off we went in ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... tumbled helplessly back into the snow. The desire to live increased, and when I felt the numbness creep from my limbs into my body, I crawled alongside Peoria Red and snuggled closely against him, hoping that our mutual body warmth would stave off the crisis to the last possible moment. He was groaning, and mustering the last vestige of control I yet had over my benumbed hands, I searched about in the darkness until I found his frozen fingers, and clasping them in my own I placed my mouth close to his ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... brought up in a home of severe simplicity, where gentleness and kindness were taught and practiced, pitied the woman and her children in their sad plight and loaned her the needed interest payment to stave off ejection from her home. Thereafter, he looked after her family until the oldest son was able to manage ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... disappointment. Somehow, he had hoped that his father and his friends might have been able to stave off ruin. As he approached nearer Tom was made aware that the crowd was in an ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... winds be; High up in a leafless tree The little bird sits and wearily twits, The woods with perjury: But the cuckoo-knave sings hold his stave, (Ever the spring comes merrily) And "O poor fool!" sings he— For this is the way in the world to live, To mock when a friend hath no more to give, Whether in ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... The measure was one which had now been promised by statesmen for the last two years,—promised at first with that half promise which would mean nothing, were it not that such promises always lead to more defined assurances. The Duke of St. Bungay, Lord Drummond, and other Ministers had wished to stave it off. Mr. Monk was eager for its adoption, and was of course supported by Phineas Finn. The Prime Minister had at first been inclined to be led by the old Duke. There was no doubt to him but that the measure ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... brought the knowledge. She had believed, had wished to believe, that the failure was her fault, a result of her unstable nature; whereas the whole undertaking had been merely a futile attempt to bolster up the impossible, to stave off the inevitable, to postpone the end. And it had all been in vain. The end! It would come, as surely as day followed night—had perhaps indeed already come; for how else could the nervous aversion be explained, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Rythdale? she had made up her mind to nothing, except, that it would be very difficult for her to say either yes or no. Naturally enough, she dreaded the being obliged to say anything; and was ready to seize every expedient to stave off the moment of emergency. As long as she was talking to Miss Broadus, she was safe; but conversations cannot last always, even when they flow in a stream so full and copious as that in which the words always ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... done all I could to stave off the blundering idiot; but I guess you are in for it! The ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... that very moment that the song of the bird broke out again, and just above my head in the larches an ugly, shrilling song of about a dozen notes with an accent on the two last, a stupid, tiresome stave that never varied. "What bird can it be," I cried out, "that comes to interrupt my meditations?" and getting up I tried to discover it amid the branches of the tree under which I had been lying. It broke out again ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... swallow an ant on your tart just now," said Ralph, "so perhaps that has given it a flavour. Oh, you needn't distress yourself! Ants are quite wholesome, I assure you. There are a frightful lot of them crawling about here, though. I think we shall have to move on a stave." ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... of that same week Field left Long at a point on the east side of the lake, to go to Bee; and half an hour after arriving there was out on the Leewell road, on horseback, galloping south, singing a stave of a song as he dashed along. There was a dance that night at the George Hotel, and Field was there, the handsomest and gayest of men; and there was no prettier girl in the rooms than the one he brought and danced so well with, and whom no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... three conditions would stave off recognition by foreign powers, until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to reduce the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... other, upon his income of five hundred a year; but, as he had neither abandoned his old haunts, nor put aside his old vices, the income, which to a good man would have seemed a handsome competence, barely enabled him to stave off the demands of his most pressing creditors by occasional ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few and far between, unless prose ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... dull should only probe things that are soft and tender. He who has a blunt knife must search out the ways to cut joint by joint. Since, therefore, it is best for a man in distress to delay the evil, and nothing is more fortunate in trouble than to stave off hard necessity, I ask three days' space to get ready, provided that I may obtain from the king the skill of a ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the bending flagstaff, and listening to the howling of the wind and the roar of the surf as it broke on the rocky shore. Harry did his best to keep the party amused, and got Paul Lizard, who could sing a good song, to strike up a merry stave; and Paul, once set going, was generally loath to stop. His full manly voice trolled forth many a ditty, sounding above the whistling of the storm and the roar of the waves. Then adventures and stories were told, ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... conveniently indefinite. When was Lysias coming? His letter said nothing about such an intention, and took for granted that all the materials for a decision would be before Felix. Lysias could tell no more. The excuse was transparent, but it served to stave off a decision, and to-morrow would bring some other excuse. Prompt carrying out of all plain duty is the only safety. The indulgence given to Paul, in his light confinement, only showed how clearly Felix knew himself to be doing wrong, but small ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... fires assumed a whiter heat. In the Convention the Union men no longer utter denunciations against the disunionists. They merely resort to pretexts and quibbles to stave off the inevitable ordinance. They had sent a deputation to Washington to make a final appeal to Seward and Lincoln to vouchsafe them such guarantees as would enable them to keep Virginia to her moorings. But in vain. They could not obtain even ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... lips to undeceive her, but stopped in time. As a drowning man catches at a straw, so did he catch at this suggestion in his hopeless despair; and he suffered her to remain in it. Anything to stave off ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... quite a task to get the dory aboard, even with the aid of the Bolo's stern davits. The sea was rising every minute and even when they had the "falls," as they are called, secured to the little dinghy, she threatened to stave either herself or the Bolo while she was being hoisted and lashed. At last, however, even that task was accomplished and the boys began to anticipate a rest. But the indefatigable Ben would not ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the belt of Leithgow's suit and prepared to stand watch. But that was too much. He over-estimated his capacity. He had come through thirty hours of hellish sleep-denied delirium, and he could not stave sleep off any longer. He staggered and went down, and his eyelids were glued in sleep when ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... all that!" said the Queen lightly;—"But, surely, Sir Walter, if you see ruin and disaster threatening so great an Empire in the far distance, you and other wise men of your land are able to stave it off?" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of a European alliance. We had but to will it, and British America, and what there was left of Spanish America and Mexico, would all have been gathered in, reaped by that mowing-machine, the American sword. Had our rulers of that year sought to stave off civil war by plunging us into a foreign war, we could have made ourselves masters of all North America, despite the opposition of all Europe, had all Europe been ready to try the question with us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Sheriff," I said, sweeping off my cap in true outlaw fashion, "the way is long and something lonely; methinks—we will therefore e'en accompany you, and may perchance lighten the tedium with quip and quirk and a merry stave or so." ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... for worse to that curious invertebrate person, Algie Wetherby, was the only real friend Claire had made on the stage. A sort of shivering gentility had kept her aloof from the rest of her fellow-workers, but it took more than a shivering gentility to stave off Polly. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... find any one that will take their paper," said Barbet. "Your book is their last stake, sir. The printer will not trust them; they are obliged to leave the copies in pawn with him. If they make a hit now, it will only stave off bankruptcy for another six months, sooner or later they will have to go. They are cleverer at tippling than at bookselling. In my own case, their bills mean business; and that being so, I can afford ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... poor that day, for there are lean days as well as fat ones for even the greatest of the jungle hunters. Oftentimes Tarzan went empty for more than a full sun, and he had passed through entire moons during which he had been but barely able to stave off starvation; but ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for from this edition of the Encyclopaedia the subject of philology was omitted. In fact, Babel and Philology made nearly as much trouble to encyclopedists as Noah's Deluge and Geology. Just as in the latter case they had been obliged to stave off a presentation of scientific truth, by the words "For Deluge, see Flood" and "For Flood, see Noah," so in the former they were obliged to take various provisional measures, some of them comical. In 1842 came the seventh edition. In this the first part of the old article on Philology which had ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... again with the mermaid; whereat the graver man clapped a hand before his mouth, and swore he should take her in wedlock, to have and to hold, if he sang another stave. 'And thou shalt be her pretty little bridemaid,' quoth he gaily to the graver man, chucking ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... and yet humbled him. His was a simple soul, and took its responsibilities seriously. He sought not to inquire for what high purpose Providence had so signally intervened to stave off from the East and West Looe Artillery the doom of common men. He only prayed to be equal to it. The Doctor's statistics had, in fact, scared him a little. I am ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... first past the post, and Bernard Hallam was sure of winning. Bandmaster, however, would not be denied, the horse divined there was danger of losing; being full of courage he resented this and put forth his strength and speed to stave off defeat. How he did it Colley could not tell, but by some almost magical power he drew level with Rainstorm again and ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... off their children on account of the heat, and their terrible water-swollen stomachs and the pitiful sticks of legs eloquently tell their own tale. Unable to find food, all are drinking enormous quantities of water to stave off the pangs of hunger. A man who has been in India says that all drink like this in famine time, which inflates the stomach to a dangerous extent, and is ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... so. I thought of trying to stave him off for a few days, but then I thought, 'Why, he'll see through that game and he'll go on with his scheme for sewing us up just the same.' You see, there's no good saying we're afraid. So I told him that we didn't mind him a bit; said ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... "I say this must come to an end; murderer, as you were, of your uncle! executioner, as you were, of King Charles! incendiary! I recommend you to sink forthwith to the bottom of the sea; and if you come another fathom nearer, I'll stave your wicked head ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with his head upheld he walked, And ever the rain drove down; And now and again to himself he talked In the streets of Danbury town. And now and again he'd stop and troll A stave of music that seemed to roll From the inmost depths of his ardent soul; But the wind took hold of the notes and tossed them And the few who chanced to be near ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... out the stave of a song as he sprang up the companion ladder after his rough breakfast in the galley, but the sound expired at the sight of the distant flutter of a woman's scarf in the stern of the ship. He halted and ran his fingers through his crisp hair with an expressive ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... born duchesses, on satin; others artistes on the boards. One trade was as good as another; but dangerous practicings, bruised flesh, seamed skins: no, he didn't approve of that. He had seen the Laurences, mad with ambition, beginning all over again, in spite of falls calculated to stave in the stage; had seen girls who "do knots" lying in the dressing-rooms, gasping, exhausted. Even when professional vanity alone prompted such excesses, Jimmy protested within himself; and then there were so many abuses.... ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... their horse will come the little devil-guns that they can drag up to the tops of the hills, and, for aught I know, to the clouds when we crown the hills. If the tribe-council thinks good, I will go to Tallantire Sahib—who loves me—and see if I can stave off at least the blockade. Do I speak for ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... ambassador found it difficult to make headway, although he assured the queen of the immediate punishment of the perpetrators, and the arrest and recall of the Governor of Jamaica. Only by the greatest tact and prudence was he able to stave off, until an official disavowal of the expedition came from England, an immediate embargo on all the goods of English merchants in Spain. The Spanish government decided to send a fleet of 10,000 ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... sits within her tepee making beaded deerskins for her father, while he longs to stave off her every suitor as all unworthy of his old heart's pride. But Tusee is not alone in her dwelling. Near the entrance-way a young brave is half reclining on a mat. In silence he watches the petals of a wild rose growing on the soft buckskin. Quickly the young woman slips the beads on ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... skald, but my man shalt thou be all the same.' Hallfrod answered: 'What wilt thou give me, King, as a name-gift if I am to be called "Troublous-Skald"?' Then did the King give him a sword, but it had no scabbard; and the King said, 'Make now a stave about the sword, & let "sword" be in every line.' ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... both Ab and Oak were easily at home. The cave dwellers, haunting the river side for centuries, had learned how to deal with gravel, and when Ab returned to the scene the next day he brought with him a sturdy oaken stave some six feet in length, sharpened to a point and hardened in the fire until it was almost iron-like in its quality. Plunged into the gravel as far as the force of a blow could drive it, and pulled backward with ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... with you, in truth, These complex miseries of Age and Youth; I feel with you—and none can feel it more Than I—this burning Problem of the Poor; The Want that grinds, the Mystery of Pain, The Hearts that sink, and never rise again;— How shall I set this to some careless screed, Or jigging stave, when Help is what you need, Help, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... BUNG-STARTER. A stave shaped like a bat, which, applied to either side of the bung, causes it to start out. Also, a soubriquet for the captain of the hold. Also, a name given to the master's assistant serving ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song - O, you envy the blessed death ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... reaching his house, but Ivan followed so quickly that he caught up with him before he could enter. Just as he was about to grasp him he was struck on the head with some hard substance. He had been hit on the temple as with a stone. The blow was struck by Gavryl, who had picked up an oaken stave, and with it gave Ivan a terrible blow ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... movement for "Life and Liberty," has established a strong claim on the respect of those who differ from him. I state on p. 198 my reason for dissenting from Mr. Temple's scheme. To my thinking, it is just one more attempt to stave off Disestablishment. The subjection of the Church to the State is felt by many to be an intolerable burden. Mr. Temple and his friends imagine that, while retaining the secular advantages of Establishment and endowment, they ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... once or twice, I can tell you. Sudden as the blow was, I had countered, in the automatic sort of way that a man who knows anything of boxing does. It was only from the elbow, with no body behind it, but it served to stave him off for the moment, while I was making inquiries about my windpipe. Then in he came with a rush; and the crowd swarming round with shrieks of delight, we were pushed, almost locked in each other's arms on to that big pedestal of which I have spoken. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... indeed strange and flighty; and though she recurred to questions about the Ordination and the Bowaters, Julius perceived that she was forcing her attention to the answers as if trying to stave off his inquiries, and he came to closer quarters. "How is Terry? Has Dr. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supposing them to be serious, defends himself against them. Lastly Secknall sings a hymn written in praise of a Saint. Saint Patrick commends it, affirming that for once Fame has dispensed her honours honestly. Upon this, Secknall recites the first stave, till then craftily reserved, which offers the whole homage of that hymn to Patrick, who, though the humblest of men, has thus arrogated to himself the saintly Crown. There is laughter ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... will break thy young pate," said Adam, "if thou darest to lift a finger to me." And then, in defiance of the young Drawcansir's threats, with a stout heart and dauntless accent, he again uplifted the stave. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... attempt to reach Whinbusses. the grieve had met the relief party from Thrums. Already the weavers had helped Waster Lunny to stave off ruin, and they were now on their way to Whinbusses, keeping together through fear of mist and water. Every few minutes Snecky Hobart rang his ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... saved many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes. He may have seen bolt mills go up and young men betwixt haying and harvest swagger down to the docks to get 25 cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... Guttorm," continued Ulf, turning to the bluff old warrior, "since thou hast shown thy readiness to rebuke, let us see thy willingness to entertain. Sing us a stave or tell us a saga, kinsman, as well thou knowest how, being gifted with more than a fair share ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... a stave. I know it well, so rings the book throughout; Much time I've lost in puzzling o'er its pages, For downright paradox, no doubt, A mystery remains alike to fools and sages. Ancient the art and modern ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... shook me by the hand, and set off down to the boat, with the money under his arms, and whistling as he went the pathetic air of "Shule Aroon." It was the first time I had heard that tune; I was to hear it again, words and all, as you shall learn, but I remember how that little stave of it ran in my head after the free-traders had bade him "Wheesht, in the deil's name," and the grating of the oars had taken its place, and I stood and watched the dawn creeping on the sea, and the boat drawing away, and the lugger lying with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them, or for Handel. Cannot a man live free and easy Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the earth with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... immortal memory of Headlong Ap-Rhaiader, and to the health of his noble descendant and worthy representative!" This example was followed by all the gentlemen present. The harp struck up a triumphal strain; and, the old squire already mentioned, vociferating the first stave, they sang, or rather ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... provisionally accepted by Congress in June, 1868; and as their Legislatures at once ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and secured its adoption, they were fully restored and their senators and representatives admitted in July. Virginia and Mississippi managed to stave off final action, hoping to escape the excluding clauses, until after Grant's election to the Presidency in 1868; and their hopes were justified when Grant gave his influence successfully with Congress against the excluding clauses; so that these two States, with belated ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... pointed out to me recently, in his most earnest and persuasive manner, that it was my duty to write a book about the American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing their flaccid opera, stave by stave. It was in vain that I urged that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in the concert halls, and that pushing ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... on this head, yet I do not see that the measure could have been decently avoided, most certainly not, consistent with the letter and spirit of my instructions. I have endeavored to adapt the mode to the main end I have in view, that is, to stave off any question touching the expediency of the voyage at this time, or prior to my obtaining permission to make it; for the reasons mentioned in my letter of the 24th instant, as well as for others, which it may not be ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... on watch began to sing, and his song was an old sea stave that had a swing and roll in its rough tune that was like the broken surge of sea water, even while it was timed to the fall of oar blades into the surf. One may not say how old those songs are that ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... But attic dwellers stave off many a woe with empty stomachs and stout courage. When April came, boats for the fur-trade should have been stirring, and my Lord Preston changes his tune. One night, when Pierre Radisson sat spinning his yarns of captivity with Iroquois to our attic neighbours, comes a rap ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... tell, let me know whether Trumbull intends to make a push. If he does, I suppose the two men in St. Clair, and one, or both, in Madison, will be for him. We have the Legislature, clearly enough, on joint ballot, but the Senate is very close, and Cullom told me to-day that the Nebraska men will stave off the election, if they can. Even if we get into joint vote, we shall have difficulty to unite our forces. Please write me, and ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... that could free themselves from the tangle of the throng rushed desperately against the on-rolling hedge of steel, and the whole throng shoved on behind them. Then met steel and men; here and there an ash-stave broke; here and there a Dusky Felon rolled himself unhurt under the ash-staves, and hewed the knees of the Dalesmen, and a tall man came tottering down; but what men or wood-wights could endure the push of spears of those mighty husbandmen? The Dusky ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... and raked the fire about the door, which, although a sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, and kept them out. Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, besides, above the people's heads to such as stood about the ladders, and some of these, climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their efforts were successful, which occasioned a new and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... very well, dropping prices and the loss of foreign markets have devastated too many family farmers. Last year, the Congress provided substantial assistance to help stave off a disaster in American agriculture, and I am ready to work with lawmakers of both parties to create a farm safety net that will include crop insurance ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to seek fur my little Em'ly. First, I'm going to stave in that theer boat and sink it where I'd a drownded him, as I'm a living soul; if I'd a known what he had in him! I'd a drownded him, and thought I was doin' right! Now I'm going to seek fur my Little ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... stalls. At that instant a horse neighed outside; then I heard the sound of hoofs pounding on soft soil. Whoever the fellow was, he was almost there—coming up at a trot, just back of the stables. My brain worked in a flash—there was but once chance to stave off discovery. With a bound I was beside the boy, and had jerked off his hat, jamming it down on my own head, as I muttered in his ear, "One word from you now, and you'll never ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... Obrenovitches and being in close touch with Montenegro and Bulgaria was planning another coup in the Balkans. Albania was resisting it. The Turks under pressure from the Powers were striving to smooth matters down sufficiently to stave off the final crash that drew ever nearer. They arrested a number of headmen and exacted some punishment for Shtcherbina's death. Though if a consul chooses to take part in a local fight he alone ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... fer thet ride. I know thet road like a book—bad, slow, hard on hoss flesh when ye take it easy. I'd stave up half my hosses—not to mention myself, sir, and I hev ...
— Caesar Rodney's Ride • Henry Fisk Carlton
... writhing, battering form. With one hand he held him at arm's length and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Dan struggled, squirmed and bit, but all in vain; he was held as in a vice. Not satisfied with shaking the lad, Farrington reached over and, seizing a broken barrel stave from the wood-box, brought it down over the lad's shoulder and back with a resounding thud. A cry of pain, the first that he had uttered, fell from Dan's lips, and with a mighty effort he tried to escape. The stick ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... Ah! Justina, I have long Kept this secret from your ears, Fearing from your tender years That the telling might be wrong; But now seeing you are strong, Firm in thought, in action brave, Seeing too, that with this stave, I go creeping o'er the ground, Rapping with a hollow sound At the portals of the grave, Knowing that my time is brief, I would not here leave you, no, In your ignorance; I owe My own peace, too, this relief: Then attentive to my grief Let ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Bill Spurey, suppose you tip us a stave. But I say, Babette, you Dutch-built galliot, tell old Frank Slush to send us another dose of the stuff; and, d'ye hear, a short pipe for me, and ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... on air. And Mr. Gilley acts like he'd unloded a hull team full of pig led oflfen his mind, cos he knoes Samanthy'll have the noose of the fortune all over town 'fore nite, and then he'll be abel to stave off his bills, and run his cheek for wotever he warnts, for a hull yare to cum. He told me, wen I was cummin home, that I was a born diplermatist, & ort to hire myself out to King Alfonso, of Spain, in case he'd ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... Silver Devon ought also to be effective. Personally this is the limit of my experience in British Columbia, but very good fishing is to be got in the Coquitlam and Capillano near Vancouver, and in the Stave and Pitt Rivers, which are a little further off. In all these rivers the steel-head can be got on the minnow, seldom, I ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven heart!... A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... like a fort, and if we reach 'em in time we may stave off our pursuers. They're coming fast, and they're spreading out in a long line now. That helps 'em, because it's impossible for fugitives to run exactly straight, and every time we deviate from the true course some part of their line gains ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... underground stream; and she despaired of ever stopping it, of exhausting it, filled with a sullen anger against it, feeling a longing to spring upon the big still as upon some animal, to kick it with her heels and stave in its belly. Then everything began to seem all mixed up. The machine seemed to be moving itself and she thought she was being grabbed by its copper claws, and that the underground stream was ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... wearied of their toil and asked for a little rest, Frodi answered: "Ye shall sleep no longer than the cuckoo is silent, or while I speak one stave." Then the giant-maids grew ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... Alfriston, we have in the Long Man of Wilmington, that gigantic figure cut out in the chalk of the hill-side, something comparable only with the Giant of Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the White Horses of Wiltshire. That figure is some two hundred and forty feet in height and holds in each hand a stave or club two hundred and thirty feet long. It would seem impossible to be certain either of its age or its purpose, but we may perhaps be sure that it lay there upon the Downs above Polegate before the landing of Caesar, and it may have been ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... for not recognizing it as the prize accident of the ages. And I don't wonder Ben went on that way for the next two days. He knew what a tenacious idiot Ed was, and that he had come miles out of his way to try something he had often tried before. The most he could hope for was to stave off the collision ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... unlock the springs, Ye Goddesses. Strike up the noble stave, And sing what hosts from Tuscan shores he brings, What ships he arms, and how they cross the wave. First, Massicus with brazen Tiger clave The watery plain. With him from Clusium go, And Cosae's town, a hundred, tried and brave; Deft archers, well the deadly craft ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... waits, till nature faints with the effort of resistance, and lies passive and hopeless under the next access of temptation. What we need then is some expedient or instrument, which at least will obstruct and stave off the approach of our spiritual enemy, and which is sufficiently congenial and level with our nature to maintain as firm a hold upon us as the inducements of sensual gratification. It will be our wisdom to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Platformes of many formes redied to carry with you by advise of the best. Capitaines of longe and of greate experience. Souldiers well trayned in Fflaunders to joyne with the younger. Harqubusshiers of skill. Archers, stronge bowmen. Bowyers. Ffletchers. Arrow head makers. Bow stave preparers. Glew makers. Morryce pike makers, and of halbert staves. Makers of spades and shovells for pyoners, trentchers, and forte makers. Makers of basketts to cary earthe to fortes and rampiers. Pioners and spademen for fortification. Salte ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... plainly closed them for one season. Supplies of fresh provisions had come to him from England all Summer; but were stopped latterly by the wild weather. Upon which, in the Fleet, arose this gravely pathetic Stave of Sea-Poetry, with a wrinkle of briny ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... regular meals a day, and between times stave off their appetite with numerous Schweitzer cheese sandwiches, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... an Oren-sting. He caught up the scarce weapon lest the girl grab it and run. Then he dragged the corpse out by the foot and left it under an orange tree. The oranges were green, but he picked a few to stave off ...
— Collectivum • Mike Lewis
... which the end of a stout pole, five feet in length, is firmly fixed; to strengthen their hold, a number of supports are nailed round the outside of the former, and also closely round the latter. The tar is then put into the barrel, and set on fire; and the remaining one being broken up, stave after stave is thrown in, until it is quite full. The 'cl[a]vie,' already burning fiercely, is now shouldered by some strong young man, and borne away at a rapid pace. As soon as the bearer gives signs of exhaustion, another ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... time Mrs. Brownlow, who had heard Cecil's boots on the stairs, and particularly wished to stave matters off till after the Friar's mission, had made a hasty conclusion of her lesson, and letting her girls depart, opened the door. She saw at once that she was too late; but there was no retreat, for Esther ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... done; and so greatly was he revered for his exalted character, so universal was the confidence in his integrity, sagacity, and sound judgment, that, so long as he remained President, the party that surrounded him was immovable as a mountain. His policy was to stave off a rupture with England, and, if possible, to bring that power into pacific and rational relations with the United States. The government aimed to keep itself clear of entanglement with all foreign politics; to maintain that ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... on the threshold Herdegen saw through their purpose, and had no sooner shut the door than he drew his hunting knife. Then the old beldame gripped him by the throat and clawed him tooth and nail; one of the ruffians beat him with a stave torn from the bedstead till he weened he had broken or bruised all his limbs, while the other, whose hands were yet bound, pressed between him and the door. In truth he would have come to a bad end, but that the younger woman ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... can't you see that it's you I want?" And she leaned forward, speaking quickly to stave off interruption. "Don't make a fuss about it, please; because I have settled everything in my mind. I'll ask Mrs Rivers to take baby and Parbutti for me. I know she gladly will. As for me, of course I go down to Dera to-morrow, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... a sort of miracle, accomplished by his great desire to help the right thing to happen, to stave off any shadow of the wrong thing. Whatsoever the reason, Strangeways waited only a moment before turning to his book again. It seemed to be a link in some chain slowly forming itself to drag him back from his wanderings. And ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... much good to be seen talkin' to me, for both men an' boys hate what are called bosses' pets; but we'll stave off this row till you get used to the ropes, when it's a case of ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... got hold of some sticks and poles, and tried to stave off the boat, and when Don Quixote saw their white, flour-covered faces he turned to Sancho and begged him to take a good look at the monsters that had been sent to oppose him. The men were all the time ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... him, the young fellow stood at bay, hooting, shouting, and waving his stave in a semicircle, within whose sweep the creatures were not anxious to intrude. Weary at length of trying to surprise the fortress by a flank movement, yet reluctant to abandon the hope of seizing Pike, the wolves finally seated themselves upon their ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... gittin' the right scent on it," said Solomon, as he was ripping the hide off the other steer. "I reckon it'll start the sap in their mouths. You roll out the rum bar'l an' stave it in. Mis' Bones knows how to shoot. Put her in the shed with yer mother an' the guns, an' take her young 'uns to the sugar shanty 'cept Isr'el who's ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... having done her duty, went down the river alone. Years after, could Aladdin have met with that log, he would have recognized it like the face of a friend, and would have embraced and kissed it, painted it white to stave off the decay of old age, and set it foremost among his ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... in the new crisis. Apparently a large majority in the House, led by Madison, were ready to sequester British debts, declare an embargo, build a navy, and in general prepare for a bitter contest; but by great exertions the administration managed to stave off these drastic steps by promising to send a special diplomatic mission to prevent war. During the summer the excitement grew, for it was in this year that Wayne's campaign against the western Indians took place, which was generally believed to be rendered necessary ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... liquors (1827), the council authorised a constable, upon a magistrate's warrant, granted on the belief of any person that ale, beer, or spirits were sold, to break open the house and seize the liquor; and unless the owner could satisfy the magistrate, the constable was permitted to stave and destroy the vessels. For the sale, not only were heavy penalties imposed, but unless paid the offender was liable to perpetual imprisonment; and even appeal was prohibited, except the penalty was first paid: one-half to the informer. This ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... to the Entente nations an agreement on the arming of merchantmen, how this government was informed by Germany of her intention to destroy armed merchantmen without giving the passengers a moment of warning, and how, in order to stave off such a contingency, we tried as the friend and in the interest of humanity to get an agreement between both sides that would bring submarine warfare within the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... the legions of Caesar came over the Alps, and finding the snowy slopes in front of them, immediately sat down on their shields and slid down upon the Northern races they had come to conquer. Many a New England youngster in days gone-by learned to come down a hill on a barrel stave in much the same way; he, too, with blood of the conqueror in his veins. The toboggan wasn't really invented; it grew. From that invention has worked out many devices specially fitted to the sport under special conditions. Switzerland has seen coasting come up from the utilitarian ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... very high, they might have been cast away. Other times I imagined that they might have lost their boat before, as might be the case many ways; particularly by the breaking of the sea upon their ship, which many times obliged men to stave, or take in pieces, their boat, and sometimes to throw it overboard with their own hands. Other times I imagined they had some other ship or ships in company, who, upon the signals of distress they made, had taken them up, and carried them off. Other times ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... smoke was decreasing. "Hurrah, lads! we shall have it under!" cried the first mate, in an encouraging tone. We breathed more freely. The fire was subdued. The peril had indeed been great. We had now to clear the wreck of the mast, which threatened to stave in the bows. "The gale is breaking," cried the captain, after looking round the horizon; "cheer up, my lads, and we shall do well!" Encouraged by the captain the men laboured on, though from the violent ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... heaven and earth, figuratively speaking: prays until he can pray no more: sacrifices, it may be, his money, his health, his prospects, and does everything that is in the power of a human being in a vain attempt to stave off a threatened disaster. But, in spite of all his efforts, in spite of his cries to a pitiless heaven, the relentless march of fate cannot be stayed. It moves forward like a huge juggernaut and crushes his hopes, his dearest idol, his very life itself or ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... spelt, spelled, spelled. Spend, spent, spent. Spill, spilt, spilt, spilled, spilled. Spin, spun, spun. span, Spit, spit, spit, spat, spitten. Split, split, split. Spoil, spoilt, spoilt, spoiled, spoiled. Spread, spread, spread. Spring, sprang, sprung. sprung, Stand, stood, stood. Stave, stove, stove, staved, staved. Stay, staid, staid, stayed, stayed. Steal, stole, stolen. Stick, stuck, stuck. Sting, stung, stung. Stink, stunk, stunk. stank, Strew, strewed, strewn, strewed. Stride, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... cleft in twain, His good buff jerkin crimsoned o'er with many a gory stain; Yet still he waves his banner, and cries amid the rout, "For Church and King, fair gentlemen! spur on, and fight it out!" And now he wards a Roundhead's pike, and now he hums a stave, And now he quotes a stage-play, and now he fells ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... ask you, man," said Murphy; "but my darling fellow, Ned here, will gladden our hearts and ears with a stave." ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... young scout hastily reloaded his gun. This task completed, he turned once more to his companions and said: "Take the man now and go! Do as I tell you! I shall bring up the rear and do my best to stave off the Indians. They are sure to follow us, though I do not think there are more than eight or ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... of the singer's voice, as indicated in the composer's score. In vain Raoul cries, "Speak on, and prolong the ineffable slumber of my soul." Valentine cannot "prolong." It is evident that an unaccustomed fire devours her. Her b's and her c's above the stave were dreadfully shrill. He struggles, he gesticulates, he is ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... do it—oh, I've got to do it," he told himself, aloud. "If I had a quart of rum I believe I could stave it off yet—for a little while. But there's no more rum for—'Beelzebub,' as they call me. By the flames of Tartarus! if I'm to sit at the right hand of Satan somebody has got to pay the court ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... she goes home to her husband; and here comes in, not merely irony, but an intentional rebuke to sentiment. Her husband is lying helpless and moaning, and she asks him whether he has slept. To which he answers in a stave of the usual form in the Sagas, the purport of which is that he has never known sleep since the death of Olaf his son. "'Verily that is a great lie,' says she, 'that thou hast never slept once these three years. But now it is high ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... of The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... day. The brief English summer, dying under the intolerable doom of evanescence for all things beautiful, presented the spectacle of creeping decay in a hectic flare of russet and crimson, like a withered woman striving to stave off the inevitable with ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... There were religious services gone through: a matins-worship such as there have been few; sternly earnest to the heart of it, and deep as death and eternity, at least on Olaf's own part. For the rest Thormod sang a stave of the fiercest Skaldic poetry that was in him; all the army straightway sang it in chorus with fiery mind. The Bonder of the nearest farm came up, to tell Olaf that he also wished to fight for him "Thanks to thee; but don't," said Olaf; "stay at ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... Prohibition. It is exactly a matter for the interference of the state. The Athenian in the comedy, wearied of war, concludes a separate peace with the enemy for himself, his wife, his children, and his servant; and forthwith raises a jovial stave to Bacchus. Now all sensible people would not only be glad to enter into amicable relations with Smoke, but would even be content to pay a good sum for protection against the incursions from factory chimnies and other nuisances in their neighbourhood. But there ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... eat six regular meals a day, and between times stave off their appetite with numerous Schweitzer cheese sandwiches, blutwurst ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... variance with the terms on which they had so lately stood together. At length the speed of the pseudo herald could save him no longer from the fangs of his pursuers; they seized him, pulled him down, and would probably soon have throttled him, had not the Duke called out, "Stave and tail!—stave and tail! [to strike the bear with a staff, and pull off the dogs by the tail, to separate them.]—Take them off him!—He hath shown so good a course, that, though he has made no sport at bay, we will not have ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... With the rear rockets, I rolled us over. For a moment we were hull-down to the passing discs. From our hull gravity-plates I flung a full repulsion. Would it stave them off, bend their orbit outward? It did ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... soul Melodious descant gave, But yet his voice so rich and sweet Swell'd not the sacred stave, The Christmas wreaths o'er arch and nave Were lingering still to cheer His parting visit to the fane Which he had ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... offering to play for nothing till Christmas; how kind and liberal he is! Mr. Abbott, Mr. Duraset, Mr. Ward, and all the others, have been as considerate and generous as possible. But the thing is doomed, and will go to the ground, in spite of every effort that can be made to stave the ruin off. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... right," said I. "Parker had suggested the walk, and a girl really does like to stave off a proposal as long as she can when she knows it is sure to come. Furthermore, it gives you a chance to describe the hat, and so make up for a few of the words you lost when she refused to discuss ball-dresses with ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... yet humbled him. His was a simple soul, and took its responsibilities seriously. He sought not to inquire for what high purpose Providence had so signally intervened to stave off from the East and West Looe Artillery the doom of common men. He only prayed to be equal to it. The Doctor's statistics had, in fact, scared him a little. I am ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... children on account of the heat, and their terrible water-swollen stomachs and the pitiful sticks of legs eloquently tell their own tale. Unable to find food, all are drinking enormous quantities of water to stave off the pangs of hunger. A man who has been in India says that all drink like this in famine time, which inflates the stomach to a dangerous extent, and is the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... song at the end of his remarks, with a portion of a stave of "The Mermaid"; but singing was not his strong point, and he made a noise partaking a good ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... building, with a tower and bells; Where priest and clerk with joint exertion strive To keep the ardour af their flock alive; That, by its periods eloquent and grave; This, by responses, and a well-set stave: These for the living; but when life be fled, I toll myself the requiem for the dead." 'Tis to this Church I call thee, and that place Where slept our fathers when they'd run their race: We too shall rest, and then our children keep Their road in life, and then, forgotten, sleep; Meanwhile the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... throughout by Rosalind and Orlando, compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall please you to select—the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if you have any ear for that class of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the parts; a balance in the swing and the return ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will follow many a stave. I know it well, so rings the book throughout; Much time I've lost in puzzling o'er its pages, For downright paradox, no doubt, A mystery remains alike to fools and sages. Ancient the art and modern too, my friend. 'Tis still the fashion as it used to be, Error instead ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was soft, and procuring a barrel-stave, the homicide went at the labor of digging a grave for ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... their runes were chiefly written: and the verb "write," which is derived from a Teutonic root, signifying to scratch or tear, is one of the testimonies of the usage. Their poems were graven upon small staves or rods, one line upon each face of the rod; and the Old English word "stave," as applied to a stanza, is probably a relic of the practice, which, in the early ages, prevailed in the West. Vellum or parchment afterwards supplied the place of these materials. Real paper, manufactured from the pellicle ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... representation of a bottle and glass, flanked by the words "Bon Vin de Macon a 8 et a 10 S." hinted intelligibly at the well-provided state of Monsieur Fricot's cellar. It was one of those humble eating-houses, abounding in the French capital, where a very hungry man may stave off starvation for about the price of a tooth-pick at the Cafe or the Trois Freres, and where an exceedingly thirsty one may get intoxicated upon potato brandy and essence of logwood for a similar amount. It needs a three days' fast or a paviour's appetite to induce entrance ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... 'bout dat man," said the elder one. "You 'ten' ter yo' wuk an' finish dat bairl-stave. You spen's enti'ely too much er yo' time stretchin' yo' neck atter other people. An' you need n' 'sturb yo'se'f 'bout dem folks 'cross de street, fer dey ain't yo' kin', an' you're wastin' yo' time both'in' yo' min' wid 'em, er wid folks w'at comes on de street on ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... admiring Pergolesi? Or through the earth with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his great surprise, ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... flash after flash, the blades came down chunking into the ever-widening notch. Summers had seen sword play in Montreal armories, and had heard the ax clang often on the side of Western firs, but—for Thurston was fighting to stave off ruin—this grim struggle in the face of a desperate risk surpassed any remembered exhibition of fencers' skill with the steel. The trunk was bending visibly beneath the hewers, the river frothed more at their feet, and the giant logs were rolling, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... two leagues to your one, and I'm just leaving for home, so, unless you would like to go with me, perhaps you will let this conversation end without any more pointed remarks. If I chose, you know, I could drop you overboard in sight of your men, to swim ashore. My guns would stave your longboat all to pieces. But I've stayed long enough to give the lads a chance to have a good meal and a bit of fun—nothing's better than dancing, for the spirits, dad always said it was better than ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. You can ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... of food, there is another important consideration. Work is at a standstill. Mobiles and Nationaux who apply forma pauperis receive one franc and a half per diem. Now, at present prices, it is materially impossible for a single man to buy sufficient food to stave off hunger for this sum, how then those who depend upon it for their sustenance, and have wives and families to support out of it, are able to live, it is difficult to understand. Sooner or later the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a 'summer madness,' anything but what it was—the American stave aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every other aristocracy on earth wishing it success. But the people did not refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved their Government from immediate capture ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... when that feast was done On the fire-lit green the dance begun, With squaws' shrill stave, and deeper hum Of old men ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... for further words. The four quickly made for the gates. They opened and closed them quickly. Each held a stave that seemed not unlike a young tree, of which a ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... puncheon, tierce, hogshead, keg, rundlet; (of wine) 31-1/2 gallons; (of flour) 196 pounds. Associated words: gauntree, cooper, bilge, stave, hoop, chine. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... slaying, the poet to rise from his unfinished rhyme, the tender and gracious lady to cease from nice denying words (mixed though they be with pitiful sighs that break their sequence like an amorous ditty heard through the strains of a martial stave), and all men, gentle or base, to follow Death's gaunt standard into unmapped realms, something of majesty enshrines the paltriest knave on whom the weight of Death's chill finger hath fallen. I doubt not that ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... are of various forms. Those in Peterborough are formed of two hoops fastened together to form a globe and a stick or stave through the centre. The hoops are decorated with flowers and ribbons, and when the children possess one, the best doll is fixed on the stick inside the garland. Two girls carry the garland which is carefully covered with a white cloth. This is lifted ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... the laurell'd stave Are measures, not the springs, of worth; In a wife's lap, as in a grave, Man's airy notions mix with earth. Seek other spur Bravely to stir The dust in this loud world, and tread Alp-high among ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... grandfather, and all the homely belongings which he, a minister of the connection, could not be kept in ignorance of. It was but a momentary pang. Phoebe was not so foolish as to shrink before the inevitable, or to attempt by foolish expedients to stave off such a danger. She shrank for a second, then drew herself up and shook off all such ignoble cares. "I am myself whatever happens," was her reflection; and she said with something ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... herself from the sculptor, and turned back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her own soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... raked the fire about the door, which, although a sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, and kept them out. Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, besides, above the people's heads to such as stood about the ladders, and some of these, climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their efforts were successful, which occasioned a new and appalling ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... turn of the tide, although the wind was still off-shore; so that even to lie to at the mouth made rather a ticklish job of it. The men looked at one another, and did not like it, for a badly handled oar would have cast them on the rocks, which are villainously hard and jagged, and would stave in the toughest boat, like biscuit china. However, they durst not say that they feared it; and by skill and steadiness they examined all three caves quite enough to be certain that no boat ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... to see this phoenomenon, we squeezed into the place with much difficulty; and who should this preacher be, but the identical Humphry Clinker. He had finished his sermon, and given out a psalm, the first stave of which he sung with peculiar graces — But if we were astonished to see Clinker in the pulpit, we were altogether confounded at finding all the females of our family among the audience — There was lady Griskin, Mrs Tabitha Bramble, Mrs Winifred Jenkins, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... noted that so far as the positions of the notes on the stave are concerned, the key of A[b] is as easy to sing in as the key of A, D[b] as D, and so on. This fact is sometimes overlooked, and unnecessary difficulties are created ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... the bitterest opposition of the best brains of both Houses. A most curious aspect of this singular law is that even the Minister, since deceased, who introduced it, subsequently declared himself against it, adding that he only forced it through in order to stave off something worse. Indeed, it is correct to say that Mr. Sauer, who introduced the Bill, spoke against it repeatedly in the House; he deleted the milder provisions, inserted more drastic amendments, spoke repeatedly against his own amendments, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the matter out of the hands of the Air Traffic Bureau. We are prepared to defy the ultimatum of the enemy, whoever he may be. But we want your help, Mr. Jones. Every ship of the Air Navy will be in the upper levels within the prescribed twenty-four hours, and we will endeavor to stave off their attacks until such time as you can fit the Pioneer for a journey to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... the rusty bars of the prison door, and the worn visage of the wounded Cavalier turning towards it as the flower turns to the sun. And surely Master Wildrake himself, with his glass of sack half-way to his mouth, never put it down to sing a finer Royalist stave than Lovelace's "To ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... our prayer, and crave Pardon, because thy lowlier stave Can do this plea no right, but wrong. Ask nought beside thy pardon, save Sweet water from the well ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... or two of them had avoided her, were almost worse to bear, and sitting alone in the gathering darkness the girl flushed crimson at the memory. There was also the grim question by what means she could stave off actual want to grapple with, and to that she could as yet find no answer, while her eyes grew dim as she glanced about the little room. Townshead had changed his quarters, and many of the trifles ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one of us at the critical moment." The Amiens line being under fire, it was impossible to bring French reinforcements north in time to save Kemmel Hill and stave off the menace to the Channel ports. The tale of our losses is grievous, and for thousands and thousands of families nothing can ever be the same again. The ordeal of Paris has been renewed by shelling from the German long-distance gun, the last and most sensational of German surprise-packets. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Ulf, turning to the bluff old warrior, "since thou hast shown thy readiness to rebuke, let us see thy willingness to entertain. Sing us a stave or tell us a saga, kinsman, as well thou knowest how, being gifted with more than a fair ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... dear old land is thine, And thou a traitor slave of it: Think how the Switzer leads his kine, When pale the evening star doth shine; His song has home in every line, Freedom in every stave of it; Think how the German loves his Rhine And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... animation. What is to be done with this apparatus? How fetter this stupendous engine of destruction? How anticipate its comings and goings, its returns, its stops, its shocks? Any one of its blows on the side of the ship may stave it in. How foretell its frightful meanderings? It is dealing with a projectile, which alters its mind, which seems to have ideas, and changes its direction every instant. How check the course of what must be avoided? The horrible cannon struggles, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of all to get the shrouds on one side cut through, so that the mast might come to the surface alongside instead of disturbing the balance of the boat below; and then they must climb up on the swaying bottom of the boat and stave in the key-holes, to let out the air which kept the boat too high in the water, and so ease her. After great exertions they succeeded, and Elias, who had got up on the top first, now helped the other two up ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... nothing is the matter. But if he merely answers "No-o-o!" he means yes, and in order to stave off sea-sickness he ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... of Napoleon. It proved physically impossible for him to extend the Continental System widely and thoroughly enough to gain his point. In many cases, to stave off opposition, he authorized exceptions to his own decrees. If he could have prevailed upon every Continental state to close its ports to British goods simultaneously and for several successive years, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... me a moment with surprise, and after exclaiming, "How are you, my boy?" gave the bench a salutary kick, and whistled more vigorously than ever "Nix my Dolly;" and having gone through the stave, he turned to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... had been dealing in lumber for ever so long, that the most important and essential thing in life was lumber. There was something touching and endearing in the way she pronounced the words, "beam," "joist," "plank," "stave," "lath," "gun-carriage," "clamp." At night she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, long, endless rows of wagons conveying the wood somewhere, far, far from the city. She dreamed that a whole ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the horror from beginning to end. He could now move his toes. If only he could fall forward, grasp that incineration tube, turn it on Barter! With Barter unable to control him he would regain his senses in time, he hoped, to stave off the certain charge of Naka Machi, whose hatred for himself he ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... or long poem, by the time he went to table; and if he failed to do so, said the king, "he shall be hanged for his impudence in composing such a small poem about King Canute." Thorarin then composed a stave as a refrain, which he inserted in the poem, and also augmented it with several other strophes or verses. ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... such pagan thirst!" exclaimed he who had been toasted, snatching the cup away. "Art thou altogether unslakable? Is thy belly a lime-kiln? Nay, shalt taste not a single drop more, Hubert, till we have a stave. ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... Mag Trega and they unyoke there and prepare their food. It is said that it is there that Dubthach recited this stave:— ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... ordering that twenty-five per cent, of the revenues of the public lands (kugaideri) should be appropriated to increase the emoluments of the metropolitan officials. This decree spoke of the latter officials as not having sufficient to stave off cold or hunger, whereas their provincial confreres were living in opulence, and added that even men of high rank were not ashamed to apply for removal to provincial posts. As illustrating the straits to which the metropolitans were reduced ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... air of one used to being served on a tray outside the servants' quarters; and a German attendant with hands constructed especially for the purpose of kneading and gouging the innermost muscles of his master, who it appears had to be kneaded and gouged three times a day by a masseur in order to stave off paralysis, locomotor ataxia or something equally unwelcome ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... couple of huge casks on one side as if they had been light balls, and seized one of the large thick beams which had not yet been worked at "Marry, master," he cried, "marry, this is good sound oak; I wager it will snap like glass." And thereupon he struck the stave against the grindstone so that it broke clean in half with a loud crack. "Pray be so kind," said Master Martin, "pray have the kindness, my good fellow, to kick that two-tun cask about or to pull down the whole shop. There, you can take that balk for a mallet, and that you may have an adze ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... for goose," finished Tom. "Come, father, old Dictionary is in the doldrums; rouse him up with another stave." ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... though, for that matter, they seldom hesitated to do anything they wished on account of the weather, as it was not so cold to the natives as to us. They played with balls, both large and small, and sleds of all descriptions; and if the latter were not to be had, or all in use, a barrel stave or board would be made to answer the same purpose. It was a rush past the window down the hill, first by a pair of muckluked feet, then a barrel stave and a boy, sometimes little Pete, and sometimes John. One barrel stave would hold only one coaster, and there ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... declare war till nearly three years after the war had begun in Europe. During most of that time the situation was this: Germany, to win at all, must win at once. The longer the Allies could stave Germany off, the more time they would have to collect arms and armies, powder, food, and ships, and the more certain they would be of winning in the end. Therefore they sent to America, which was rich and had many factories, for tremendous quantities ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... planters own a tobacco straightener and screw-press, inventions which materially lessen the manual labor of preparing the crop for market. Each hogshead is branded with the name of the owner, and thus shipped to his commission-merchant, when the hogshead is 'broken' by tearing off a stave, thus exposing the strata of the bulk to view. Of late years some planters have been guilty of 'nesting,' or placing prime leaf around the outer part and an inferior article in the center ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... vast unknown of air, Out of all summer, from wave to wave, He'll perch, and prank his feathers fair, Jangle a glass-clear wildering stave, And take his ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... mate raised his gun, firing the bomb directly down the great livid cavern of a throat fronting him. Down went that mountainous head not six inches from us, but with a perfectly indescribable motion, a tremendous writhe, in fact; up flew the broad tail in air, and a blow which might have sufficed to stave in the side of the ship struck the second mate's boat fairly amidships. It was right before my eyes, not sixty feet away, and the sight will haunt me to my death. The tub oarsman was the poor German baker, about whom ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... what can we do about it? We can't stop it, or even keep it within bounds. Our customers will give them, and people who have too much money or too little sense, give not only dollar bills or five dollar bills, but fifty dollar bills and even hundred dollar bills. We have tried to stave off customers who do such things: we believe that in the long run it would pay us ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... you were a millionaire, sir; and what are you? A pauper on my bounty, and on your brother Montagu's after me—a pauper with a tinsel fashion, a gilded beggary, a Queen's commission to cover a sold-out poverty, a dandy's reputation to stave off a defaulter's future! A pauper, sir—and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... schemer lurking near the door picked up their sense at once. Dr Pendle was the priest who was to drop the money on Southberry Heath, and Jentham the knave who was to pick it up. As certainly as though the man had given chapter and verse, Cargrim understood his enigmatic stave. His mind flashed back to the memory that Dr Pendle intended to ride over to Southberry in the morning, across the heath. Without doubt he had agreed to meet there this man who boasted that he could get blood out of a stone, and the object of the meeting was to bribe him to silence. But however loosely ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... of his noble descendant and worthy representative!" This example was followed by all the gentlemen present. The harp struck up a triumphal strain; and, the old squire already mentioned, vociferating the first stave, they sang, or rather roared, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... raised by her unexpected good-fortune, Toni showed herself more than usually bewitching; and although she managed to stave off the declaration which still trembled on the young man's lips, she played games with him in the most friendly fashion, and bade him good-night at last with so sweet a smile that he almost fell upon his knees then and there and kissed the slim little feet in their ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... storm-toss'd and beating for the bay, They'll be howling and be growling as they drench it with their spray— For they'd like to heel it over to their laughter when it lists, Or crack the keel between them, or stave ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... soon as his voice filled the night, the woman's faltered and died; and he, holding on for a stave or more, would stop on a note that had a wailing fall, and the lapping of the waves or cry of hidden birds take up the rule again. This did not often obtain. Mostly he watched out the night, sleeping little, talking none, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... the sound whose charm is half divine; Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye, But yields young history all to harmony; A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire. For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave, Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side, Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide, Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear, Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear; Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme For sages' ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... dear, foolish man, can't you see that it's you I want?" And she leaned forward, speaking quickly to stave off interruption. "Don't make a fuss about it, please; because I have settled everything in my mind. I'll ask Mrs Rivers to take baby and Parbutti for me. I know she gladly will. As for me, of course I go down to Dera to-morrow, and do what I can ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... a number of theatrical representations of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." I have witnessed as well as heard a performance of "Acis and Galatea" and been entertained with the spectacle of Polyphemus crushing the head of presumptuous Acis with a stave like another Fafner while singing "Fly, thou massy ruin, fly" to the bludgeon which was playing understudy for ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... shaped, shapen shave shaved shaved, shaven shear sheared sheared, shorn smell smelled, smelt smelled, smelt sow sowed sowed, sown spell spelled, spelt spelled, spelt spill spilled, spilt spilled, spilt spoil spoiled, spoilt spoiled, spoilt stave staved, stove staved, stove stay stayed, staid stayed, staid swell swelled swelled, swollen wake waked, woke waked, woke wax, grow waxed waxed (waxen) wed wedded wedded, wed whet whetted, whet whetted, whet work worked, ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... welcome as the Gladiateur, with reversed engines, hung against the current above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands. And then the gang-plank was set ashore, and instantly beside it—standing in the glare of a great lantern—we saw our Capoulie, the head of all the Felibrige, Felix Gras, waiting for us, his subjects and ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... sailors to take up upon credit. But the first lieutenant would not allow any of them to come on board until after the ship was paid; although they were so urgent that he was forced to place sentries in the chains with cold shot, to stave the boats if they came alongside. I was standing at the gangway, looking at the crowd of boats, when a black-looking fellow in one of the wherries said to me, "I say, sir, let me slip in at the port, and I have a very nice present to make you;" and he displayed a gold seal, which he held up to ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... at dusk our Mess carouse, With catches strong and brave, The mules their tuneful hearts arouse, And answer stave for stave. 'Dumb nature' breaks in festive noise, Remembering in this East The mystic bond which knits the joys ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... consequences of eating forbidden animals vary considerably. Sometimes the Boyl-yas (that is, ghosts) avenge the crime. Thus when Sir George Grey ate some mussels (which, after all, are not the crest of the Greys), a storm followed, and one of his black fellow improvised this stave:— ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a compulsive stave Through all the bounds, from Beersheba to Dan; Come out! come out! who scorns to be a slave, Or claims ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... for some money to put off the infernal creditors, who have begun to flock into the house. There's the bell. Hang me, if it isn't another one! To come to the point, then, I wish you would loan me, say two hundred dollars. It is a small amount, but will stave them off a ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... was eyed askance by his brethren. No one deigned to call him "Reb" Zelig, nor to prefix to his name the American equivalent—"Mr." "The old one is a barrel with a stave missing," knowingly declared his neighbors. "He never spends a cent; and he belongs nowheres." For "to belong," on New York's East Side, is of no slight importance. It means being a member in one of the numberless congregations. Every decent Jew must join ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... larger boats than ours; but it was impossible always to avoid concealed dangers, over which the waters did not cause the slightest ripple. The large boat struck on a sharp rock, and with such violence as to stave her bottom; she was immediately unladen, and temporarily repaired without injury to the cargo. Although the river is extremely low, there is a very large body of water in it; the outer banks are nearly a quarter of a mile wide, and far out of ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor breaks into a weird setting of the "Marseillaise" ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Joke, or singing Black-eyed Susan, or some such sorrowful ditty."—"By no means," cried the doctor; "such pastimes are neither suitable to the place, nor the occasion, which is altogether a religious exercise. If you have got any psalms by heart, you may sing a stave or two, or repeat the Doxology."—"Would I had Tom Laverick here," replied our novitiate; "he would sing your anthems like a sea-mew—a had been a clerk a-shore—many's the time and often I've given him a rope's end for singing psalms in the larboard watch. Would I had hired the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... from heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D'avenant's) to be sung by a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the utter amaze of the drunken listeners and astonishment of the Indians, the game old officer trolled off this stave: ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... aright by the brothers, who see what her meaning is. Then she goes home to her husband; and here comes in, not merely irony, but an intentional rebuke to sentiment. Her husband is lying helpless and moaning, and she asks him whether he has slept. To which he answers in a stave of the usual form in the Sagas, the purport of which is that he has never known sleep since the death of Olaf his son. "'Verily that is a great lie,' says she, 'that thou hast never slept once these three years. But now it is high time to be up and play the man, if thou wilt have ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... dictated by the hard and fierce circumstances which dictate to him what he must do. Often he is compelled to move as his food supply moves. The Cliff-Dweller Indian of the arid regions of the Southwest was forced to cliff- dwell, in order to stave off extermination by his enemies. Under that spur he became a ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... was this? Here he was at home hunting Charley Hannaford. Well, but his father was close at hand, and Father Halloran just below, who had always protected him. At this game he could go on for ever, if only it would stave off ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on the sledge, or I'll stave your head in!" commanded MacVeigh. "Face the enemy, Pelly, and give 'em hell. You've got three rifles there. You can do the shooting while I hustle on the dogs. And keep yourself in front of her," he added, pointing to the almost completely ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... cheer him up by talking to him of my home, and how he might find his relations and friends, and then I bethought me that I would sing a song. I don't suppose that many people have sung under such circumstances, but I managed to strike up a stave, one of those with which I had been accustomed to amuse my messmates in the Naiad's forecastle. It was not, perhaps, one of the merriest, but it served to divert Clem's thoughts, as well as mine, from ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... boy. The light in those peering, bloodshot eyes told him that the longshoreman would mistreat that beloved uniform; and Johnnie wanted to gain time. Something, or some one, might interrupt, and thus stave off—what? ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... haggling and huckstering look than it need have had. Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person in the Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in smoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making their appearance. Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's cherished claim to levy "impositions," or custom duties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative—a claim which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... He saw evil and woe unspeakable fall on that world which he had left behind him, till the earth was filled with blood, and Antichrist seemed ready to appear, and the day of judgment to be at hand. And he had been called to do what he could to stave off this ruin, to make those young princes decree justice and rule in judgment by the fear of God. But he had failed; and there was nothing left to him save self-accusation and regret, and dread lest some, at least, of the blood which had been shed might be required ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... within her tepee making beaded deerskins for her father, while he longs to stave off her every suitor as all unworthy of his old heart's pride. But Tusee is not alone in her dwelling. Near the entrance-way a young brave is half reclining on a mat. In silence he watches the petals of a wild rose growing on the soft buckskin. ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... the fingers for love; but wine's the very heart of life. There's wisdom and truth in wine, there's valor in it, and it's powerful enough to make even good sound men fall in love. There's a stave I've heard which you may have if you will." And with much sound but little music Stefan ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... can punch a hole through eight inches of young ice; that try to climb into the boat to get at or upset you,—we never could make out which, and didn't care, as the result to us would have been the same,—or else try to ram your boat and stave holes in it. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... perching himself grotesquely on the easy chair). I was ass enough to keep it until about ten minutes ago. Up to that moment I went on desperately reading to her—reading my own poems—anybody's poems—to stave off a conversation. I was standing outside the gate of Heaven, and refusing to go in. Oh, you can't think how heroic it was, and how ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... to talk of the men in the Eastfirth Quarter, and thou must always find something to say against them. At last your talk will come to Rangrivervale, and then thou must say, there is small choice of men left in those parts since Fiddle Mord died. At the same time sing some stave to please Hrut, for I know thou art a skald. Hrut will ask what makes thee say there is never a man to come in Mord's place; and then thou must answer, that he was so wise a man and so good a taker up of suits, that he never made a false ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... s'pose so, but with vessels like we got and the seamen sailing out of Gloucester we'll stave 'em off a long time yet, and even as it is, give me a breeze and a vessel like this one under us and we'll beat out all the steam fishermen that ever turned ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... he had not much of a voice, contrived to make his songs popular by the humour he threw into his tone, had sung about a stave or so, and Norris and the rest of the party, with laughing countenances, while listening to his song, forgot ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... the latter, but the long, rolling gallop of the bays ate up the ground, and bore them down on the leaders in a bright hurricane. The cowpunchers, hearing that volleying of hoofbeats, went to spur and quirt to stave off the inevitable, but at five furlongs Lady Mary left her sisters and streaked around the tiring range horses into the lead. Marianne cried out in delight. She had forgotten her hope that the mares ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... pitch hot." In handing the sails, "to loose" is good English,—"to furl" is Armorican, and belongs to the Mediterranean class of words. "To rake," which is applied to spars, is from the Saxon racian, to incline;—"to steeve," which is applied to the bowsprit, and often pronounced "stave," is from the Italian stivare. When we get below-decks, we find "cargo" to be Spanish,—while "ballast" (from bat, a boat, and last, a load) is Saxon. A ship in ballast comes from the Baltic,—a vessel and cargo from the Bay ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... physical wants of men. These wants have, of course, become much complicated and refined: men wish not only to live, but to live commodiously and well. They want not merely a roof over their heads, but a pleasant and comfortable house in which to live. They want not merely something to stave off starvation, but palatable foods. In the satisfaction of these increasingly complicated demands a great diversity of industries arises. With every new want to be fulfilled, there is a new occupation, pursued not for its own sake, but for the sake ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... washed through, but for the double ceiling of bacon on the inside, which has hung there from his grandsire's time, and is yet to make rashers for posterity. His dinner is his other work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labour; he is a terrible fastener on a piece of beef, and you may hope to stave the guard off sooner. His religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord, and refers it wholly to his discretion: Yet if he give him leave he is a good Christian to his power, (that is,) comes to ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... which, in its mere animal estate, we may name courage. Booth found that a tragedy in real life could no more be enacted without greasy-faced and knock-kneed supernumeraries than upon the mimic stage. Your "First Citizen," who swings a stave for Marc Antony, and drinks hard porter behind the flies is very like the bravo of real life, who murders between his cocktails at the nearest bar. Wilkes Booth had passed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink from the broader and ranker green-room of real ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... religious turn, although attached to no particular denomination, the meeting-houses on every side, hardly excepting the Quakers themselves, delighted to see him drive up on Sundays and tell an anecdote to the children and sing a little air, half-hymn sort, half stave, but always given with a good countenance, which apologized for the worldly notes of it. If any severe interpreter of Christian amusements took the people to task for tolerating such a universal and desultory character, there were others to rise up and ask what evil ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... 'except that one shuffles off unpleasant subjects! I did fancy I could stave it off till Oxford was over, and I was free of the men there; but that notion might have been a mere excuse to myself for putting off the evil day. I was too much in debt, too, for an open rupture with you; and as to her, I can truly say that my sole shadow of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the period of the first crusade, when the empire was infested by Turks on the one hand and Normans on the other, while the crusaders who passed through his territory proved more troublesome than either. He managed to hold the empire together in spite of these troubles, and to stave off the doom that impended all through his reign of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... several times with considerable cordiality and lemon-tea. On such occasions, Mr. BUMSTEAD, in his musical capacity, has sung so closely in Judge SWEENEY'S ear as to tickle him, a wild and slightly incoherent Ritualistic stave, to the effect that Saint PETER'S of Rome, with pontifical dome, would by ballot Infallible be; but for making Call sure, and Election secure, Saint Repeater's of Rum beats the See. With finger in ear to allay the tickling sensation, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own doings. My companion was completely silent, and I felt both as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Matt Quintal," returned the other, who was beginning to talk rather thickly, so powerful was the effect of the liquor on his unaccustomed nerves; "I shay, ole feller, you used to sing well once. Come g-give us a stave now." ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... dat in his head he's done for. I'm gwine to speak to de Mist'iss 'bout dat boy, an' see if sumpin can't be done to save him fo' it gits too late; ain't nuffin' gwine to do him no good but a barr'l stave—hear dat—a ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... me," thought Betty, when Emory had taken him to his room. "He has made up his mind to propose during this visit. If I can only stave it ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Long Man of Wilmington, that gigantic figure cut out in the chalk of the hill-side, something comparable only with the Giant of Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the White Horses of Wiltshire. That figure is some two hundred and forty feet in height and holds in each hand a stave or club two hundred and thirty feet long. It would seem impossible to be certain either of its age or its purpose, but we may perhaps be sure that it lay there upon the Downs above Polegate before the landing of Caesar, and it may have been ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... move many people of all these Provinces, and which are rather of a social, or, strictly speaking, political than of a financial kind. In the first place, I echo what was stated in the speech last night of my hon. friend, the President of the Council—that we cannot stand still; we cannot stave off some great change; we cannot stand alone—Province apart from Province—if we would; and that we are in a state of political transition. All, even honorable gentlemen who are opposed to this description of ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... understand why it was done; and so greatly was he revered for his exalted character, so universal was the confidence in his integrity, sagacity, and sound judgment, that, so long as he remained President, the party that surrounded him was immovable as a mountain. His policy was to stave off a rupture with England, and, if possible, to bring that power into pacific and rational relations with the United States. The government aimed to keep itself clear of entanglement with all foreign politics; to maintain that perfect neutrality which should violate no treaties, offend no national ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... least of what they'll try to do. They'll use slugging tactics, sure, if they get a chance, or railroad me to some Pen or other, if possible. My one best bet is to keep out of their way; and I figure I'm ten times safer on the open road, with a few dollars to stave off a vagrancy charge, and with two good fists and this stick to keep 'em at a distance, than I would be on the railroads or in cheap ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... true. Then, our demoiselle, reward me, if you will by letting me hear the stave you were going to sing and I ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... been confounded upon another point—the prodigious interest manifested by the public. Thus it seems—that, whilst he meditated only a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one for himself; and finally, to evade the suspicions which began to arise powerfully as to his true motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin, had found himself in a manner obliged to go forward and ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... "the waist, since one has to make use of that hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc, disfigure themselves in a less barbarous fashion. For, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... eyed askance by his brethren. No one deigned to call him "Reb" Zelig, nor to prefix to his name the American equivalent—"Mr." "The old one is a barrel with a stave missing," knowingly declared his neighbors. "He never spends a cent; and he belongs nowheres." For "to belong," on New York's East Side, is of no slight importance. It means being a member in one of the numberless congregations. Every decent Jew must join "A Society ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was mad, and he took me by the ear and said I couldn't come no 'Daisy' business on him the second time. He said he knew I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and prepare for the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went down stairs and broke up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me with. Well, I had to think mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got a dried bladder in my room, one that me and my chum got to the slotter house, and blowed it partly up, so it would be sort of flat-like, and I put it down inside ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... gallop while doing so. "Look at him!" repeated Judah. "When I go up to the depot he'll stand right in the middle of the railroad track and go to sleep. I have to whale the timbers out of him to get him awake enough to step ahead so's a train of cars won't stave in his broadside. But get him home here where he can see the barn, the place where he knows I stow the oats, and he wants to run right over top of a stone wall. Can't hardly hold him, I can't. Who-a-a!... Well, Cap'n Sears, here we be at the General Minot place. ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... butt, puncheon, tierce, hogshead, keg, rundlet; (of wine) 31-1/2 gallons; (of flour) 196 pounds. Associated words: gauntree, cooper, bilge, stave, hoop, chine. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... for Handel. Cannot a man live free and easy Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the earth with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... "Is this the place to sneer at an English yeoman, where you see an unprincely prince living by a gambling-table? What says the old stave? ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... these three conditions would stave off recognition by foreign powers, until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to reduce the South ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... length, is firmly fixed; to strengthen their hold, a number of supports are nailed round the outside of the former, and also closely round the latter. The tar is then put into the barrel, and set on fire; and the remaining one being broken up, stave after stave is thrown in, until it is quite full. The 'cl[a]vie,' already burning fiercely, is now shouldered by some strong young man, and borne away at a rapid pace. As soon as the bearer gives signs of exhaustion, another willingly takes his place; and should any of those who are ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... consideration. Work is at a standstill. Mobiles and Nationaux who apply forma pauperis receive one franc and a half per diem. Now, at present prices, it is materially impossible for a single man to buy sufficient food to stave off hunger for this sum, how then those who depend upon it for their sustenance, and have wives and families to support out of it, are able to live, it is difficult to understand. Sooner or later the population will have to be rationed like soldiers, and, if the siege goes on, useless ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... me now some wicked stave, Till thy drooping courage rise, And the glow-worm of the grave Glimmer in thy ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... shall betide ofttimes, for when the ship in her course by night sends a ripple back alongside of the whale, the creature seeing the foam fancies there is something to eat afloat, and makes a rush forward, whereby it often shall stave in some part of the ship). In such case the water that enters the leak flows to the bilge, which is always kept clear; and the mariners having ascertained where the damage is, empty the cargo from that compartment into those adjoining, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... minutes 15 seconds East. On the 1st of July, being then in latitude 9 degrees 39 minutes 30 seconds S and longitude 142 degrees 59 minutes 15 seconds East of Greenwich, they fell in with an island which obtained the name of Tate's Island, and at which they had the misfortune to stave a boat as before mentioned. The circumstances of the murder of Captain Hill, Mr. Carter, Shaw the first mate of the Chesterfield, and the boat's crew, were related by Mr. Dell. It appeared from his account, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... sank or sunk sunk [adj. sunken] sit sat [sate] sat slay slew slain slide slid slidden, slid sling slung slung slink slunk slunk smite smote smitten speak spoke spoken spin spun spun spring sprang, sprung sprung stand stood stood stave stove (staved) (staved) steal stole stolen stick stuck stuck sting stung stung stink stunk, stank stunk stride strode stridden strike struck struck, stricken string strung strung strive strove striven swear swore sworn swim swam or swum swum swing swung swung take ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... Christchurch Police-court on Tuesday, it would almost seem that some of the dark-faced wanderers already are educated a little too much. At all events, they occasionally manifest an ability to 'take a stave' out of the rest of the community. At the court in question a Gipsy woman named Emma Barney was brought to task for 'imposing by subtle craft to extort money' from a Bournemouth shopkeeper named Richard Oliver. It seems that Oliver is troubled with pimples on his face, and ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... beyond Thy walls, O Tagliacozzo, without arms The old Alardo conquer'd; and his limbs One were to show transpierc'd, another his Clean lopt away; a spectacle like this Were but a thing of nought, to the' hideous sight Of the ninth chasm. A rundlet, that hath lost Its middle or side stave, gapes not so wide, As one I mark'd, torn from the chin throughout Down to the hinder passage: 'twixt the legs Dangling his entrails hung, the midriff lay Open to view, and wretched ventricle, That turns ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... returned from a hard three months' campaign. For any one to question our devotion to this cause is to us amazing. The treatment of us by Abolitionists also is enough to try the souls of better saints than we. The secret of all this furor is Republican spite. They want to stave off our question until after the presidential campaign. They can keep all the women still but Susan and me. They can't control us, therefore the united effort of Republicans, Abolitionists and certain women to crush us ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Chan, an' den he teched me up. He nuver hu't me, but in co'se I wuz a-hollerin' ez hard ez I could stave it, 'cause I knowed dat wuz gwine mek him stop. Marse Chan he hed'n open he mouf long ez ole marster wuz tunin' 'im; but soon ez he commence warmin' me an' I begin to holler, Marse Chan he bu'st out cryin', an' stept right in befo' ole marster an' ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... of a bottle and glass, flanked by the words "Bon Vin de Macon a 8 et a 10 S." hinted intelligibly at the well-provided state of Monsieur Fricot's cellar. It was one of those humble eating-houses, abounding in the French capital, where a very hungry man may stave off starvation for about the price of a tooth-pick at the Cafe or the Trois Freres, and where an exceedingly thirsty one may get intoxicated upon potato brandy and essence of logwood for a similar amount. ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... as if I were unbearably stupid. "Nobody could get back! I told you the tunnel caved in, till it was solid between us and the others. Collins saw I had to follow you. In two more minutes Dick would have come to hunt Thompson's stope for me, and we had no guns to stave him off. You and Collins left them in the tunnel!" It was just what we had done, and I wasted good time in remembering it, guiltily. Paulette stood up and twisted back her streaming cloud of hair. "So, as I had to come with you," ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... was this lawless stave, the spirit with which it was sung atoned to the young stranger for its obscurity and quaintness; as for his host, that curious personage took a lusty and prominent part in the chorus; nor did the old woods refuse their share of the burden, but sent back a merry echo to the chief's deep voice ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of our townsfolks now, why some of 'um isn't so good as I, to be sure. There's Tom Forge, the blacksmith, and little Daniel Snip, the tailor, and Roger Peg, the cobbler, and Tim Frize, the barber, and Landlord Tipple, that keeps the ale-house at the sign of the Turk's Head, and Jeremy Stave, the clerk of the meeting-house, why, there an't one of 'um that's a single copper before a beggar, as the old saying is; but what o' that? We isn't all born alike, as father says; for my part, I likes to be friendly, so give us your hand. You mus'n't think how I casts ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... Fats stave off the feeling of hunger longer than other foods because they pass more slowly from the stomach and delay the passage of foods eaten with them. A slice of bread and butter will "satisfy" one for a much longer time ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... uttered a mocking laugh as he stepped to a rough shelf and took a little pail-like vessel with one stave prolonged into a handle from the place where it had been left clean by the last occupant of the hut, and as he stepped with it to the open door something ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... sing anither stave. It was lanesome stan'in' upo' the ootside here, as gin I war ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... see, As step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers evading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... me trouble her no more with sighs! Heart-healing comes by distance, and with time: Then let me wander, and enrich mine eyes With the green forests of a softer clime, Or list by night at sea the wind's low stave And long ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... might be possible to stave death off for a time if a way could be found of setting up a reaction in the lower extremities; but if the symptoms do not abate by to-morrow evening, it will be all over with him, poor old fellow! Do you know what has happened to bring this ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... one or two who praised it much, and deemed it marvellous as might well be that a child should have faced and slain those three monsters who had put two stout men to flight. And one man made up this stave, which was presently sung all about the Eastern Mote, and went over the water with the tale ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... changes. After their horse will come the little devil-guns that they can drag up to the tops of the hills, and, for aught I know, to the clouds when we crown the hills. If the tribe-council thinks good, I will go to Tallantire Sahib—who loves me—and see if I can stave off at least the blockade. Do I speak for ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... ponder upon what they have been, what they are, or what is like to become of them hereafter: such thoughts they count unmanly and hurtful. And now they are for any thing rather than the word: an alehouse, a playhouse, sports, pleasures, sleep, the world, and what not, so they may stave of the power of ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... German mobilization, he said, would mean war. The results of the second interview, which took place at two o'clock in the morning, were as negative as those of the first, notwithstanding a last effort, a final suggestion by M. Sazonoff to stave off the crisis. His giving in to Germany's brutal dictation would have been an avowal that ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... his hold may be firm and his stab sure; yet the world know not that, and they trust him, and he is singled out as a pattern-man for youth to follow; and so—but we all play parts—all, all! And now for a stave of a song: Hurrah for the free trade!—a shout for the brave Buccaneers!—a pottle of sack!—and now, sir, I am myself again! The brimstone smell of that dark ruffian nearly overpowered me!" So saying, he passed his hand frequently over his brows, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... execution of the design. Against these falsehoods the English ambassador found it difficult to make headway, although he assured the queen of the immediate punishment of the perpetrators, and the arrest and recall of the Governor of Jamaica. Only by the greatest tact and prudence was he able to stave off, until an official disavowal of the expedition came from England, an immediate embargo on all the goods of English merchants in Spain. The Spanish government decided to send a fleet of 10,000 men with all speed to the Indies; and the Dukes ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... concerning the Treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to this exalted stave in the Ladder of Learning for the astonishment of a visitor; and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard them exercised in simpler lessons, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... elated and yet humbled him. His was a simple soul, and took its responsibilities seriously. He sought not to inquire for what high purpose Providence had so signally intervened to stave off from the East and West Looe Artillery the doom of common men. He only prayed to be equal to it. The Doctor's statistics had, in fact, scared him a little. I am ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sir," said Hal, "you can do the poor fool no further good! but only bring the pack about the ears of the mangy hound." And he sang a stave appropriated by a ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rascals, and you have the same way of looking at things," said he. "Our object is to keep things going for another twenty-four hours. After that it does not much matter what befalls us, for we shall be out of the reach of rescue. But how can we stave them ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... word that was spoken; when, in some few succeeding seconds, the diapason stop only was opened ... and how sweet and touching was the melody which it imparted! "Oh Dieu! (exclaimed our valet) que cela est ravissant, et meme penetrant." This was true enough. A solemn stave or two of a hymn (during which a few other pipes were opened) was then performed by the organist ... and the effect was, as if these notes had been chanted by an invisible choir of angels. The darkness of the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... beginning, but when you are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary consultation over the map—that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found myself submitting, and following ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a dark flight of steps, damp and slippery. The ooze and slime rendered his footing tedious and insecure. Soon he recognised the mighty voice of Gideon bellowing forth a triumphant psalm. Another stave was just commencing as the door opened, and the torch glared lurid and dismally on the iron features and grisly aspect of the captive. A pair of rude stocks, through which Gideon's long extremities protruded, stood in the middle of the dungeon. He scowled terrifically at ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... with the mermaid; whereat the graver man clapped a hand before his mouth, and swore he should take her in wedlock, to have and to hold, if he sang another stave. 'And thou shalt be her pretty little bridemaid,' quoth he gaily to the graver man, chucking him under ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... she managed to stave off the evil day until lunch was half over; but procrastination was not nearly as wholesale a thief of time as they ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... seldom hesitated to do anything they wished on account of the weather, as it was not so cold to the natives as to us. They played with balls, both large and small, and sleds of all descriptions; and if the latter were not to be had, or all in use, a barrel stave or board would be made to answer the same purpose. It was a rush past the window down the hill, first by a pair of muckluked feet, then a barrel stave and a boy, sometimes little Pete, and sometimes John. One barrel stave would hold only one coaster, and there were usually ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... the threshold Herdegen saw through their purpose, and had no sooner shut the door than he drew his hunting knife. Then the old beldame gripped him by the throat and clawed him tooth and nail; one of the ruffians beat him with a stave torn from the bedstead till he weened he had broken or bruised all his limbs, while the other, whose hands were yet bound, pressed between him and the door. In truth he would have come to a bad end, but that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... repeating it, for it ain't worth hearing, and won't go down with ME. I'm a-going to unfold your plan, before this young lady; I'm a-going to show this young lady the second view of you; and nothing you can say will stave it off. (Now, attend here, Bella, my dear.) Rokesmith, you're a needy chap. You're a chap that I pick up in the street. Are you, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... fabrics. The purpose of the Universal calender is, says the Engineer, to enable limited quantities of goods to be finished in various ways without requiring different machines. The machine consists of suitable framing, to which is attached all the requisite stave rails, batching apparatus, compound levers, top and bottom adjusting screws, and level setting down gear, also Stanley roller with all its adjustments. It is furthermore supplied with chasing arrangement and four bowls; the bottom one is of cast iron, with wrought iron center; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... gripping the pen as a drowning man holds to a stave, was moving without his volition. It was scrawling in huge letters, over ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... circulation of the blood, but every time I arose half way I tumbled helplessly back into the snow. The desire to live increased, and when I felt the numbness creep from my limbs into my body, I crawled alongside Peoria Red and snuggled closely against him, hoping that our mutual body warmth would stave off the crisis to the last possible moment. He was groaning, and mustering the last vestige of control I yet had over my benumbed hands, I searched about in the darkness until I found his frozen fingers, and clasping them in my own I placed ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... Elizabeth's policy had been dictated by a most consummate, if by no means elevated, state-craft based upon an abnormally astute calculation of risks and chances, or merely by a desperate desire to stave off an immediate contest, whatever shifts might be involved; whether it was in fact peculiarly long-sighted, or opportunist to the last and lowest degree; it had been actually a complete success. She had ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Europe was heckling him; the settling of accounts was near. Commissioners had been sent to find where were the ninety millions he had borrowed. Only Ismail and Sadik the Mouffetish, once slave and foster-brother, could reply. The Khedive could not long stave off the evil day when he must "pay the debt of the lobster," and Sadik give account of his stewardship. Meanwhile, his mind turned to the resourceful little Englishman with the face of a girl and the tongue of an ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have had. Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person in the Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in smoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making their appearance. Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's cherished claim to levy "impositions," or custom duties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative—a claim which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his best to ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman. "Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... quiet with me. Presently I heard a yell from the camp, which was about three hundred yards away. 'That's mischief,' says I. I had scarce spoken when there was a yelling fit to make your har stand on end, and I heard pistol-shots. 'Quick,' lads, says I, 'catch up a hatchet and stave a hole in the other boats, and push ours a little way out from the bank.' We warn't long in doing that, and ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... or some such sorrowful ditty."—"By no means," cried the doctor; "such pastimes are neither suitable to the place, nor the occasion, which is altogether a religious exercise. If you have got any psalms by heart, you may sing a stave or two, or repeat the Doxology."—"Would I had Tom Laverick here," replied our novitiate; "he would sing your anthems like a sea-mew—a had been a clerk a-shore—many's the time and often I've given him a rope's end for singing psalms in the larboard watch. Would I had hired the son of a b—-h ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... Dick ought to know. But at least there must be no warfare here in this warm patch of shelter snatched out of the cold and dark. His hand was on Old Crow's journal, Dick's inheritance, he thought, as well as his, and now a fortunate pretext to stave off an awkward moment. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... time for further words. The four quickly made for the gates. They opened and closed them quickly. Each held a stave that seemed not unlike a young tree, of which a number were inside ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... well-to-do planters own a tobacco straightener and screw-press, inventions which materially lessen the manual labor of preparing the crop for market. Each hogshead is branded with the name of the owner, and thus shipped to his commission-merchant, when the hogshead is 'broken' by tearing off a stave, thus exposing the strata of the bulk to view. Of late years some planters have been guilty of 'nesting,' or placing prime leaf around the outer part and an inferior article in ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and whistle and caper to it, and purr and pray, and chant a hymn to Hecate while it melts, entreating and imploring her that I may melt as easily—and thou wouldst, in thy equity and holiness, strangle him at the first stave of his psalmody. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... works of literature and art is as necessary for the continued development of either one or the other as death is for that of organic life. We fight against it as long as we can, and often stave it off successfully both for ourselves and others, but there is nothing so great—not Homer, Shakespeare, Handel, Rembrandt, Giovanni Bellini, De Hooghe, Velasquez and the goodly company of other great men for whose lives we would gladly give our own—but it has got to go sooner or later ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the Fahy Committee, even the demands of civil rights leaders and the mandates of the draft law, all exerted pressure for reform and assured the presence of some black marines. But the Marine Corps was for years able to stave off the logical outcome of such pressures, and in the end it was the manpower demands of the Korean ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... Victoria. The Sergeant smiled like the carved head of a Swiss nutcracker, and the other gentlemen in my neighborhood, by nods and gestures, evinced grave approbation of so suitable a tribute to English superiority; and we finished our stave and sat down in an ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... blood was now up, and boiling like an old Roman's; so he was determined to show Cursecowl that I had a friend in court, able and willing to keep him at stave's-end. "Keep a calm sough," said James Batter, interfering, "and not miscall the head of the house in his own shop; or, to say nothing of present consequences, byway of showing ye the road to the door, perhaps Maister Sneckdrawer, the penny-writer, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... as if she had been dealing in lumber for ever so long, that the most important and essential thing in life was lumber. There was something touching and endearing in the way she pronounced the words, "beam," "joist," "plank," "stave," "lath," "gun-carriage," "clamp." At night she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, long, endless rows of wagons conveying the wood somewhere, far, far from the city. She dreamed that a whole regiment of beams, 36 ft. x 5 in., were advancing in an ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... and to Hardy's apprehensive eyes she seemed on the verge of tears. So he spoke, blindly and without consideration, filled with a man's anxiety to stave off this ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the boats away, and the anchors. Stave in the water-casks. Heave all spare shot and tackle overboard—we need nowt but the boards we stand on and the guns we fight; and make what sail you can on her.... I shall bear away for the shore. Don't mean bein took at my ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... in the early part of Esar-haddon's reign, public prayers and fasts "for one hundred days and one hundred nights" were ordained by the "prophets" in the hope that the Sun-god might "remove the sin" of the people and stave off the threatened attack. So, again, when Assur-bani-pal had suppressed the Babylonian revolt and taken Babylon after a long siege, he tells us that "at the instance of the prophets he purified the mercy-seats and ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... Although differing so widely from Guyon Vidocq, he, without any effort to do so, and indeed unconsciously, disputed the palm of popularity with him. He was an active, powerful man too, and though terribly pockmarked, had a most agreeable countenance. He could troll a pleasant stave, and loved, when off hunting or at work with his axe sometimes, to sing one of our C—- Sunday hymns, and whenever there was a respectable party in the evening, instead of the usual rioting set, he would willingly give ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... disavow her protege, which is a fact not unthought of by the house of Auersperg. By constant machination and intrigue the king's revenues have been so depleted that ordinary debts are troublesome. The archbishop, to stave off the probable end, brought about the alliance between the houses of Carnavia and Osia. My business here is to arrange for a ten years' renewal of the loan, and that is what the duchess wishes to prevent, mon ami. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... first half of their onward march; and as they could follow a plain trail for the remainder of the way, they had no further need of their guide's services. They promised to visit Eb at his bark hut on their return journey, to bid him a final farewell, and hear one more stave of:— ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... the darkness now, steals the strain we knew: No one even knows his grave! Only here and there a stave, Out of all his hedge-row flock, be-drips the may with dew. And I know not what wild bird Carried us his parting word:— Master Shakespeare needn't take ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... by a triumph in words all the more resolute that it feels assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in action. As in such slipshod housekeeping men are their own largest creditors, they find it easy to stave off utter bankruptcy of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise with another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling becomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge discount his own notes of this kind with less and less ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... I heard the sound of hoofs pounding on soft soil. Whoever the fellow was, he was almost there—coming up at a trot, just back of the stables. My brain worked in a flash—there was but once chance to stave off discovery. With a bound I was beside the boy, and had jerked off his hat, jamming it down on my own head, as I muttered in his ear, "One word from you now, and you'll never ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... Garlands are of various forms. Those in Peterborough are formed of two hoops fastened together to form a globe and a stick or stave through the centre. The hoops are decorated with flowers and ribbons, and when the children possess one, the best doll is fixed on the stick inside the garland. Two girls carry the garland which is carefully ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... the stars at night when the moon is down, Pleasures assail him. He to his nobler fate Fares; and but waves a hand as he passes on, Cries but a wayside word to her at the garden gate, Sings but a boyish stave and his face ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... animal intimacy. So he saw that day by day their lives were slipping to a lower plane; day by day they were discovering new weaknesses and developing new vices in themselves. Corydon was now a good part of the time in pain of some sort; and the doctors had accustomed her to stave off these crises with various kinds of drugs, so that she had a set of shelves crowded with pills and powders and bottles. She had learned to rely upon them in emergencies, to plead for them when she was helpless; and so Thyrsis saw her declining into an inferno. He ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... cajoled), perhaps if Brown had been less confident and truthful—if he had had less faith in his old companion's powers as a man of business—it would have come easier to tell the truth. And how futile a thing it was to stave off discovery for a single day! How doubly ashamed he would have to feel after that poor pretence of responsible solidity! If he had only been disposed to be tempted at all—here surely was an added reason for ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the right scent on it," said Solomon, as he was ripping the hide off the other steer. "I reckon it'll start the sap in their mouths. You roll out the rum bar'l an' stave it in. Mis' Bones knows how to shoot. Put her in the shed with yer mother an' the guns, an' take her young 'uns to the sugar shanty 'cept Isr'el who's ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... iv., scene 1; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando, compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall please you to select—the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if you have any ear for that class of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would not be any fun to stave a hole in the bottom of the boat. It doesn't belong ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... go to my office, as the Director was absent in London, and there I applied myself to the notes and spaces below the stave, but relinquished the exercise, convinced that these mysteries were unattainable by man, while the knowledge that above the stave there were others and not less ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... far end of the room, crept a faint note of music. The players were carefully concealed behind banked palms and gigantic ferns. To the surprised ears of those unaware of their presence it came first as a single note, then a chord, a stave, a vibrant meaning. It was like a distant bugle call across a midnight plain. It swelled ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... and removed The dead trunks and the fallen trees. He dressed and regulated The bushy clumps and the (tangled) rows. He opened up and cleared The tamarisk trees and the stave trees. He hewed and thinned The mountain mulberry trees. God having brought about the removal thither of this intelligent ruler, The Kwan hordes fled away[2]. Heaven had raised up a helpmeet for him, And the appointment he ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D'avenant's) to be sung ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... another like that and it's home! Pitch into it, Mivins. You're the boy for me. Now, then, Grim, trip him up! Hallo, Buzzby, you bluff-bowed Dutchman, luff! luff! or I'll stave in your ribs! Mind your eye, Mizzle, there's Green, he'll be into your larboard quarter in no time. Hurrah! Mivins, up in the air with it. Kick, boy, kick like a spanker boom ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... task to get the dory aboard, even with the aid of the Bolo's stern davits. The sea was rising every minute and even when they had the "falls," as they are called, secured to the little dinghy, she threatened to stave either herself or the Bolo while she was being hoisted and lashed. At last, however, even that task was accomplished and the boys began to anticipate a rest. But the indefatigable Ben would not let ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible—and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now—this—this—" She broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been manicured since the morning. "George has gone—we think ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... tricks to which he was addicted, I must say he did the inimitable scene great justice. At all events, the effect it produced was deep and memorable, and no wonder that the exulting typographer's one bumper more to Jedediah Cleishbotham preceded his parting stave, which was uniformly The Last Words of Marmion, executed certainly with no contemptible rivalry ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... venture near this gate, for it looks out upon the street, and I care not to be seen by any Indian or half-breed Spaniard who might go loitering by; but as I stood in the vine-covered arbour in the centre of the garden I heard a man's voice from the direction of the gate, humming a stave of a maritime air that I had heard sung oft and again by the sailors on the sloop, in which some unknown fair one is ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... order. He is their embodiment: he is the most emblematic figure in the modern world that I know—in this country, at any rate—representing so much that is good in the great traditions which have got to go. And to stave off that day he will do almost anything. He would even—if he thought it would enable him the better to prick some of his bubbles—he would even take office ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... need of our all falling into a panic, or all being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of things—things ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... secession fires assumed a whiter heat. In the Convention the Union men no longer utter denunciations against the disunionists. They merely resort to pretexts and quibbles to stave off the inevitable ordinance. They had sent a deputation to Washington to make a final appeal to Seward and Lincoln to vouchsafe them such guarantees as would enable them to keep Virginia to her moorings. But in vain. They could not obtain even a promise ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... a case of impalement in a woman of forty-five who, while attempting to obtain water from a hogshead, fell with one limb inside the cistern, striking a projecting stave three inches wide and 1/2 inch thick. The external labia were divided, the left crus of the clitoris separated, the nymphae lacerated, and the vaginal wall penetrated to the extent of five inches; the patient recovered ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... trope curse ache fleece trite grope hearse bathe steer splice broke purge lathe speech stripe stroke scourge plaint sphere tithe cloak verge brain fief yield crock squeal slave field fierce block league quake thief pierce flock plead stave fiend tierce shock squeak plague shriek niece ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... first time I happened to roar out a stave in the presence of noble Mehevi. It was a stanza from the 'Bavarian broom-seller'. His Typeean majesty, with all his court, gazed upon me in amazement, as if I had displayed some preternatural faculty which Heaven had denied to them. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... unknown of air, Out of all summer, from wave to wave, He'll perch, and prank his feathers fair, Jangle a glass-clear wildering stave, And take ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... thing), it would be the signal for adding forty more to the list, and so you would be more encumbered than ever. It is useless to make these poor spasmodic efforts. The thing must be done effectually. You are hopelessly bankrupt, and the driblets of aid you solicit will not enable you to stave off ruin. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... through. I'm an old hand, but when it comes to striking a swamp where I said there'd be a reef, it's time to shift. You're the boss now. I'll be cook and bring along the accordion. A bit of a stave may ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... torment and terror of all douce fogies, male and female,—even the Boys, I say, respected Captain Willis, so potent was the influence of his gentleness; nailed not up his shutters, nor tied fishing-lines across his doorway; tail-piped not his dog, nor sent his cat to sea on a barrel-stave; nor put live crabs into his pocket, nor dead dog-fish into his well; yea, even when judgment, too long provoked, made bare her red right hand, and the lieutenant vowed by his commission that he would send half-a-dozen of them to the treadmill, they would send up a deputation to "beg ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... not be misunderstood. I agree with Mr. Williams that these things are desirable, but not for the reason for which he desires them. By him they are put forward as devices to help to stave off the impending ruin of the country. For that purpose they are not needed, for there is not the slightest real evidence that ruin is impending. On the contrary, we are progressing rapidly in trade abroad and in prosperity at home. It is solely because I believe that we are capable of making ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... and slightly mummified. He noticed that it had killed itself with a shotgun—possibly because of an Oren-sting. He caught up the scarce weapon lest the girl grab it and run. Then he dragged the corpse out by the foot and left it under an orange tree. The oranges were green, but he picked a few to stave off the pangs ...
— Collectivum • Mike Lewis
... and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... among the broken land, and incurring the dangers of the northern shore, which was to leeward; towards this broken land, however, and lee-shore, the ship settled very fast, notwithstanding our utmost efforts: In this pressing emergency we were obliged to stave all the water-casks upon the deck, and between decks, to clear the vessel, and to make her carry better sail, and at length, happily escaped the danger which threatened us. After we got clear of those islands, and drew off from the Streight's mouth and the land, we ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... short tale, of a somewhat grisly character, which Abner had composed during the holiday season. Bond had taxed him with using this work as a buffer to stave off other work of a practical nature such as was abundantly offered by Giles and his father about the farm; and, to tell the truth, Abner had limited his physical exertions to half-hour periods that most other men would have charged to ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... aid the South! Men of England, we are suffering for a principle common to all humanity; can not you suffer somewhat with us? Can you not, out of the inexhaustible wealth of your islands, find wherewithal to stave off the bitter need, for a season, of your cotton-spinners? Feed them?—why we would, for a little aid in our dire need, have poured in millions of bushels of wheat to your poor,—one brave, decided act of sympathy on your part for us would ere this ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... big men in the business kept faith with him. Now and then, when the British Intelligence were too hot on the trail, Parrish and Marbran would give away one of the small fry belonging to the organization and thus stave off suspicion. They could do this in complete safety, for so perfect was their organization that the small fry only knew the small fry in the shallows and never the big fish ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... "I'm going a stave higher still. Keep your hair on!" she shouted down to Ulyth, and began swarming up the bole of a huge old oak-tree that abutted on the wall. She was strong and active as a boy, and had soon scrambled ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... clinging vines. From below there was a sound of music. Up at the Fort the band was playing. There was no moon, but the stars were bright and glittering in strange tints. Now and then a party rather merry with wine and whisky trolled out a noisy stave that had been imported from the mother country years ago about Jacques and his loves ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... only too glad to shelve him. If he were shelved here his other two Companies would be sure to follow suit, and bang would go every penny of his income—he would be a pauper dependant on that holy woman. Well! Safe now for another year if he could stave off these sharks once more. It might be a harder job this time, but he was in luck—in luck, and it must hold. And taking a luxurious pull at his cigar, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... once," said Curly. "If I'd take a barrel stave and pound him with it, saying all the time, 'Nice doggie, isn't this fun! Isn't this a nice little stick! Don't you like these little love pats?' he'd wag his tail and slobber and tell me how much he enjoyed it and beg for ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... senses, I could hear a hundred harsh and melancholy groaning and straining sounds rising from the hull, with now and again a mighty blow as from some spar or lump of ice alongside, weighty enough, you would have supposed, to stave the ship. But though the Laughing Mary was not a new vessel, she was one of the stoutest of her kind ever launched, built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer. Nevertheless her continuing ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... to the Union Arms, so seemed to grow proportionately the efforts, on all sides, to force forward, or to stave off, as the case might be, the great question of the liberation and arming of the Slaves, as a War Measure, under the War powers of the Constitution. It was about this time (July 12, 1862) that President Lincoln ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... different than Mr. Sowerby's tone about money at different times. When he wanted to raise the wind, everything was so important; haste and superhuman efforts, and men running to and fro with blank acceptances in their hands, could alone stave off the crack of doom; but at other times, when retaliatory applications were made to him, he could prove with the easiest voice and most jaunty manner that everything was quite serene. Now, at this period, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... can tell you. Sudden as the blow was, I had countered, in the automatic sort of way that a man who knows anything of boxing does. It was only from the elbow, with no body behind it, but it served to stave him off for the moment, while I was making inquiries about my windpipe. Then in he came with a rush; and the crowd swarming round with shrieks of delight, we were pushed, almost locked in each other's arms on to that big pedestal ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... the office she give me! She rip and stave and tear! She talk of political slander, and libel, and disgrace, and all that. She rise up big right afore me, and come nigh swearing she would kill such a David Lockwin on sight. There wasn't no such a David Lockwin at all. Her husband was ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
