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More "Tinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... due to Dr. Robert K. Root and Dr. Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale University, and to Dr. Charles H. Whitman of Lehigh University, for examining part of the work in manuscript, and to Dr. Albert S. Cook of Yale University for a careful ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... sentiment to take sides, and the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The raids of passing soldiers was the excuse for the organization, by both sides, of bands who claimed they were "Home Guards"—the Federals under "Tinker" Beaty, and the Confederates under Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving for the mastery, soon developed into guerrillas of the worst type the war produced, ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... was Nathan Perry, with a mechanical instinct that gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to get excited about over the renomination and election ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... have all de trouble in de world. He boy, Ned, die in de war and William, what name for he pa, drink bad all de time. And after de war dem Ku Kluxers what wear de false faces try to tinker with Marse's niggers. One day Uncle Dave start to town and a Kluxer ask him where am he pass. Dat Kluxer clout him but Uncle Dave outrun him in de cane. Marse grab de hoss and go 'rest dat man and Marse a jedge and he make dat man pay de fine for hittin' Uncle ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... such men, who murdered every prisoner that they took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received positive information of the strength and position of the enemy ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... why tar supplies all sorts of useful material is because it is indeed the quintessence of the forest, of the forests of untold millenniums if it is coal tar. If you are acquainted with a village tinker, one of those all-round mechanics who still survive in this age of specialization and can mend anything from a baby-carriage to an automobile, you will know that he has on the floor of his back shop ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... a flock of geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... to be frightened because he was so angry, and he spoke right out loud! He stood up and shook his fist at the Tinker. His head showed over the top of the wall. ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... to puzzle out his philosophy. For the ordinary French philosophy of the war is very simple. They have no high-falutin, altruistic ideas of improving the Boche. They don't care a tinker's curse what happens to the unholy brood beyond the Rhine, so long as they are beaten, humiliated, subjected: so long as there is no chance of their ever deflowering again with their brutality the sacred soil of France. The French mind cannot ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking landlady ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... PROGRESS, and HOLY WAR, are apparently little aware of the glowing genius, and fervent piety, and strong sense, and picturesque imagery, and racy, vigorous English, that mark the many other writings of the honored tinker of Elstow. These last, if less known than the story of the pilgrimage to the Celestial City, and of the siege and recovery of the good town of Mansoul, yet bear all of them the traces of the same vivid fancy, the same earnest heart, and the same robust and sanctified intellect. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies, whom, in truth, they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... records, of letters, of printing, of critics; wars, revolutions, factions, and other causes, occasioned these defects in ancient history. Chronology and astronomy are forced to tinker up and reconcile, as well as they can, those uncertainties. This satisfies the learned—but what should we think of the reign of George the Second, to be calculated two thousand years hence by eclipses, lest the conquest of Canada should be ascribed ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me—from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850—down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries; to ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... above all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the zeal of his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated by the abilities of his disciple Eunomius. Armed with texts of Scripture, and with captious syllogisms from the logic of Aristotle, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... scared!" said Gribble, kindly. "It's only a broken bone or so." As this consoling assurance seemed not to lessen Jane's alarm, he went on cheerfully to say, "There isn't one in my body hasn't been splintered by these broncos! Tinker 'em up and they're better than new. Here's doc coming lickety-switch! ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... for John Bunyan—how He made one of the mightiest instruments for good the world ever saw, out of that swearing Bedford tinker. If we had a telescope which would enable us to look into heaven as Stephen did, I can imagine we should see the thief, who believed in Jesus while on the cross, very near the throne. Ask him how he got there; ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... a mass o' blind onreas'ning prejudice from horn to tail. Take hes sense o' colour: he can't abide red. Ef you press the matter, there ain't no more reas'n for this than that hes father afore him cudn' abide et; but how does he act? 'Hulloa!' says he, 'there's a party in red, an' I don't care a tinker's cuss whether 'tes a mail-cart or a milisha-man: I'm bound to stop this 'ere taste for red ef I dies nex' minnit.' And at et he goes accordin'. Ef he seed the Scarlet Woman about in his part o' the country, he'd lay by an' h'ist her, an' you'd say, 'Well done!' an' I don't say ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who were sleepy go ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... play periods, Jimmy took to staying in. The permissive school encouraged it; if Jimmy Holden preferred to tinker with a typewriter instead of playing noisy games, his teacher saw no wrong in it—for his Third Grade teacher was something of an ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... with care and anxiety, about this farming project of mine, that my muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wench that ever picked cinders, or followed a tinker. When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming; at present, the world sits such a load on my mind, that it has effaced almost every trace of the poet ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... matter. Mrs. Hedgehog and I had never seen tinkers, and we resolved to take an early opportunity some evening of sending the seven urchins down to the burdock plantations to pick snails, whilst we paid a cautious visit to the tinker camp. ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... hair, and a very peculiar shrill voice and laugh. His most intimate friend at Eton was a boy named Price, who was considered one of the best classical scholars amongst us. At his tutor, Bethell's, where he lodged, he attempted many mechanical and scientific experiments. By the aid of a common tinker, he contrived to make something like a steam-engine, which, unfortunately, one day suddenly exploded; to the great consternation of the neighbourhood and to the imminent danger of a ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... of the peace; "you can shut up your school at five o'clock every night, and every cheesemonger and tinker in the place can do the same; but we've got no time we can call our own. Pull your chair up to the fire, old fellow. Let's see, what were we saying?" The servant appeared again at this point, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... have it sent over here," said Tom, "unless I'll send my own horse and cart to fetch it. And every man and boy I have about the place is desired to leave me at the command of some d——d O'Toole, whose father kept a tinker's shop somewhere in County Mayo, and whose mother ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... found on the roll of free miners—Garone, Clarke, Wytt, Nortone, Mitchell, Lumbart, Ocle, Barton, Heynes, Arminger, Rogers, Hathen, Miller, Croudfell, Dull, Loofe, Forthey, Walker, Tinker, Witch, Delewger, Doles, Hinde, Tellow, Backstar, Lawrence, Dolet, Caloe, Holt; in place of which names the following now occur—Baldwin, Cook, Dobbs, Hale, Jenkins, Kear, Morgan, Philipps, Harper, Davis, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. El Dancaire and I got there ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... hoped ye'd feel all right this mornin'. Let's see th' bandage—I guess it's slipped." He began to tinker at the wound in rather a clumsy way until ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the French clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous decree making ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... up the shaft for us,—a cunning old beggar, the pere de famille of the encampment; up to every move on the board. He wanted to have a deal with me for Jessy. But 'pon my honor, we had a good time of it. There was the old tinker, mending the shaft, in his fur cap, with a black pipe, one inch long, sticking out of his mouth; and the old brown parchment of a mother, with her head in a red handkerchief, smoking a ditto pipe to the tinker's, who told our fortunes, and talked like ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... inexperienced teacher will find a splendid version, "The Story of Beowulf," ready-made in Wyche's Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them. To work from the complete epic, use any of the translations by Child, Tinker, Gummere, or Hall. "Perhaps it is not too much to assert . . . that in its lofty spirit, its vigor, and its sincerity, . . . it reflects traits which are distinctive of English-speaking people ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... very much obliged to you.—You send a brazier to challenge me, and now, I suppose, you have brought a travelling tinker for his second. Where ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to make ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... it for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might have ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This wonderful little sketch, however—the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... with dew, and crossed by the shadows of the bare elms, Atherley's little sons, Harold and Denis, were playing with a very unlovely but much-beloved mongrel called Tip. They had bought him with their own pocket-money from a tinker who was ill-using him, and then claimed for him the hospitality of their parents; so, though Atherley often spoke of the dog as a disgrace to the household, he remained a member thereof, and received, from a ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... day, and when Herbert came back and we had found a bed-room for our visitor in Essex Street, he told us all of it. His name was Magwitch—Abel Magwitch—he called himself Provis now—and he had been left by a travelling tinker to grow up alone. "In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail—that's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend." But there was a man who "set up fur a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... so constituted not a science but a mystery. So has it always been with chemistry, the most cosmopolitan of sciences, the most secret of arts. Quietly and stealthily it crept through the world; the tinker brought it with his solder and his flux; the African tribes who were the first workers in iron passed it on to the great metallurgists who ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He thanked her ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how small. So he brought out the kettle, which had resumed its former ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... to tinker with voting the first thing necessary is to get rid of the constitution. We have had one for a hundred and twenty-five years with a provision for changing it. It has needed change. It needs it all the while, and yet it has never been changed but once. They passed several amendments all in a heap. ...
— Industrial Conspiracies • Clarence S. Darrow
... 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, gentleman, apothecary, ploughboy, thief,' said Katie. 'That would only be eight; what should the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Frank Brangwyn may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air, hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size, but also because Brangwyn is practically the first ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... because you have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... would!" Lady Muriel gaily retorted. "Soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, what a lot of words would fit in! I think 'my tinker-lad sounds best. Don't you?" ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... book without one word in it of John Bunyan, the tinker, probably the gipsy, who although born only and not made a poet, like his great brother, John Milton, has uttered in prose a wealth of poetic thought. He was born in 1628, twenty years after Milton. I must not, however, remark on this noble ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... game, yes; but a cursed poor game—for a God. The counters don't matter, I know; they'll soon be broken up and flung away; and the sooner the better. It's living hell to be born into a world where there's no justice—none for king or tinker." ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the Rue de Bauboug; and were even furnished with a number ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... inevitably retained stuffy old Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... other engineer in all the navies o' the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... reaping-hook into a sabre, or getting a long pike made with an axe at the end of it; so Michael Stein's smithy is turned into a perfect armoury, and he and his two sons are at work at the anvil morning, noon, and night: they made Annot blow the bellows this morning, till she looks for all the world like a tinker's wife." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... tell 'e this. If you dare to lift up your eyes to my child again, or stop her in the way, or have speech with her, I'll set p'liceman 'pon 'e! For a year and more she 'm not her awn mistress; and, at the end of that time, if she doan't get better sense than to tinker arter a harum-scarum young jackanapes like you, she ban't a true Lyddon. Now be off with 'e an' doan't dare to look same way Phoebe 's walkin', no more, else ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... and suggested the good results of another well compounded punch, which the general ordered without delay. "I tell you, sir," Mr. Tickler resumed, "he is an oily gentleman in very shabby clothes, and might be easily mistaken for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set up for a man of letters. His aversion to water and clean linen is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... "You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your jaw, I'll——" But here she gasped for breath, unable to hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell had nearly knocked ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... countenance, and similarly clad; there were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not know, indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all,' said the man in black; 'but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker. When He whom you call the Saviour gave His followers the sop and bade them eat it, telling them it was His body, He delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after His death, namely, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... cried his friend—"the worst of all! Avarice is a gentleman to ambition! Avarice is merely a tinker, a dealer in old metal; but ambition is a chimney-sweep of a passion: a mere climbing-boy, who will go through any dirty hole in all Christendom only to get out at the top of the chimney. But you have not guessed, Wilton—you ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... his face, (Silent heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, most dear, The ringing voices, like sweet silver bells, Of his two little ones. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Put a peg in that! Shiver my soul if this is a way to welcome friends! Come aboard all of you and test the Canary we got in the hold of a fine Spanish galleon last week! Such a top-heavy ship, with sails like a tinker's tatters, you never saw! And her hold running over with Canary and Madeira—oh! Come aboard! ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and a poor, ill-fed beast harnessed to it, happened to be passing, and heard the little girl's words. He stared after her, for she seemed very small to speak so wisely, and the tinker did not, of course, know that she was only repeating what she had heard her ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... the disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... first father of all religion, is not he stark blind, that he can not himself distinguish of colors, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hobnailed suitor prefers Joan the milkmaid before any of milady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence only that all societies receive their cement ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... will you gain dragging me to the priest this night, I'm saying, when it's new thoughts you'll be thinking at the dawn of day? SARAH — teasingly. — It's at the dawn of day I do be thinking I'd have a right to be going off to the rich tinker's do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it'd be a fine life to ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... replied Deaker, "you forget, that you had more vices, and,'hammers, too, in your family, and more brass, than ever I or mine could' boast of. If the memory of that successful old tinker, your grandfather, had not passed out of your mind, you would make no allusion to vices or screws, and take care, my good hot-brained young fellow, that you don't die in your family trade, and come to ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... said Patsy Kenny. "Too hard. He had no right to be carryin' all that tinker's stuff. That man of yours, my girl, oughtn't to be let ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... "There's a Tinker's boy in the town," said the Innkeeper, darkly, "and he's always looking out for Hedgehogs—I shouldn't be surprised if he ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... 'usual crowd': the three young ladies, commonly; one or two young men who understand how to tinker the oil-stove—which usually needs it—and how to prime the pump. They once asked me to do these things; but I've discovered that younger men enjoy it more than I do, so I let them do it. Besides these, a number of miscellaneous ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... twenty, found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books which formed his library. But darkness only gathered ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... 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!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Ship! I've loved and left more of them than I can remember. I've been nearly everything you can think of but a tinker or a soldier; I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep and humped my swag and harpooned a whale; I've rigged ships and skinned dead bullocks and prospected for gold—and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote: Professor Richmann, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... would have fallen down and worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... I passed the cow and went on, stopping an hour later at a lonely log house, where I found French people, and a welcome that included moose meat, a cup of coffee, and fried potatoes. Leaving, I rode some miles with a travelling tinker, a voluble, well-meaning youth who took a liking for me, and went far out of his way to help me on. He blushed proudly when, stopping to mend a pot for the cook at a camp of militia, they inquired if I was ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... leaving off like one, when you wish he would give you another touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one. However, I am not going to review him now; for I ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... The tinker, for such I supposed him to be, without altering his posture, raised his eyes, looked at me for a moment, gave a slight nod, and then once more fixed his eyes upon the table. I took a draught of the ale, which I found excellent; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of real good sense and cultured taste objecting to "The Pilgrim's Progress." Why should he not? Millions of people have read the book, but millions have not; and the fact that many of the best judges of style love Bunyan offers no reason why the good tinker should be loved by everybody. As for "Don Quixote," a fine critic once remarked that he would choose that book if he were to be imprisoned for life, and if he were also allowed to choose one volume. Doubtless ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Ticket Harvey Tiffman Andrew Tillen Jacob Tillen Peter Tillender Thomas Tillinghast David Tilmouse John Tilson Nicholas Tilson Grale Timcent George Timford Jeremiah Timrer Alexander Tindell James Tinker William Tinley Joseph Tinleys Anthony Tioffe Samuel Tippen Jean Tirve Stephen Tissina Michael Titcomb Moses Titcomb James Tobin Thomas Tobin (2) John Todd William Todd Thomas Tolley Francis Tollings Henry Tollmot Thomas Tomay James ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of Fielding's first ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... indicate that the theme of the taming of a wife is crude and primitive folk-farce, particularly suited to the taste of the drunken tinker ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... no sooner had finger'd the cole, But he hies him abroad with his good Madam Vole- Where, like a true tinker, he managed this metal, And while he stopp'd one hole, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count on me just ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... All the other outfits have been sent for, and we'll have enough men to make our bluff stand up, never fear. From what I learn, these herds belong to a lot of Yankee speculators, and they don't give a tinker's dam if all the cattle in Montana die from fever. They're no better than anybody else, and if we allow them to go through, they'll leave a trail of dead natives that will stink us out of this valley. Make ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... one of these Wretches to be seen, but in short, if it has been in other Nations as it is with us, I do not see that the DEVIL was able to get any better People into his Pay, or at least very rarely: Where have we seen any thing above a Tinker turn Wizard? and where have we had a Witch of Quality among us, Mother Je———gs excepted? and if she had not been more of something else than a Witch, 'twas thought she had never got so much Money by ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... glass; but I can't carry a man a thousand miles in my pocket to put that glass into these frames; and if it is done in New Zealand, ten to one it gets broken on the voyage; whereas, glass by itself will pack well. Besides, a pane gets broken, and then I am in a nice fix. To know how to tinker a bit is a good thing; else your only saucepan or tea-kettle may be lying by you useless for months. In fact, if I had known all this before, I should be just ten times as useful as I am now. If anyone you know thinks of emigrating or becoming ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... we'll try anything ye choose to put us at. I had a brother once who was a sort of tinker to trade, an' great at mendin' pots, pans, old umbrellas, and the like. I wos used to help him when a boy. P'r'aps if yer honour, now, has got a old umbrella as wants refittin', I might ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... that for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse; but for your palate you are to be ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... letter from Cambridge to the Christian Observer, very feelingly states the case of a Gypsey family, the father of which, being a travelling tinker and fiddler, intimated, he would be glad to have all his children brought up to some other mode of life, and even to embrace some other himself; but he finds a difficulty in it. Not having been brought up in husbandry, he could not go through the labour of it; and few, if ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... Warrington emptied his pockets upon the table; silver and gold and paper. "Eh? That's the stuff. Without it the world's not worth a tinker's dam. Count out ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him believe ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... my dear! its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife of Louis ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... modest damsel, who will be most willing to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as Knipperdoling, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel played the oboe for his meals. Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose from the ranks. His great industry gained for him the name of "The Indefatigable." Soult served fourteen years before he was ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the object of all religious observances is better obtained, when the government of the church is confided to the wisdom and experience of the most venerated among the people, than when it is placed in the hands of every tinker and tailor who chooses to claim a share in it. Nor is this the only evil attending the want of a national religion, supported by the State. As there is no legal and fixed provision for the clergy, it is hardly ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... Who's your sarvant now?' says the chap, docking up his chin as impident as a tinker's dog. I felt my fingers itching to give the fellow a polthogue[3] in the ear; but I thought I might as well keep myself paceable in a strange place—so I only gave him a contemptible look, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display their jewels or try ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... perfection of a mari, of whom she had been boasting all the way. The incredulous listeners, whom she had so annoyed, now revenged themselves by sundry depreciatory remarks on the appearance of this phoenix, whom they pronounced to have the air of a tinker or old clothesman, and by no means that of the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... question, Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... here yesterday may deserve the appellation. You may perhaps be more interested to hear that I sprained my foot, and am just recovering from the effects of the accident by means of opodeldoc which I bought at the tinker's. For all trades and professions here lie in a most delightful confusion. The druggist sells hats; the shoemaker is the sole bookseller, if that dignity may be allowed him on the strength of the three Welsh Bibles, and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... gentle and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this momentary weakness was overcome. My other choice, the last tale ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that, when he got old and found himself poor, not being able to work, but still able to scrape a few airs upon a violin, he had endeavored to procure one, but in vain. At last his good, kind nephew Eustache, who was apprenticed to a tinker, had made him one out of a tin-plate. "And an excellent one, too," he added; "and my poor boy Eustache brings me here in the morning when he goes to work, and fetches me away in the evening when he returns, and the receipts are not so bad sometimes—as, when he was out ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... You Englishmen take more time to think. The Germans do their work with the most patience and deliberation. We boys desire a holiday. Come on, my men; I will lead you. I, your teacher, desire your success. You, my pupils, are attentive. I called on Tom, the tinker. Friends, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... be recollected, was born in 1628, at Elstow, near Bedford, where the cottage stood in its original state till within these few years. It has latterly been new fronted, but the interior remains nearly as in Bunyan's time. He was the son of a tinker, and followed his father's trade; and at Elstow are the remains of a closet in which, in early life, he carried on business. During the civil war he served as a soldier in the parliament army; and subsequently ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... I was a cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... very long brown cloak, and a very white cap, without bonnet. Her face was brown, but it had plainly once been fair. She led a little barefooted child about two years old by the hand, and said her husband, who was a tinker, was gone before with the other children. I gave her a piece of bread. Afterwards, on my road to Ambleside, beside the bridge at Rydal, I saw her husband sitting at the roadside, his two asses standing beside him, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... half again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... expedition. The gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Jason Denor a Doctor of Padua takes notice of the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the contrary, the censorship, though it learns an awful lot, doesn't care a tinker's hoot about nine-tenths of the stuff it learns. It isn't concerned with Private Jones's morals, with Corporal Brown's unpaid grocery bills, with Sergeant Smith's mother-in-law, with Lieutenant Johnson's ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... into common use. One hundred years after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had really lived. In the Bibliotheca Pastorum Ruskin makes comment on Sir Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him to say precisely in English what David said in Hebrew; impressed the while himself so vividly of the majesty of the thought itself that no tinker's language can lower it or vulgarize it in his ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the story where his mother had left off; "then he went to a 'fair, thatched inn,' you know, and he sat drinking with the tinker, the peddler, and the beggar, when the two rich brothers from Fountains Abbey came out to start again on their journey to York. Little John thought there'd be some fun, and perhaps some good money for him, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the thistle,—the thistle! a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes and jaws ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make a ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... I call a success. I don't care a tinker's darn for the prizes, but the way you boys built up to the girls last night warmed the sluggish blood in my old veins. Even if Cotton did claim a dance or two with the oldest Vaux girl, if Theo and her don't make the riffle now—well, they simply ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... year, have been in search of a particular rock, somewhere on the mountains in the vicinity of Shelburne Falls, which is supposed to contain some valuable ore; but they cannot find it. One man in the bar-room observed that it must be enchanted; and spoke of a tinker, during the Revolutionary War, who met with a somewhat similar instance. Roaming along the Hudson River, he came to a precipice which had some bunches of singular appearance embossed upon it. He knocked off one of the hunches, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Chrysostom on the Priesthood, which was then locked up in the Greek language, but has been since translated into English. Nor can we find any similarity between the work of the pious apostolically descended tinker, and the learned Greek father. Chrysostom's picture of the battle is contained in a letter to Basil, urging him to become a minister of the gospel. It is in words to this effect:—'Pent up in this body, like a dungeon, we cannot discern the invisible powers. Could you behold the black army ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... hearts to lose, I never could spare a bit of one of them for that good, gray, square, severe man. But different people have different tastes, and here is that little imp of a gipsy-tinker ready to turn slave for my master; and, odd enough, my master,—who, I should have said beforehand, would have made short work of imp, and imp's family, and have sent Hall, the Bang-beggar, after them in no time—my master, as they tell me, is in his way ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... pick up an odd sixpence, or even less, wherever he could, till one day he fell in with Mick, who offered him his food and the chance of more by degrees, as he wanted a sharp lad to help him in his various trades—of pedlar, tinker, basket-maker, wicker-chair mender, etc., not to speak of poultry-stealing, orchard-robbing, and even child-thieving when he got a chance that seemed likely ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... other sat in the shadowy hollow of the orchestra, two obscure little shapes on the floor of the enormous cavern. The other was Talbot Potter's manager, Carson Tinker, a neat, grim, small old man with a definite appearance of having long ago learned that after a little while life will beat anybody's game, no matter how good. He observed the nervousness of the playwright, but without interest. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... officer, but what he did not catch. If he had only known, he was describing a particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that he ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the best sleeping accommodations the village gasthaus affords. True, I am assigned the place of honor in the manger, which, though uncomfortably narrow and confining, is perhaps better accommodation, after all, than the peregrinating tinker and three other likely-looking characters are enjoying on the bare floor. Some of these companions, upon retiring, pray aloud at unseemly length, and one of them, at least, keeps it up in his sleep at frequent intervals through the night; horses ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... sailor, A tinker and a tailor, &c. Another specimen of his wit is furnished by the following epigram of the five reasons ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... in 1628 at the village of Elstow, just outside of Bedford, in central England. After very slight schooling and some practice at his father's trade of tinker, he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half into garrison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from this occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and worked at his trade; but the important ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... stout one, A most courageous drinker, I doe excell, 'tis knowne full well, The Ratter, Tom, and Tinker. Still doe I cry, good your Worship good Sir, Bestow one small Denire, Sir [1] And brauely at the bousing Ken [2] He bouse it all ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not thousands ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of butter, eggs, milk, cream ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... resent it. I don't care a tinker's curse about it.' He was silent a moment, then he added, laughing. 'No, I'll see it through, that's all. She ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... declared. "I don't say it for a minute. I like your going. I wouldn't give a tinker's dam for you, whatever that is, if you didn't want to do something for those fellows over there. I won't even say to be careful, for you can't if you do your duty—only, don't you be too all-fired foolhardy, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... care a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count on me just the same. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... the British Army in India with Havelock and Colin Campbell. He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other one. He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend. Seeing a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside him and watched the process. In that way he learned something ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... Lucian, his fair face crimsoning with vexation. "She seems to me one of those shallow women who would sooner flirt with a tinker than pass unnoticed by the male sex. I don't like her," he concluded, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... could talk, but not at all in French, but he was glad that the tinker spoke German, because otherwise he would not be ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... weary, "but I should think you might. It would be at least refreshing to have you, or someone, demonstrate what Christianity is. It would be good for our souls. Instead," she added bitterly, "instead, you select one little thing here, and one little thing there, and putter, and tinker, and temporize, and gloss over, and build big churches, with mortgages and taxes and insurance to pay, in the name of Christianity! If I were little Annie Smith, down in the village here, I could get a divorce for twenty-five dollars, and you would never ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... a note to Corliss. Later he tied the note to the inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant tank. Water was pouring ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... Bunyan (1628-1688) was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful meetings" he was thrown into prison, where he remained for twelve years. It was while he was in ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... or not—I don't care! In fact I don't give a tinker's damn! If this thing is really decreed in the council of God, as the song has it—I want a dismissal in all due form: I refuse to be just coolly shunted off.—Rose, is there anything in the past for which I need to ask ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Tibbs Henry Ticket Harvey Tiffman Andrew Tillen Jacob Tillen Peter Tillender Thomas Tillinghast David Tilmouse John Tilson Nicholas Tilson Grale Timcent George Timford Jeremiah Timrer Alexander Tindell James Tinker William Tinley Joseph Tinleys Anthony Tioffe Samuel Tippen Jean Tirve Stephen Tissina Michael Titcomb Moses Titcomb James Tobin Thomas Tobin (2) John Todd William Todd Thomas Tolley Francis Tollings Henry Tollmot Thomas Tomay James Tomkins Charles Tomped ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... was a farmer, and was called from the plow to succeed Elijah. Joseph and Daniel were servants before they were made prime ministers. Martin Luther was a miner's son. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of a butcher. John Bunyan was a tinker. William Carey was a shoemaker. Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Dr. Livingstone was a weaver. Every man ought to engage in some kind of work, either ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... contribution. How do I know it was? It never reached us. It's Nickleby's money and its loss is his funeral. Go and report to him and try to understand the meaning of the word 'loyalty.' Our party doesn't care a tinker's dam who has had, now has, or will have that envelope. And if you want to get thrown out by the scruff of the neck just try going to headquarters ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking landlady went ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Of course; it was for scientific reasons that I persuaded the old "Badger" to stand in with me in the matter. So we will tinker at the conduit-pipes a little, and dig up a little bit of the shore, and it shan't cost the town a sixpence. ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... pulling up while in sight of me. Then I passed the cow and went on, stopping an hour later at a lonely log house, where I found French people, and a welcome that included moose meat, a cup of coffee, and fried potatoes. Leaving, I rode some miles with a travelling tinker, a voluble, well-meaning youth who took a liking for me, and went far out of his way to help me on. He blushed proudly when, stopping to mend a pot for the cook at a camp of militia, they inquired if I ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... that works for certain purposes sent a smart shower from the sinking sun, and the wet sent two strangers for shelter in the lane behind the hedge where the boys reclined. One was a travelling tinker, who lit a pipe and spread a tawny umbrella. The other was a burly young countryman, pipeless and tentless. They saluted with a nod, and began recounting for each other's benefit the daylong-doings of the weather, as it had affected their individual experience ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me another ten to put it in shape, but after that it will do all right. Will you deliver it to a man that I send after it? I'll take it down to the Riverton shops and work on it. They let me tinker things ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, most dear, The ringing voices, like sweet silver bells, Of his two little ones. How fondly swells The father's heart, as, dancing up the lane, Each ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... cayuse, or Indian pony, which answered to the name of Jump, followed by a long train of sixteen other cayuses of every variety of color and character, the most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, as in the old Norse legends, she has inherited his strength, his wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I came back ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... he said. "It ain't just selfishness that makes me steer the course I'm runnin'. Course, Bos'n's got to be the world and all to me, and if she's taken away I don't know's I care a tinker's darn what happens afterwards. But, all the same, if her dad was a real man, sorry for what he's done and tryin' to make up for it—why, then, I cal'late I'm decent enough to take off my hat, hand her over, and say: 'God bless you and good luck.' But to think of him ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... employment in this world is very much in his own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... taken into conjunction with a hard, unfeeling mouth, from the corners of which two right lines ran down his chin, giving that part of his face a most dismal expression, constituted a countenance that matched exceedingly well with the visage of Teddy Phats. This worthy gentleman was a tinker, and one of Hogan's brothers, whom we have already introduced to our readers. Scattered about the fire and through the cavern were a party of countrymen who came to purchase whiskey for a wedding, and three or four publicans ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... they—" he broke off. "And you're Jeremy Ammidon's granddaughter! By heaven, it would make a coolie laugh. It's like William, who never would go to sea, to have four daughters in place of a son. I'm done with you; go tinker on the piano." They got down from their chairs and departed with an only half concealed eagerness. "Do you think he means it," Janet asked hopefully, "and he'll never have ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... until that consummation to be idle: nor was the mighty pause to be confined to these great enterprises. Every trade of every kind and description was to be stopped: tailor and cobbler, brushmaker and sweep, tinker and carter, mason and builder, all, all; for all an enormous Sabbath that was to compensate for any incidental suffering that it induced by the increased means and the elevated condition it ultimately would insure—that paradise of artizans, that Utopia of Toil, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Tanner of Tamworth" is a ballad of a kind once popular; there were "King Alfred and the Neatherd," "King Henry and the Miller," "King James I. and the Tinker," "King Henry VII. and the Cobbler," with a dozen more. "The Tanner of Tamworth" in another, perhaps older, form, as "The King and the Barker," was printed by Joseph Ritson ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... while his relations and dependants presented to them the more animated and interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in the course of the same year. After ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... too far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... 7) is field engineer, carpenter, bridge builder, the general maker, mender, patcher, splicer and tinker; cares for tools and trek-cart, mends the tents and clothing, and makes ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... shadow of a fir-tree with his back to the house. From here he could see the long garden. He was fond of his garden, and spent what few moments he could spare from work and games pottering about it. He had his views as to what the ideal garden should be, and he hoped in time to tinker his own three acres up to the desired standard. At present there remained much to be done. Why not, for instance, take away those laurels at the end of the lawn, and have a flower-bed there instead? Laurels lasted all the year round, true, whereas ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... prussiate of potash, that beautiful, yellow, crystallized salt, which is exhibited in the shops of some of our chemists. The worn-out saucepans and tinware of our kitchens, when beyond the reach of the tinker's art, are not utterly worthless. We sometimes meet carts loaded with old tin kettles and worn-out iron coal-skuttles traversing our streets. These have not yet completed their useful course; the less corroded parts are cut into strips, punched with ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... B. Tinker, "In Praise of Nursery Lore," Unpopular Review, Vol. VI, p. 338 (Oct.-Dec., 1916). For a most satisfactory presentation of the whole subject read chap. x, "Mother Goose," in Field. For the origin of Mother Goose as a character consult Lang's introduction to his edition of Perrault's Popular ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... from the same root with the other jog, which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and may be traced, by whosoever ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... up," interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... my umbrella folded and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen words. This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position in the parish untenable. He had no wish to go elsewhere—where could he go? It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor. He had now only to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity of life with what natural wisdom were possible. It was his duty to adapt himself to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... future son-in-law, and summoned the wise men of his court to ask if there was no way out of the difficulty. The council at once decided that Canetella was far too dainty a morsel for the mouth of such a travelling tinker, and advised the king to offer Moscione a present of gold, which no doubt a beggar like him would prefer to all ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I was forced to make something else do. ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... I am very much obliged to you.—You send a brazier to challenge me, and now, I suppose, you have brought a travelling tinker for his second. Where ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... about things myself so well as doing them," he confided. "I'm crazy about machinery. It's fun to tinker with it—take it to pieces and put it together again. I like nothing better than ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... of parts," he answered. "How does the old puzzle run? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, ploughboy, gentleman, thief. I think I have played all those parts, and others, too. Fling beggar and pirate into the dish. But I tell you this, honest John, I have never played a part so dear to me as that of captain to this divine commander. I thank ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... purpose. But I would ask when was the time when Bunyan "was nearly persuaded to be of Hobbes' opinion?" If he is the author and speaks the truth (and he is notoriously truthful), it must have been in early youth; but surely the philosopher of Malmesbury could not know an obscure tinker. Bunyan cannot speak metaphorically, for he had not read the Leviathan, since he mentions that his only reading in early life, i.e. when he was likely to have embraced freethinking, was the Practice of Piety, and the Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for them on their fiddles." The man to whom honest John ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... we not, madam?" said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... fall, it adopted and sent to the States for ratification twelve amendments to the new Constitution. There were those who thought this action precipitate. Why tinker with a constitution which had hardly been tried? To all such Madison replied cogently that the amendments which his committee reported did not alter the framework of the instrument, but added only certain safeguards to individual rights. The lack of a declaration of rights ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... which habitually rises and fills the cavity of the mouth does so in response to a wrong mental concept of cause. The only way to correct this condition is to change the cause. The rigid tongue we see is effect, and to tinker with the effect while the cause remains is unnecessarily stupid. An impulse of tension has been directed to the tongue so often that the impulse and response have become simultaneous and automatic. The correction lies in directing an impulse of relaxation ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,—faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come . . . . Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it best to keep the ship before the wind, not only because it eases her but on account of the gale being bound to slacken down soon; and if we run down to a lower latitude, as I have frequently done in this part of the ocean before, we will probably get fine weather and be able to tinker up the old craft and make her look all ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... at the twin buttes this morning with every cowman in town. All the other outfits have been sent for, and we'll have enough men to make our bluff stand up, never fear. From what I learn, these herds belong to a lot of Yankee speculators, and they don't give a tinker's dam if all the cattle in Montana die from fever. They're no better than anybody else, and if we allow them to go through, they'll leave a trail of dead natives that will stink us out of this valley. Make ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of Theocritus, ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... doors, for which they were taken before the magistrates in a body this morning, and committed to prison as vagrants for various terms. One of these persons I understand to be a highly-respectable tinker, of great practical skill, who had forwarded a paper to the President of Section D. Mechanical Science, on the construction of pipkins with copper bottoms and safety-values, of which report speaks highly. The incarceration of this gentleman is greatly to be regretted, as his absence ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... (except drama) before it. This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This wonderful little sketch, however—the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous decree making this doctrine ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... "Too hard. He had no right to be carryin' all that tinker's stuff. That man of yours, my girl, oughtn't ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... never saw Cleveland, Ohio, then," said Fitz, "'n' Euclid Avenue, 'n' Wade Park, 'n' the cannons in the square, 'n' the breakwater, 'n' never eat Silverthorn's potatoes at Rocky River, 'n' never went to a picnic at Tinker's Creek, 'n' never saw Little ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were three sore-faced babies; there were a couple of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he couldn't fix it himself," explained Willie, immediately interpreting the interrogation. "Neither him or I were guns enough for the job. So Bob got somebody he knew of to tinker it up." ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... in the morning upon the Introduction to the Chronicles; it may be thought egotistical. Learned a bad accident had happened yesterday. A tinker (drunk I suppose) entered the stream opposite to Faldonside with an ass bearing his children. The ass was carried down by the force of the stream, and one of the little creatures was drowned; the other was brought out alive, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... out of the west—men who would be walking the world looking for a bit of money—and every one of them would be talking of the wonders below in Connemara. I remember one time, a while after I was married, there was a tinker down there in the glen, and two women along with him. I brought him into my cottage to do a bit of a job, and my first child was there lying in the bed, and he covered up to his chin with the bed-clothes. When the tallest of the women came in, she looked around at ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the struggle for a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years, suffering tortures, first from his broken jaw, and later ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... The floor is covered with straw, and then a carpet is stretched over it, which makes a particularly bulgy, uneven surface to stand dressing-tables and things on. The straw, too, is apt to stick out where it is least expected, and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn. At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end. I woke last night to hear something sniffing outside the tent. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of this town, and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more notion where I was born than you have—if so much. I first become aware of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me—a man—a tinker—and he'd took the fire with him, and left me ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... brought the old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He thanked ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... hyar," he began again, with a twinkle in his eye. "Thar was an old fellar had a ranch in Chevelon Canyon, an' he was always bein' pestered by mountain lions. His name was Bill Tinker. Now Bill was no sort of a hunter, fact was he was afeerd of lions an' bears, but he shore did git riled when any critters rustled around his cabin. One day in the fall he comes home an' seen a big she-lion sneakin' around. He grabbed ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... came up in my throat at the tone of him. I put out my hand and laid it on Spikes' wet, sweat-roughened neck. "Yes, he's a good little horse, and I beg his pardon for what I said," I owned, still with the ache just back of my palate. "But he can't carry us both, Frosty; I'll just have to tinker up this old skate, and make ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... country. He readily purchased the salt, but learned, to his consternation, that the march to Burkesville was a mere preliminary canter. He was confronted with the alternative of going on a dangerous raid or of returning alone through a region swarming with the fierce bushwhackers of "Tinker Dave" Beattie, who never gave quarter to Confederate soldier or Southern sympathizer. He knew that if he fell into their hands they would pickle him with his own salt. So this old man sadly yet wisely resolved to follow ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was an Allen-a-Dale in Robin Hood's gang; it was in the Bell Inn, at Gloucester, that George Whitefield, the most gifted of popular orators, was reared; and Bunyan's Muse found him at the disrespectable trade of a tinker, and amidst the clatter of pots, and pans, and vulgar curses, made her whisper audible in his ear, "Come up hither to the Mount of Vision—to the summit ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The very small thing ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... Saviour's strange saying with the most intense wistfulness and yearning. Let me cite three instances—each as unlike the others as it could possibly be—in order to show that all sorts and conditions of men have at some time felt as Dr. Blund felt in those last hours of his. John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford, was born in the seventeenth century; the Duke of Wellington, soldier and statesman, was born in the eighteenth century; Frederick Charrington, the London brewer, was born in the nineteenth century. From ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... Gribble, kindly. "It's only a broken bone or so." As this consoling assurance seemed not to lessen Jane's alarm, he went on cheerfully to say, "There isn't one in my body hasn't been splintered by these broncos! Tinker 'em up and they're better than new. Here's doc coming lickety-switch! He'll tell you ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... was a tinker—a travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... must know, Tom Hickathrift had secured to himself a trusty friend and comrade, almost his equal in strength and courage, for though he was but a tinker, yet he was a great and lusty one. Now the sheriff of the country came to Tom, under cover of night, full of fear and trembling, and begged his aid and protection against the rebels, "else," said he, "we ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... relative to the navy, observes: "It is said, and I believe with truth, that at this time (the middle of the sixteenth century) there was not a private builder between London Bridge and Gravesend, who could lay down a ship in the mould left from a Navy Board's draught, without applying to a tinker who ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... humdrum farm-life, as I've heard you call it behind my back"—Dr. Willett smiled somewhat sadly—"won't be so humdrum as you think, if you make of it a life work—a something to be handled nobly, and made the most of. A tinker's life could be hardly humdrum with that end ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and bubbled, "I've often thought of that! If I had the money, I'd go down to Tinker's Falls and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... this. If you dare to lift up your eyes to my child again, or stop her in the way, or have speech with her, I'll set p'liceman 'pon 'e! For a year and more she 'm not her awn mistress; and, at the end of that time, if she doan't get better sense than to tinker arter a harum-scarum young jackanapes like you, she ban't a true Lyddon. Now be off with 'e an' doan't dare to look same way Phoebe 's walkin', no more, else theer'll be ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... cannot be in the playground, whither they invite me. Harold Skimpole is fettered—by what? By items! I regret my incapacity for details. It may be the tinker or the tailor at whose suit I am detained. I am certain it is not at that of the soldier, or the sailor, or the ploughboy, or the thief. But, for the apothecary— why, yes—it MAY be the apothecary! In the dawn of life I loved— who has not?—I wedded. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... though sullenly; and the Parson thought it better to temporize as to the more unpalatable demand. Unluckily Lenny's apprehensions of the mockery that awaited him in the merciless world of his village were realized. Though Stirn at first kept his own counsel, the Tinker blabbed the whole affair. And after the search instituted for Lenny on the fatal night, all attempt to hush up what had passed would have been impossible. So then Stirn told his story, as the Tinker had told his own; both tales were very ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... world which interested Bunyan so intensely, and cost him so many pangs of conscience? No doubt it was just the life of the road as he travelled about his business; for though by no means a tinker in the modern sense of the word, he was an itinerant brazier, whose business took him constantly to and fro among the many villages of the district of Bedford. He must have heard in inns and from wayside companions many a catch of plays and songs, and listened to many a lively ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... or madmen? Her port is all to make? You're manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming's sake? Well, tinker up your engines — you know your business best — She's taking tired people to ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received positive information of the strength and position of the ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... ill. Thought I'd got a job to tinker him up; but he only wants a bit of comforting, to show him ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... after his work, as Lenny was returning to his mother's cottage very sullen and very moody, he suddenly came in contact with Sprott the tinker. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... it's a gran' bit. Listen to this," and he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clattering like a tinker's kettle, came down the inclined plank and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, West Indian ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Act, lately passed at Oxford, had rendered the restrictions and penalties of Nonconformity utterly intolerable. Men were lying in prison here and there about merry England for no greater offence than preaching the gospel to a handful of God-fearing people. But that a Puritan tinker should moulder for a dozen years in a damp jail could count for little against the blessed fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five play-houses in London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... Cosy Moments into a real live paper. He wondered that the idea had not occurred to him before. The trifling fact that the despised journal was the property of Mr. Benjamin White, and that he had no right whatever to tinker with it without that gentleman's approval, may have occurred to him, but, if it did, it occurred so momentarily that he did not notice it. In these crises one cannot think ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the unmentionable instrument down his gory throat. Who cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down; and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he muttered darkly, "I'll faint them," and dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... jungle-grass," he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as fast ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... have personal grievances. And there are always some people in every community who stand all ready to be led by the last brain with which they come in contact; or, if not that, they are sure to think exactly as Dr. Jones and Judge Tinker and Prof. Bolus do, without reason as to why or wherefore. This class is very easily managed. A little care, a judicious repetition of a sentence which fell from the doctor's or the judge's or the professor's lips, and ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... to gather the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, soldier, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... how near he had been to losing a wife and a fortune. Arrived off Isle of Day; Tarboe told Mr. Martin and his men that if they said "treasure-trove" till they left the island their live would not be worth "a tinker's damn." When the had sworn, he took them to Angel Point, fed then royally, gave them excellent liquor to drink, and sent them in a fishing-smack with Bissonnette to Quebec where, arriving, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... midst of this uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ran home ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... when a case of individual need is brought before them will hire girls at less than any one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ago, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... sooner had finger'd the cole, But he hies him abroad with his good Madam Vole- Where, like a true tinker, he managed this metal, And while he stopp'd one hole, made ten in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... say it!" he protested. "It's true! He's the finest chap in the world, all true gold and not a grain of dross. That's how it is we all knock under to him. Even Nap does that, though he doesn't care a tinker's curse for anyone else on this muddy ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... King Henry VIII. Elizabeth Her Death The Trace of Cromwell Cromwell's Law Cromwell in Connacht A Worse than Cromwell The Battle of Aughrim The Stuarts Another Story Patrick Sarsfield Queen Anne Carolan's Song 'Ninety-Eight Denis Browne The Union Robert Emmet O'Connell's Birth The Tinker A Present His Strategy The Man was Going to be Hanged The Cup of the Sassanach The Thousand Fishers What the Old Women Saw O'Connell's Hat The Change He Made The Man He Brought to Justice The Binding ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all," said the man in black; "but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker; when he whom you call the Saviour gave his followers the sop, and bade them eat it, telling them it was his body, he delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after his death, namely, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... or four years, 1899-1902 were passed between Paris and Ireland; Paris in the winter and spring and Ireland in the other seasons. He was at work on The Aran Islands, and on his three early one act plays, The Tinker's Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen. He came to London in the winter of 1902-3, where I saw him as I have described. London did not suit him and he did not stay long. He ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... had considerable land. His father had left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent it up, ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... why we troubled our heads about the matter at all,' said the man in black; 'but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker. When He whom you call the Saviour gave His followers the sop and bade them eat it, telling them it was His body, He delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after His death, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... village about one mile south of Bedford, was Bunyan's birthplace. The house is still pointed out, though a new front has been put into it, and it is a very small building, suitable to the tinker's humble estate. The village-green where he played is near by, alongside the churchyard wall; the church, which has been little changed, stands on the farther side of the yard, with a massive tower at the north-western angle, looking ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... The Story of the First Thanksgiving, and Doll-in-the-Grass. Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. Little, Brown and Company for How Peter Rabbit Got His ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... the Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him 'the cure of souls'. So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry: but when he came to declare 'himself' a "chosen ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lady's reticule from her arm in Broadway and got clear off with it; but upon examining my prize, I found it contained nothing but a handkerchief and some letters. The wipe I kept for my own use; as for the letters, here they are—they are not worth a tinker's d——n, for they are ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil word, much more make me a present ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... did for John Bunyan—how He made one of the mightiest instruments for good the world ever saw, out of that swearing Bedford tinker. If we had a telescope which would enable us to look into heaven as Stephen did, I can imagine we should see the thief, who believed in Jesus while on the cross, very near the throne. Ask him how he got there; and he would tell you it was through the grace of God. See how the grace of God could ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... minds its roar, 'Cause he'll take and he'll kick a bubble up and ride all safe to shore. Come, all, and riffle the ledges! Come, all, and bust the jam! And for all o' the bluff o' the Comas crowd we don't give one good— Hoot, toot, and a hoorah! We don't give a tinker's dam. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... and the long chain of incidental blessings which should follow, which the reformers feel must inevitably follow, wait for other reformers to bring them into being. So there is always plenty of work for the social tinker, and no one man ever built a millennium. For God is ever jealous for our progeny, and leaves an unfinished job always on the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Independence, and, after many difficulties, perplexities and hardships were surmounted and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, 50 in number. The men under Capt. Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a Federal Salute of 15 rounds, and then the 16th in honor of New Conn. Drank several toasts. Closed with three cheers. Drank several pints of grog. Supped ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... respectable but footsore men, wending their way from Steiermark, were received with a hearty welcome and krapfen; and the wandering family, who were not at all respectable, but were treated with some distrust and more commiseration—the traveling tinker, his dark-eyed, dark-skinned wife and saucy, grimy children, who were barred and bolted with their barrow, their rags and their kettles in the barn that night as in a traveler's rest—ate with marvelous relish their bountiful-gleanings of this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... other MSS., but of alternative expressions put down tentatively. If either hand is Saxo's it is probably the second. He may conceivably have dictated both at different times to different scribes. No other man would tinker the style in this fashion. A complete translation of all these changes has been deemed unnecessary in these volumes; there is a full collation in Holder's "Apparatus Criticus". The verdict of the Angers-Fragment, which, for the very reason mentioned, must not be taken as the final form of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out — to patch — or, in vulgar language, to tinker — the political machine as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world — the clumsiest ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... been girls together and sat in school with arms entwined and wove romances of the future, rosy-hued and golden. When they consulted the oracle of "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief," the buttons on her gray winsey dress had declared in favour of the "rich man." Then she had dreamed dreams of silks and satins ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a tinker's—doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... His dull unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodelled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him in a dream, and had its way. Henceforth ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger or empiric ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... formed one of this queer household, a degree of refinement superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily dinner-party in the kitchen—master, mistress, servants, with an occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"—he skilfully points out that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... old woman, named Marion Haw, was returned upon that, her native parish, from Glasgow. She had led a migratory life with her son—who was what he called a bell-hanger, but in fact a tinker of the worst grade—for many years, and was at last returned to the muckle town in a state of great destitution. She gave the parishioners a history of the Mysterious Bride, so plausibly correct, but withal so romantic, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I am ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... let Skeets and me help you some? Skeets will be here again next week and I love to tinker and contrive and make all sorts of things; it'll be fun to see the ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... it. But all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... small countryside cottage, I saw scrawled over the door, "Good beer sold here." Being overcome with thirst, I went in to taste the beverage. Along the wall opposite where I sat in the well-sanded kitchen was the most disconsolate family I had ever seen, consisting of a tinker, his wife, a pretty-looking woman, who had evidently been crying, and a ragged boy and girl. I treated them to a large measure of beer, and in a few minutes the tinker was telling me his history. That conversation ended very curiously, for I purchased for five pounds ten shillings ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Wastle dwalt on Tweed, The spot they ca'd it Linkumdoddie; Willie was a wabster guid, [weaver good] Cou'd stown a clue wi' ony body. [have stolen] He had a wife was dour and din, [stubborn, sallow] O, Tinkler Madgie was her mither; [Tinker] Sic a wife as Willie had, [Such] I wad na ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... out of a lot of men who probably don't know any more about this here shooting of our dams than a hog does about a ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well? Well? Do you suppose the men who were back of that shooting, do you suppose Morrison and Daly give a tinker's dam how many men of theirs you lick? What they want is to hang our drive. If they hang our drive, it's cheap at the price ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... attributed to partiality; and with my deep devotion to his memory, I should ever suspect it in myself. But I will set my repugnance in a stronger light, by relating an anecdote not incurious. In the new edition of the Biographia Britannica, Dr. Kippis, the tinker of it, reflecting on my having called the former, Vindicatio Britannica, or Defence of Every body, threatened that when he should come to my father's life he would convince me that the new edition did not deserve that censure. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... got it in Africa, trading in diamonds. I've got a piece of paper in my pocket that blows up your lies like dynamite. You was in Australia all them years. By the Almighty! I'm going to sign up with the preacher, and I don't care a tinker's dam if you get the last cent I have, and send me up Riverhead way to the Poor Farm to eat off the county. Foreclose on my property! That ain't no more than you've been doing to others all your miserable life. It ain't ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... belle, a goat and a carriage, They all set off to the tinker's marriage. Two three-cornered hats, and one with a feather, They looked very fine in the sweet summer weather. But the carriage turned over, the poor goat shied, The little belle laughed, the silly beaux ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... nonplussed on one occasion by hearing a speaker strongly recommend the audience to give their days and nights to the study of Bunyan and M'Cheyne. "Bunyan by all means," said I to myself, "but who is M'Cheyne that one should be mindful of him and put him for importance alongside of the immortal tinker?" ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and the lazy wagoner drooping their heads with a weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a tailor named Holt, a drunken fellow who ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... it's juist the lassie's clavers, for Jean cam' in frae the stable, where she had nae right to be, except to be seein' her lad—they ha'e lads on the brain the lassies noo—and greetin' that young Dan had shamed her before the men, and a' because o' a tinker body like Belle here, although the great folk will treat her so kindly; no' that I mean her any harm," she added (erring on the safe side, for Belle's eyes had begun to glow finely); "and then in came Kate and ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... intense wistfulness and yearning. Let me cite three instances—each as unlike the others as it could possibly be—in order to show that all sorts and conditions of men have at some time felt as Dr. Blund felt in those last hours of his. John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford, was born in the seventeenth century; the Duke of Wellington, soldier and statesman, was born in the eighteenth century; Frederick Charrington, the London brewer, was born in the nineteenth century. From a great cloud of available ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe. Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful, tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up to ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... with some vehemence, Strap looked at me for same time with a grave countenance, and then went on: "I'm very sorry to see such an alteration in your temper of late; you were always fiery, but now you are grown as crabbed as old Periwinkle the drunken tinker, on whom you and I (God forgive us!) played so many unlucky tricks while we were at school—but I will no longer detain you in suspense, because (doubtless) nothing is more uneasy than doubt—Dubio procul dubio nil dubius. My friend or relation, or which you will, or both, the schoolmaster, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... so harassed with care and anxiety, about this farming project of mine, that my muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wench that ever picked cinders, or followed a tinker. When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming; at present, the world sits such a load on my mind, that it has effaced almost every trace of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who were ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... elevate what is highest in his nature, she will speedily reduce him to her own level. Thus a wife may be the making or the unmaking of the best of men. An illustration of this power is furnished in the life of Bunyan. The profligate tinker had the good fortune to marry, in early life, a worthy young woman of good parentage. "My mercy," he himself says, "was to light upon a wife whose father and mother were accounted godly. This woman and I, though we came together as poor as poor might be [20not having so much household stuff ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... make it a point to be there, and as we've got some time to kill meanwhile, let's hop over to that nice landingplace at the foot of old Thunder top, and overhaul the machine again. There are a few things I'd like to tinker with, because I'm not quite pleased with the way they work; and you know, Andy, I'm a regular crank about having a motor run ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... hogs was killed at de time. Lots o' sheep and goats was also killed. All our meat was raised, and us wore wooden-bottom shoes. Raised all de wheat and corn. Hogs, cows, goats and sheep jes' run wild on Tinker and Brushy Fork Creeks. On Sat'day us git one peck meal; three pounds o' meat and one-half gallon black molasses fer a person; and dat's lot mo' dan dey gits in dese days and times. Sunday morning, us git two, or maybe three pounds o' flour. Didn't know nothing 'bout ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... construction as well as keen little sparklets into the fabric of another's labor, and makes the whole translucent where before it may have been opaque. On Broadway he was called a play doctor, and Mr. Vandeford was not the first manager who had shut him up with quarts of refreshment to tinker on the play of many a literary, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... such a mistake trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... have you any broken pots, Or any broken branders? For I'm a tinker to my trade, I'm newly ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... see that Tom sometimes met his match. In wandering one day in the forest he met a lusty tinker that had a good staff on his shoulder, and a great dog to carry his bag ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... the French may give out next year for lack of men. I do not mean that they will quit, but that their fighting strength will have passed its maximum and that they will be able to play only a sort of second part. Except the British and the French, there's no nation in Europe worth a tinker's damn when you come to the real scratch. The whole continent is rotten or tyrannical or yellow-dog. I wouldn't give Long Island or Moore County for the whole of continental Europe, with its kings and ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... have not footballed out of the field of consideration. Indubitably, too, in doing so they have forfeited as they must have expected to forfeit, all the "moral support" for which they did not care a tinker's imprecation. If there were any question of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it would lack something of the humor with which it is now invested and which saves the observer ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... "If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress's dog, the Lord help him!" said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself swiftly from the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Peter's shadow, rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... good and humble. His dull, unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber-room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodeled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him in a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... fanciful, for the theorists, for the flabby idealists and doctrinaires. If I melt lead and iron and copper and silver and gold in the same pot, I get a bastard metal, do I not? It is not, as a fused product, worth a tinker's hoot. Why, even Zangwill is not an advocate of the melting-pot. He is a Jew, proud of it, and extremely solicitous for the welfare of the Jewish race. He is a Zionist—a leader of the movement to crowd the Arabs out of Palestine and repopulate that country with Jews. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... many years ago there dwelt in Athens a fruit-dealer of the name of Kimon, who was possessed of two daughters,—the one named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... 'I cal'late when it gets high enough them floats'll rise with it and lift the automobile up, too. If she's anchored bow and stern she'll hold, unless it comes on to blow a gale, and to-morrow mornin' at low tide maybe you can tinker her up ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be a lord president, but it must be a prelate? Is there never a wise man in the realm to be a comptroller of the mint? I speak it to your shame. I speak it to your shame. If there be never a wise man, make a water-bearer, a tinker, a cobbler, a slave, a page, comptroller of the mint: make a mean gentleman, a groom, a yeoman, or a poor beggar, ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... substitute for Indian housemaids was found at an early day in "help," as it was called even then. Roger Williams, writing of his daughter, said: "She desires to spend some time in service & liked much Mrs. Brenton who wanted." John Tinker, who himself was help, wrote thus to John Winthrop; "Help is scarce, hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out and wages on & I cannot make choice of my help." Children of well-to-do citizens thus worked in domestic service. Members of the family of ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... his side—but the life of a man was a different matter. Nor was the task eased by his exceptional memory. He claimed, as has been seen, to remember the look of the viper seen in his third year. Later, in "Lavengro," he meets a tinker and buys his stock-in-trade to set himself up with. The tinker tries to put him off by tales of the Blazing Tinman who has driven him from his beat. Borrow answers that he can manage the Tinman one way or other, saying, "I know all kinds of strange words and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... arch neck'd, with tails erect And gold upon their blinkers; And by their side an ass I spied; It was a travelling tinker's. ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... results of another well compounded punch, which the general ordered without delay. "I tell you, sir," Mr. Tickler resumed, "he is an oily gentleman in very shabby clothes, and might be easily mistaken for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set up for a ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... much, Oscar: the humdrum farm-life, as I've heard you call it behind my back"—Dr. Willett smiled somewhat sadly—"won't be so humdrum as you think, if you make of it a life work—a something to be handled nobly, and made the most of. A tinker's life could be hardly humdrum ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... we. Where are now the jocund laugh, the repartee, the oft-repeated tale, the last debate? As our sporting contemporary, the Quarterly, said, when describing the noiseless pursuit of old reynard by the Quorn: "Reader, there is no crash now, and not much music." It is the tinker that makes a great noise over a little work, but, at the pace these men are eating, there is no time for babbling. So, gentle lector, there is now no leisure for bandying compliments, 'tis your small eater alone who chatters o'er his meals; your ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... license-tax; if you can feel a quiet sense of pleasure when driving on a rough and hilly road, and never move a muscle of your visage when underneath you hear a tire explode; if you can plan a pleasant week-end journey and tinker at your car a day or so, then thrill with joy on that eventful morning to find no skill of yours can make it go; if you can gather up your wife and children, put on your glad rags, and start off for church, then have to wade around ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, two quilts were under it, and my canvas bag, a battered canteen, a frying pan, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... and His Team Arrive at the Goal A Page from the Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on the Barrier: Eastern Expedition ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... Puritan writer of England was John Bunyan. He was born in 1628, more than twenty years after Milton. His father was a tinker. A tinker! The word makes us think of ragged, weather-worn men and women who wander about the countryside. They carry bundles of old umbrellas, and sometimes a battered kettle or two. They live, who knows how? they sleep, who knows where? Sometimes in our walks we come ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... am very much obliged to you.—You send a brazier to challenge me, and now, I suppose, you have brought a travelling tinker for his second. Where does he ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... to a bunch of hay and a couple of sacks in the stable as the best sleeping accommodations the village gasthaus affords. True, I am assigned the place of honor in the manger, which, though uncomfortably narrow and confining, is perhaps better accommodation, after all, than the peregrinating tinker and three other likely-looking characters are enjoying on the bare floor. Some of these companions, upon retiring, pray aloud at unseemly length, and one of them, at least, keeps it up in his sleep at frequent intervals through the night; horses and work-cattle are rattling chains ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... doubt," said Lady Marney, "that we shall have some monster of the middle class, some tinker or tailor, or candlestick-maker, with his long purse, preaching reform and practising corruption: exactly as the liberals did under Walpole: bribery was unknown in the time of the Stuarts; but we ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... prosecute, not our own, but her own adventure. Beyond every corner there may be a tavern or a church wherein both the saint and the sinner may be entrapped and remolded. Beyond the skyline you may find a dynamite cartridge, a drunken tinker, a mad dog, or a shilling which some person has dropped; and any one of these unexpectednesses may be potent to urge the traveler down a side street and put a crook in the straight line which had been his life, and to which he had become miserably reconciled. The element of surprise being, accordingly, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... railroad, the farmer who did not live near a navigable stream must remain a backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously made for himself ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant tank. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... dry as a red herring, and as poor as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... night of sleeping in the brick fields, and on the steps of doors, for which they were taken before the magistrates in a body this morning, and committed to prison as vagrants for various terms. One of these persons I understand to be a highly-respectable tinker, of great practical skill, who had forwarded a paper to the President of Section D. Mechanical Science, on the construction of pipkins with copper bottoms and safety-values, of which report speaks highly. The incarceration of this gentleman is greatly to be regretted, as ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel played the oboe for his meals. Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose from the ranks. His great industry gained for him the name of "The Indefatigable." Soult served fourteen years before he was made ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... laugh). Ship! I've loved and left more of them than I can remember. I've been nearly everything you can think of but a tinker or a soldier; I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep and humped my swag and harpooned a whale; I've rigged ships and skinned dead bullocks and prospected for gold—and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped together ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... place singularly favourable to every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display their ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can get results. No ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... near Bedford, the s. of a poor tinker, was ed. at a free school, after which he worked at his father's trade. At 17 he was drafted as a soldier in the Civil War, and served for two years at Newport Pagnell. At 19 he m. a pious young woman, whose only dowry appears to have been two books, the Plain Man's ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... only tell a good tale as it should be told, but he has the right gipsy magic, and the great fight which comes towards the end of the story is almost, if not quite, as fine as the epic contest between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinker."—Referee. ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and Ty Cobb. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... and he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' it's ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... blind spot in men of science! The average man doesn't give a tinker's damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of science versus non-science ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... wishing to entertain in Society, went on to detail his experiences in the Hospital, giving first—as it is always well to begin at the beginning—the names of the staff as he had mastered them. There was Dr. Dabtinkle, or it might have been Damned Tinker, a doubtful name; and Drs. Inkstraw, Jarbottle, and Toby. His hearers were able to identify the names of Dalrymple, Inglethorpe, and Harborough. They were at work on Toby, who defied detection, when it became evident that sleep was overwhelming their informant. He ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see him a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery comfortable, and he says, 'Would you like to come along a me, my man?' I says 'Yes,' and him and me and the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as—"to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Sutherland me," she broke in with a laugh, "call me Frances; and if something is hurt and needs mending, I'm not a tinker, though my father and the priest—yes and you, too—sometimes think so. But sisters do mending, don't they?" and she laughed my earnestness off as one would puff out ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the bottles thrown out; the procession had drawn up at a dozen villages on the way; the perspiring tipsters, with whom "things hadn't panned out well," had forgotten their disappointments and "didn't care a tinker's! cuss"; every woman in a barrow had her head-gear in confusion, and she was singing in a drunken wail. Nevertheless Drake, who was laughing and talking constantly, said it was the quietest Derby night he had ever seen, and he couldn't tell ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... "I don't give a tinker's damn about his voice. It's up to me to run the dwarf to earth, and I'm goin' to ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... one mile south of Bedford, was Bunyan's birthplace. The house is still pointed out, though a new front has been put into it, and it is a very small building, suitable to the tinker's humble estate. The village-green where he played is near by, alongside the churchyard wall; the church, which has been little changed, stands on the farther side of the yard, with a massive tower at the north-western angle, looking more like a fortress than a religious edifice. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... artist he bent and shaped the rough material, selecting with great fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself declared all good speech should be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), possibly the least important of his plays, one is ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... no mention is made of either country. Strange to say the most perfect allegory in the English language was written by an almost illiterate and ignorant man, and written too, in a dungeon cell. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," Bunyan, the itinerant tinker, has given us by far the best allegory ever penned. Another good one is "The ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... broke off. "And you're Jeremy Ammidon's granddaughter! By heaven, it would make a coolie laugh. It's like William, who never would go to sea, to have four daughters in place of a son. I'm done with you; go tinker on the piano." They got down from their chairs and departed with an only half concealed eagerness. "Do you think he means it," Janet asked hopefully, "and he'll ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... mother, not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into his ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... not missing him, stirred him up in the mixture, and put it and him into the pot. Tom no sooner felt the hot water than he danced about like mad; the woman was nearly frightened out of her wits to see the pudding come out of the pot and jump about, and she was glad to give it to a tinker who was passing that way. The tinker took the pudding and put it into a cloth, to carry it home to his family, who seldom tasted such ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... machine, why, the soul is forgotten instantly. We summon the arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man. And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is really wonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within us fails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines. Doctors are not ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... an Irish auctioneer at Kingston, some years ago, called Paddy Moran, whom all the world, priest and parson, minister and methodist, soldier and sailor, tinker and tailor, went to hear when he ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Brethren had better work on hand than to tinker with their constitution. At the root of their troubles had been the neglect of the Bible. In order, therefore, to restore the Bible to its proper position in Church esteem, the Brethren now established the Theological College at Gnadenfeld (1818). There John Plitt ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... being his mother's till he was twenty-one, a livelihood had to be found, and so at about fourteen years of age the work of life began. Like a true boy, the lad wanted to go to sea, despite his uncle's warning "that I think he had better be put apprentice to a tinker; for a common sailor before the mast has by no means the liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has fifty shillings a month; and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash, and use him like a negro, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this charge of supposed imitation, in which so much rests upon the very simplicity of the conception of the story, and has successfully shown that the tinker of Elstow could not have profited by one or two allegories in the French and Flemish languages—works which he could have had hardly a chance to meet with; which, if thrown in his way, he could not have read; and, finally, which, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... wives, ale wives. Brugh, a burgh. Brulzie, brulyie, a brawl. Brunstane, brimstone. Brunt, burned. Brust, burst. Buckie, dim. of buck; a smart younker. Buckle, a curl. Buckskin, Virginian: the buckskin kye, negroes. Budget, tinker's bag of tools. Buff, to bang, to thump. Bughtin, folding. Buirdly, stalwart. Bum, the buttocks. Bum, to hum. Bum-clock, beetle, cockchafer, Junebug. Bummle, a drone, a useless fellow. Bunker, a seat. Bunters, harlots. Burdies, dim. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... for grouping these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning "What is't to live" appears in Butler's Note-Book with the remark, "This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it"—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the third ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... what I gathered from your mother and sisters. You have not asked my advice. I don't suppose you want it, but if you do, here it is. If you love the girl and she is respectable, marry her if she is poor as poverty and the daughter of a tinker; but if you don't love her, and she's rich as a nabob, for thunder's ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... this here shooting of our dams than a hog does about a ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well? Well? Do you suppose the men who were back of that shooting, do you suppose Morrison and Daly give a tinker's dam how many men of theirs you lick? What they want is to hang our drive. If they hang our drive, it's cheap at the price ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... worth, are his own, without a parental anxiety in regard to the fate of his offspring. And there are few prefaces which do not in some way betray this nervousness. I confess to a respect for even the prefatory doggerel of good Tinker Bunyan—a respect for his paternal tenderness toward his book, not at all for his villainous rhyming. When I saw, the other day, the white handkerchiefs of my children waving an adieu as they sailed away from me, a profound anxiety seized me. So now, as I part company ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... the squire and tinker Wood Gravely consulting Ireland's good, Together mingled in a mass Smith's dust, and copper, lead, and brass; The mixture thus by chemic art United close in ev'ry part, In fillets roll'd, or cut in pieces, Appear'd like one continued species; And, by the forming engine struck, On all the same ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... oracles, at second-hand, from Voltaire and Diderot. The other class have studied his plans of practical philanthropy, with all his shrewd researches and homely discussions in agriculture, finance, mechanics, and architecture, and have ridiculed him as a tinker. To such Jefferson seems a grandmotherly sort of person,—riding about in a gig arranged to register the length of his rides,—walking about in boots arranged to register the length of his walks,—weatherwise, and profound in dealing with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He thanked her and ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... led into mischief by their undisciplined tongues—some who have personal grievances. And there are always some people in every community who stand all ready to be led by the last brain with which they come in contact; or, if not that, they are sure to think exactly as Dr. Jones and Judge Tinker and Prof. Bolus do, without reason as to why or wherefore. This class is very easily managed. A little care, a judicious repetition of a sentence which fell from the doctor's or the judge's or the professor's lips, and which might have meant anything or nothing, ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... and Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam- engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... fell over head and ears into the batter, and his mother, not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into his budget, ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... Stand-By left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and Ty Cobb. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... life and movement of the scenes in which they appear. Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Miser, and hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... French may give out next year for lack of men. I do not mean that they will quit, but that their fighting strength will have passed its maximum and that they will be able to play only a sort of second part. Except the British and the French, there's no nation in Europe worth a tinker's damn when you come to the real scratch. The whole continent is rotten or tyrannical or yellow-dog. I wouldn't give Long Island or Moore County for the whole of continental Europe, with ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... object of piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser—in short, fully to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up when out of order on his own responsibility. Thus he learnt at last something of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way a great deal about the general principles of mechanical science. Still, even now, incredible as it seems, the future ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... always was so ever since I can remember; but—tchah!—your father would not turn him away. My father says he is the most useful man he ever knew. Why, he's just like what we say when we count the rye-grass: soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor—you know." ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... all the people: the old cobbler, who sat next her, and chattered all day long like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many a summer night to drink a-glass with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheated everybody else, but who had always given her a toy or a trinket at every Fete Dieu all the summers she had known; the little old woman, ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... her. I went round to her this morning and told her you'd sign any pledge she liked about woman's suffrage if she'd only clear out of this and go to Belfast. She as good as told me to my face that she wouldn't give a tinker's curse for any pledge I had a hand in giving. My own impression is that she doesn't care if she never got a vote, or any other woman either. All she wants is to turn the place into a bear garden and spoil the whole election. I've come here to tell you plain that if you don't ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... steps of the porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe. Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful, tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy path ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... doubt in your favour; and papa thinks Mr. Null a remarkably clever man." Zo stood by frowning, while these smooth conventionalities trickled over her sister's lips. Carmina asked what was the matter. Zo looked gloomily at the dog on the rug. "I wish I was Tinker," she said. Maria smiled sweetly. "Dear Zoe, what a very strange wish! What would you do, if you were Tinker?" The dog, hearing his name, rose and shook himself. Zo pointed to him, with an appearance ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... Thomas Tinker, wife, and son are not certainly known to have been of the Leyden company, or to have embarked at Delfshaven, but their constant association in close relation with others who were and who so embarked warrants the inference that they were of the SPEEDWELL'S passengers. It is, however, remotely ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... archaeologist can understand; the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... have you done to edify, You clammy chapel tinker? What act like his of days gone by— ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... going at top speed. I happened to be standing right behind him at the time, and I managed to jerk him back before he went right over; but he cut his foot badly, as it was, poor chap. I had always loved to tinker away at cuts and bruises, so I managed to patch him up a bit, and stop the bleeding, till the doctor came. It was nothing, any one could have done it, but poor old Martin made a great fuss over it; and he ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not thousands ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... seen and heard nothing. The road was not bordered by trees or a high hedge, so that it could not have been some trick of the moonlight. One of the girls described the appearance of the figure to a local workman, who said, "It is very like a tinker who was found dead in that ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... under the sheltering eaves of a half-burned house, and cold and miserable he sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning an itinerant tinker came by and touched by the child's distress, drew from him his unhappy story. He was a lonely old man, and offered to take Ben with him, an offer which ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... The sun breaks o'er Calvano; He strikes the great gloom 230 And flutters it o'er the mount's summit In airy gold fume. All is over. Look out, see the gipsy, Our tinker and smith, Has arrived, set up bellows and forge, And down-squatted forthwith To his hammering, under the wall there; One eye keeps aloof The urchins that itch to be putting His jews'-harps to proof, 240 While the other, thro' locks of ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... was very hungry indeed. He had been going from place to place with his master, and now it was two long days since he had eaten a good dinner. His master was a poor tinker who traveled about the country and never stayed long in one place. Rover would have liked this if his master had been kind to him, but the dog was used ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... into a scrape too! They won't let me off as easy as they do you. I shall be sent off to learn to be a tinker, or a blacksmith." ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... and a stout one, A most courageous drinker, I doe excell, 'tis knowne full well, The Ratter, Tom, and Tinker. Still doe I cry, good your Worship good Sir, Bestow one small Denire, Sir [1] And brauely at the bousing Ken [2] He bouse it ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... he and Janet had explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... nerve to start it. Roosevelt has got everything west of the Mississippi excepting Utah and Wyoming, in my judgment. That he will be able to get the nomination I am not so sure; but he does not care a tinker's damn whether he gets it himself or not. That is the worst of it because the people won't give anything to a man that he does not want. ... Well, we are living ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... of his size, for fear you should receive a shock. The cottage just holds him when he sits down, and his mother's one anxiety is that he should not bring down the kitchen ceiling more than once a year, as it hurts his head and comes expensive; he has a black collie they call Tinker, the cleverest dog in the place, so Nathaniel says; and these three constitute the ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine in some ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... colored with the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... him," muttered Dorrimore between his set teeth. "That wouldn't matter a tinker's curse, but she's fooled us as well. Rofflash, I've a mind to pick a quarrel with the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... writer says, "For hellish reviling of the painful ministers of Christ, I know no people can match them." The following epithets bestowed by Fisher on Dr. Owen are said to be fair specimens of their usual addresses: "Thou green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou louse! thou mooncalf! thou ragged tatterdemalion! thou livest in philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." Even Penn is said to have addressed ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... community," he stated, "and we shirk our duty as a community because we believe in our hearts that we aren't a community. What does Jones or Smith or Robinson or anybody else really care for Italian Bar as a place; or, indeed, for California as a place? Not a tinker's damn! He came out here in the first place to make his pile, and in the second place to have a good time. He isn't dependent on any one's good opinion, as he used to be at home. He refuses to ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... not a habitable house left in Peronne. The sixteenth century church of St. Jean is but a relic. W. Beach Thomas wrote after the retreat that nothing was left that was valuable enough to be worth collection by a penny tinker or a rag-and-bone merchant. Foul what you cannot have, was ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... be a good tinker, and worship god Pan, or I might grind scissors as sharp as the noses of bakers. But, as a matter of fact, I'm a piper, not a rat-catcher, you understand, but just a simple singer of sad songs, and a mad ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... so comical that even Hogarth's humour can scarcely parallel; yet our hero thought himself of something else to render his disguise more impenetrable: he therefore borrowed a little hump-backed child of a tinker, and two more of some others of his community. There remained now only in what situation to place the children, and it was quickly resolved to tie two to his back, and to take the other ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... is, violent blowing. Cairding however, is not unlikely the proper word, a caird being in Scotland the name of a tinker.—Ed.] ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... tinkers who were unanimous—that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason' by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came nearest to the seraphic character in one century was a tinker—namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions do cheat at uncertain times, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned, I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... care and anxiety, about this farming project of mine, that my muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wench that ever picked cinders, or followed a tinker. When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming; at present, the world sits such a load on my mind, that it has effaced almost every trace of the poet ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... speak it to thy shame: is there never a nobleman to be a lord president, but it must be a prelate? Is there never a wise man in the realm to be a comptroller of the mint? I speak it to your shame. I speak it to your shame. If there be never a wise man, make a water-bearer, a tinker, a cobbler, a slave, a page, comptroller of the mint: make a mean gentleman, a groom, a yeoman, or a poor beggar, ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... "Darrel, the clock tinker, is a wit, philosopher, and man of mystery. Learned, strong, kindly, dignified, he towers like a giant above the people among whom he lives. It is another tale of the North Country, full of the odor of wood and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... of protest against the extreme refinement of society, just as the collegians of Oxford, trained beyond their natural capacity in morals, love to fall into slang and, like Prince Hal, talk to every tinker ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pontifical tariff. Then comes the "Spaccio di Vino," that gloomiest among the shrines of Bacchus, where the sour red wine is drunk at dirty tables by the grimiest of tipplers. Hard by is the "Stannaro," or hardware tinker, who is always re-bottoming dilapidated pans, and drives a brisk trade in those clumsy, murderous-looking knives. Further on is the greengrocer, with the long strings of greens, and sausages, and flabby balls of cheese, and straw-covered ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... with tails erect And gold upon their blinkers; And by their side an ass I spied; It was a travelling tinker's. ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... and gave a true account of the situation. His two companions were the sons of wealthy parents and one of them owned a beautiful motor launch which broke down while descending the river from Wiscasset. He had left the two trying to tinker it in shape, but had doubts of their success. In case they failed, it would be very pleasing to them if they could get supper and lodging in Beartown. Would the good woman advise them where ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he! Ask Tinker if I aynt. Mrs. Tinker, Miss Sharp; Miss ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cross-grained, sons of a cock-eyed tinker,' exclaimed Bill, boiling with rage. 'If punching parrots on the beak wasn't too painful for pleasure, I'd land you a sockdolager on the muzzle that 'ud lay you out till Christmas. Come on, mates,' he added, 'it's no use wastin' time over this low-down, hook-nosed tobacco-grabber.' ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... of three weeks I was so exhausted with sheer hunger that I could hardly stand on my legs. One day, when my miserable, covetous thief of a master had gone out, an angel, in the likeness of a tinker, knocked at the door, and inquired whether I had anything to mend. Suddenly a light flashed upon me. "I have lost the key of this chest," said I, "can you fit it?" He drew forth a bunch of keys, fitted it, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... esteemed. After him, comes the parker, whose favourite resort is a gentleman's pleasure-ground, where he usually breeds in great numbers, and from which he frequently drives away the hares. The hedgehog is a sort of vagabond rabbit, that, tinker like, roams about the country, and would have a much better coat on his back if he was more settled in his habits, and remained more at home. The sweetheart is a tame rabbit, with its fur so sleek, soft, and silky, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life is ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... bear of the two so facetiously described above. And the author of "Confusion Worse Confounded" tells a familiar story, which will enliven the history of our great critic. "One of the bears mentioned above happened to get loose, and was running along the street in which a tinker was gravely walking. The people all cried, 'Tinker! tinker! beware of the bear!' Upon this Magnano faced about with great composure; and raising his staff, knocked down Bruin, then setting his arms a-kimbo, walked off very sedately; only saying, 'Let the bear ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps furnish the ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... time for the voyage of a trading schooner to the Marquesas and return to Papeete. I had no bother about clothes, as I was to be in the same climate, and in less formal circles even than in Tahiti. But I desired to carry with me a type-writer, and mine was out of order. There was no tinker of skill in Papeete, and I had about given up hope of repairs, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... to the right stealthily.] — Do you know what? That man's raving from his wound to-day, for I met him a while since telling a rambling tale of a tinker had him destroyed. Then he heard of Christy's deed, and he up and says it was his son had cracked his skull. O isn't madness a fright, for he'll go killing someone yet, and he thinking it's the man ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... I says. 'I cal'late when it gets high enough them floats'll rise with it and lift the automobile up too. If she's anchored bow and stern she'll hold, unless it comes on to blow a gale, and to-morrow mornin' at low tide maybe you can tinker her up ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... day, while the Sheriff's daughter was racking her brains for a scheme, there came to the Mansion House a strolling tinker named Middle, a great gossip and braggart. And as he pounded away upon some pots and pans in the scullery, he talked loudly about what he would do, if he once came within reach of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... you will be kind enough to listen. I won't detain you long. My explanation is quite simple. I have been made a fool of. I seem to be in the position of the tinker in the play whom everybody conspired to delude into the belief that he was a king. First a friend of yours, Mr. Byng, came to me and told me that you had confided to him that you ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... having no associates of your own rank, should make friends where you could find them. I trust that it has done you no harm. Well, Prior, this day week the boy shall come to you. I must get befitting clothes for him, or the other pupils will think that he is the son of a hedge tinker." ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... passes Sunday, June 12th, with the Welsh preacher and his wife Winifred; on the 21st he departs with his itinerant hosts to the Welsh border. Before entering Wales, however, he turns back with Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot of the dingle hard by Mumper's Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire; here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between the philologer and the flaming tinman—all this, is it not related in Lavengro, and substantiated ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,[117] who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... forthwith to set about "cooking water." The clattering and hammering the incessant talking, and the figures flitting about in the glare, reminded one of a crowded open-air market with flaring lamps and frequent coffee stalls. Kurnalpi was known at first as "Billy-Billy," or as "The Tinker's Rush"—the first name was supposed by some to be of native origin, by others to indicate the amount of tin used in the condensing plants—"Billy," translated for those to whom the bush is unfamiliar, meaning a tin pot for boiling tea in, and other ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... us. As yet, of course, it is too soon to form plans for the future; but be assured that there will be no parting. You took me when I was a helpless baby; but for you I should have been a workhouse child, and might now be coming out of my apprenticeship to a tinker or a tailor. I owe all I have, all I am, to you; and whatever fortune befall me you will still be dad and mother. For a short time I must go to the hall, as Mr. Brook has invited me; and we shall have much to arrange and talk over. Afterwards I suppose I shall have to go to the manager's house, ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... my hand and laid it on Spikes' wet, sweat-roughened neck. "Yes, he's a good little horse, and I beg his pardon for what I said," I owned, still with the ache just back of my palate. "But he can't carry us both, Frosty; I'll just have to tinker up this old skate, and ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... powder, and Stepney said with a laughing glance at Miss Bart: "I suppose he is thinking of marriage, and wants to tinker up the old ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... ideas of the day, believing that while history and the past were delegated to the control of the unsophisticated whose ways were superstitious and outdated, the present contains truth in its pure form. Reform and revolution are their watchwords, for they tinker with the very foundations of society and life in an attempt to cultivate it. Zimri is their Lord, of the Future, and they follow him loosely, for he doesn't require the strict adhesion that Onan does, which suits their ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... almost incredible swiftness, and by the time the theatre was opened, on August 23, 1722, he had finished five of his best plays, among which were Jeppe of the Hill (Jeppe paa Bjerget) and The Political Tinker (Den politiske Kandestober). During the six years in which the company eked out its precarious existence, Holberg produced twenty-six comedies, most of which were successfully performed. His literary fecundity seems ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... skewer, and, by steeping himself in soot and grease, soon acquired immense fame. Rumor said he murdered his beautiful young wife, and abandoned the world. Be this as it may, he certainly lived a nasty life. Mr. Traveller tried to bring him back into society, but a tinker said to him "Take my word for it, when iron is thoroughly rotten, you can never botch it, do what you may."—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... clad; there were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were three sore-faced babies; there ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... visit from his neighbors of the Cross-Roads. Mrs. Wimby was a widow, who owned a comfortable farm, and she had refused every offer of the neighboring ill-eligible bachelors to share it. However, a vagabonding tinker won her heart, and after their marriage she continued to be known as "Mrs. Wimby"; for so complete was the bridegroom's insignificance that it extended to his name, which proved quite unrememberable, and he was usually called "Widder-Woman Wimby's Husband," or, more simply, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... by this time, and owing to some breakage we had to stop, as we drew close to the town. We left the driver, however, to tinker about with the old Ford, and plunged into the wilds, Brown being particularly anxious to see what all ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... stable, where she had nae right to be, except to be seein' her lad—they ha'e lads on the brain the lassies noo—and greetin' that young Dan had shamed her before the men, and a' because o' a tinker body like Belle here, although the great folk will treat her so kindly; no' that I mean her any harm," she added (erring on the safe side, for Belle's eyes had begun to glow finely); "and then in came Kate and Leezie wi' a tale o' a wean, tied in a tartan shawl, lying in a biss in ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Bunyan's 'Holy War.' It is not at all probable that Bunyan was acquainted with Chrysostom on the Priesthood, which was then locked up in the Greek language, but has been since translated into English. Nor can we find any similarity between the work of the pious apostolically descended tinker, and the learned Greek father. Chrysostom's picture of the battle is contained in a letter to Basil, urging him to become a minister of the gospel. It is in words to this effect:—'Pent up in this body, like a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that clearly. You say it was a campaign-fund contribution. How do I know it was? It never reached us. It's Nickleby's money and its loss is his funeral. Go and report to him and try to understand the meaning of the word 'loyalty.' Our party doesn't care a tinker's dam who has had, now has, or will have that envelope. And if you want to get thrown out by the scruff of the neck just try going to headquarters ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... doctors, armourers, barbers, curriers, smiths, carpenters, bricklayers, sculptors, cooks, and tailors. When afflicted with Mercury or the moon, he denotes thieves, hangmen, and 'all cut throat people.' In fact, except the ploughboy, who belongs to Saturn, all the members of the old septet, 'tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy, thief,' are favourites with Mars. The planet's influence is not quite so evil as Saturn's, nor are the effects produced by it so long-lasting. 'The influence of Saturn,' says an astrologer, 'may be compared to a lingering but ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. Little, Brown and Company for ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... are "A fantasticke taylor; a player; a shooe-maker; a rope-maker; a smith; a tobacconist; a cunning woman; a cobler; a tooth-drawer; a tinker; a fidler; a cunning horse-courser; Bethlem; ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... of Reading almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, eyes, with a cheerful nod and word ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... bath. Don't know who could have done it; most extraordinary, I assure you. One of those ungrateful blacks, I warrant. Going this way? I shall be glad of your company. Ah, do you happen to know of a tinker?" he asked, as together they ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research is biological, while that ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Corner, in an envelope with the New Dalry postmark. He was an obliging editor, and generally gave the closely written manuscript to the senior office boy, who had passed the sixth standard, to cut down, tinker the rhymes, and lope any superfluity of feet. The senior office boy "just spread himself," as he said, and delighted to do the job in style. But there was a woman fading into a gray old-maidishness which had hardly ever been girlhood, who did ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... house, first, to pick up Father," replied Bob. "He is going to tinker up and whitewash some of the fences this morning. And Ma said she wanted to say 'hello' to you all. I thought you'd like to play down along the brook, and I can drive you there, because Father wants to work on the ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... the most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies, whom, in truth, they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more respectable than ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... of that day was Edward Dowling. As a tinker he wandered about distributing tracts, speaking the word in truth, and returning during the winter to be factotum in the tower. In that kindly old soul few guessed the old fighter in India. Did he really know the place where priceless treasures were ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... personality, characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... life now—didn't care about drinking any longer, nor yet about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money—he began to make it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made foreman—then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself, but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay back his ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... in Jack's overcoat pocket a parcel containing a cold chisel, small screw-wrench, file, and one or two other things that he'd bought that evening to tinker up the old printing press. I knew that, because I'd lent him a hand a few nights before, and he told me he'd have to get the tools. They found some scratches round the key-hole and knob of the office door that I'd made myself, ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... horses and the lazy wagoner drooping their heads with a weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... not the poet's father. The prefix Mr. is not used in the entries; it is certain that he retained his freeholds in Henley Street all his life, and if he had "no goods whereon to distrain," he could hardly have been received as sufficient bail at Coventry, on July 19 of that year, for Michael Price, tinker, of Stratford-on-Avon, or as security for his brother Henry's debts. In 1586 he was removed from his office ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... Domni, and being a Dom is "Domnipana." In English gypsy, the same words are expressed by Rom, romni, and romnipen. D, be it observed, very often changes to r in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany. Thus doi, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy roi, a term known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance. Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies went there, the word for man is romi, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows- mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is something in this play which looks ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Stratford-on-Avon, or on a ploughman in Ayrshire, so, in a similar manner, the altogether different gift of the divine, life-giving Spirit follows no lines that Churches or institutions draw. It falls upon an Augustinian monk in a convent, and he shakes Europe. It falls upon a tinker in Bedford gaol, and he writes Pilgrim's Progress. It falls upon a cobbler in Kettering, and he founds modern Christian missions. It blows 'where it listeth,' sovereignly indifferent to the expectations ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... We were the usual crowd of mixed humanity—tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, with our cousins, and our sisters, and our wives. So many of our eyes were wet with tears. Miss Butcher could hardly repress her sobs. Young Mr. Tinker, his face hidden behind his programme, pretended to be blowing his nose. Mrs. Apothecary's large bosom heaved with heartfelt sighs. The retired Colonel sniffed audibly. Sadness rested on our souls. It might ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... suggesting another "Happiness and Hayseed" trip just a few weeks before. Andrew was away when the letter came. I had a suspicion what was in it; so I opened it, read it, and—well, burnt it. Heavens! as though Andrew didn't have enough to do without mooning down the road like a tinker, just to write ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... it not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in sight when we anchored, which at first we took for the Jamaica packet; but it turned out to be the Tinker, friend Bang's flour—loaded brig; and by five in the evening our friends were all three once more restored to us, but, alas! so far as regarded two of them, only for a moment. Messrs Gelid and Wagtail had, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... "I will tinker this little toy of your body for you; then run along down there and play with ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... highest step of thraldome, there is no libertie or freedome. It is but a milde kind of subiection to be the seruant of one master at once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest botcher, tinker or cobler freeborne wil dominere ouer a forreiner, & think to bee his better or master in company: then shalt thou finde theres no such hell, as to leaue thy fathers house (thy natural habitation) ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... successfully played the parts of a nonjuring clergyman, dispossessed of his living for conscience' sake; a Quaker—here is a good example of his wonderful gift—in an assembly of Quakers; a ruined miller; a rat-catcher; and, having borrowed three children from a tinker, a grandmother. Carew once wheedled a gentleman, who boasted that he could not be taken in by beggars, into giving him liberal alms twice in one day—in the morning as an unfortunate blacksmith, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... is aluminum," said he, "or it wouldn't be worth a tinker's dam after all this time. But as it is, it's taken no harm that I can see. Wire braces all gone, rusted out and disappeared. Have to be rewired throughout, if I can find steel wire; if not, I'll use braided leather thongs. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Cromwell Cromwell's Law Cromwell in Connacht A Worse than Cromwell The Battle of Aughrim The Stuarts Another Story Patrick Sarsfield Queen Anne Carolan's Song 'Ninety-Eight Denis Browne The Union Robert Emmet O'Connell's Birth The Tinker A Present His Strategy The Man was Going to be Hanged The Cup of the Sassanach The Thousand Fishers What the Old Women Saw O'Connell's Hat The Change He Made The Man He Brought to Justice The Binding His Monument A Praise Made for Daniel O'Connell by Old Women and They Begging at ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... Brougham's of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs intelligence as melting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... there was something lying on the roadside. As he came nearer, he made it out to be a man prostrate on the grass, apparently asleep, and a few yards from where the man lay was a knife-grinder's wheel, and a few other articles in the use of a travelling tinker; a fire, nearly extinct, was throwing up a tiny column of smoke, and a saucepan, which appeared to have been upset, was lying beside it. There was something in the scene before him which created a suspicion ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... still more remarkable than the play itself: a drunken tinker, removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's. Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable truth; but he has spun it out to five acts, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... strikes me I weren't in no such 'urry after all. Why 'urry for a Harab? The car's been rattlin' worse 'n a tinker's basket. I gets down to lave a look—lights a gasper*—an' takes my bloomin' time about it. You seen them yellow curs there by Lazarus' tomb? Well, they come for me, yappin' an' snarlin' to beat 'ell. I'm pickin' up stones to break their 'eads with—good stones ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... enough to fill the kettle before tramping off to the 'Ring of Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to Providence ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and inspired me with a dread that is yet quite fresh in my mind. Some of them were most ferocious-looking ruffians, who stared at me as I went by; and stopped, perhaps, and called after me to come back and speak to them, and when I took to my heels, stoned me. I recollect one young fellow—a tinker, I suppose, from his wallet and brazier—who had a woman with him, and who faced about and stared at me thus; and then roared to me in such a tremendous voice to come back, that I halted ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... "I'm no tinker by trade, King O'Toole; I've a better trade than a tinker," says he—"what would you say," says he, "if I made your old goose ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... may or not—I don't care! In fact I don't give a tinker's damn! If this thing is really decreed in the council of God, as the song has it—I want a dismissal in all due form: I refuse to be just coolly shunted off.—Rose, is there anything in the past for which I ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... click? If not, disconnect the ground wire and examine all connections. Also press the sounder of each instrument down and see if it springs back readily. It may be that some screw is too tight, or too loose, or that a spring has come off; tinker awhile and see if you cannot make the instrument work. If you are unable to do so, ask ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... in his fervently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me—from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850—down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... will cost me another ten to put it in shape, but after that it will do all right. Will you deliver it to a man that I send after it? I'll take it down to the Riverton shops and work on it. They let me tinker things there whenever I ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... tone of him. I put out my hand and laid it on Spikes' wet, sweat-roughened neck. "Yes, he's a good little horse, and I beg his pardon for what I said," I owned, still with the ache just back of my palate. "But he can't carry us both, Frosty; I'll just have to tinker up this old skate, ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... disguised infidel, she was exposed to the temptations of a Moorish spy, and convicted mainly on the evidence furnished by certain Mussulman habits to which she adhered. Llorente reports a similar specimen case, vol. i. p. 442. The culprit was a tinker aged 71, accused in 1528 of abstaining from pork and wine, and using certain ablutions. He defended himself by pleading that, having been converted at the age of 45, it did not suit his taste to eat ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... man named Thorvald, the son of Eystein, bynamed the Tinker: he was a wealthy man, a smith, and a skald; but he was mean-spirited for all that. His brother Thorvard lived in the north country at Fliot (Fleet); and they had many kinsmen,— the Skidings they were called,—but little luck ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,'—faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,—prythee, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... genealogies connected with the Saxon Heptarchy. As a rule they had no time left in which to learn anything whatever of the progress of their own age, or the nineteenth-century development of the Empire. At that time a national schoolboy destined to earn his living as a soldier or a sailor, or a tinker or a tailor, sometimes knew a little of the Saxon kings of England, or even a few dates connected with the Norman Conquest, and the fact that Henry VIII. had six wives. But he had never heard of the Reform Bill, and knew ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... you understand, Peabody," he said. "It ain't just selfishness that makes me steer the course I'm runnin'. Course, Bos'n's got to be the world and all to me, and if she's taken away I don't know's I care a tinker's darn what happens afterwards. But, all the same, if her dad was a real man, sorry for what he's done and tryin' to make up for it—why, then, I cal'late I'm decent enough to take off my hat, hand her over, and say: 'God bless you and good luck.' But to think of him carryin' her ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in any way, but his smile drew the heart. "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them here in shorthand, were"—he opened a neat pocket-book—"'Get out of this and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion! You're a disgrace to the Service, and your ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... remember, he had lost his father, a clever tinker who could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an Irish colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... wonder at you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave is as flat to the earth as my hand, and his name forgot, people ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... The gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse of a ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Beowulf. The inexperienced teacher will find a splendid version, "The Story of Beowulf," ready-made in Wyche's Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them. To work from the complete epic, use any of the translations by Child, Tinker, Gummere, or Hall. "Perhaps it is not too much to assert . . . that in its lofty spirit, its vigor, and its sincerity, . . . it reflects traits which are distinctive of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... There was a Jovial Tinker, Which was a good Ale drinker; He never was a Shrinker, Believe me this is true; And he came from the wild of Kent, When all his Money was gone and spent, Which made him look like a Jack-a-Lent, And ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... batter, and his mother, not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... all to pieces when notified to pay your license-tax; if you can feel a quiet sense of pleasure when driving on a rough and hilly road, and never move a muscle of your visage when underneath you hear a tire explode; if you can plan a pleasant week-end journey and tinker at your car a day or so, then thrill with joy on that eventful morning to find no skill of yours can make it go; if you can gather up your wife and children, put on your glad rags, and start off for church, then have to wade around in greasy gearings and spoil the best of all your stock ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... at the still noon of night, The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's offspring ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... a good tinker, and worship god Pan, or I might grind scissors as sharp as the noses of bakers. But, as a matter of fact, I'm a piper, not a rat-catcher, you understand, but just a simple singer of sad songs, and a mad singer ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... outrage has been committed. During the night someone punched a hole in the bottom of my bath. Don't know who could have done it; most extraordinary, I assure you. One of those ungrateful blacks, I warrant. Going this way? I shall be glad of your company. Ah, do you happen to know of a tinker?" he asked, as together they walked along ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... had rendered the restrictions and penalties of Nonconformity utterly intolerable. Men were lying in prison here and there about merry England for no greater offence than preaching the gospel to a handful of God-fearing people. But that a Puritan tinker should moulder for a dozen years in a damp jail could count for little against the blessed fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five play-houses in London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when the plague ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... that day was Edward Dowling. As a tinker he wandered about distributing tracts, speaking the word in truth, and returning during the winter to be factotum in the tower. In that kindly old soul few guessed the old fighter in India. Did he really know the place where priceless treasures were ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... by sticking labels in a shoe-blacking factory. William Shakespeare's father made gloves. Benjamin Franklin was the son of a candlemaker. Daniel Defoe, who wrote that Robinson Crusoe you love so much, helped his father around the butcher shop. John Bunyan was a traveling tinker. And Christopher Columbus was the son of a wool comber, and ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs intelligence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... preamble?" When I pronounced these words with some vehemence, Strap looked at me for same time with a grave countenance, and then went on: "I'm very sorry to see such an alteration in your temper of late; you were always fiery, but now you are grown as crabbed as old Periwinkle the drunken tinker, on whom you and I (God forgive us!) played so many unlucky tricks while we were at school—but I will no longer detain you in suspense, because (doubtless) nothing is more uneasy than doubt—Dubio procul dubio nil dubius. My friend or relation, or which you will, or both, the schoolmaster, being ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... others, but never for himself. Tranquillity was to him instead of it. This philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... have half again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... the komatik (sledge) in front was a single thong of sealskin with a loop on its end. This was called the "bridle." Each dog had an individual trace, its end passed through the loop in the bridle and securely tied. Tinker, the leading dog, was fully thirty-five feet from the komatik when his trace was stretched to its full length. He had the longest trace of all. He was trained to respond to shouted directions, turning to the right when "ouk" was called, or left ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... around him on Tom Tiddler's ground, and his glance at last encountered a dusky Tinker lying among the weeds and rank grass, in the shade of the dwelling-house. A rough walking-staff lay on the ground by his side, and his head rested on a small wallet. He met Mr. Traveller's eye without lifting ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... himself been guilty of, lighted his cigar, and suggested the good results of another well compounded punch, which the general ordered without delay. "I tell you, sir," Mr. Tickler resumed, "he is an oily gentleman in very shabby clothes, and might be easily mistaken for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set up for a man of letters. His aversion to water and clean linen is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... compassed about with obstacles many and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ways are sometimes ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... of all religious observances is better obtained, when the government of the church is confided to the wisdom and experience of the most venerated among the people, than when it is placed in the hands of every tinker and tailor who chooses to claim a share in it. Nor is this the only evil attending the want of a national religion, supported by the State. As there is no legal and fixed provision for the clergy, it is hardly surprising that their services are ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... than any one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ago, and ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the shaft for us,—a cunning old beggar, the pere de famille of the encampment; up to every move on the board. He wanted to have a deal with me for Jessy. But 'pon my honor, we had a good time of it. There was the old tinker, mending the shaft, in his fur cap, with a black pipe, one inch long, sticking out of his mouth; and the old brown parchment of a mother, with her head in a red handkerchief, smoking a ditto pipe ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... few here," said Clark. "You know Kentucky breeds explorers. I have a good blacksmith, Shields, and Bill Bratton is another blacksmith—either can tinker a gun if need be. Then I have John Coalter, an active, strapping chap, and the two Fields boys, whom I know to be good men; and Charlie Floyd, Nate Pryor, and a couple of others—Warner and Whitehouse. We should get ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... holding it in with their united efforts, they forced it into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how small. So he ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... Breffny King Henry VIII. Elizabeth Her Death The Trace of Cromwell Cromwell's Law Cromwell in Connacht A Worse than Cromwell The Battle of Aughrim The Stuarts Another Story Patrick Sarsfield Queen Anne Carolan's Song 'Ninety-Eight Denis Browne The Union Robert Emmet O'Connell's Birth The Tinker A Present His Strategy The Man was Going to be Hanged The Cup of the Sassanach The Thousand Fishers What the Old Women Saw O'Connell's Hat The Change He Made The Man He Brought to Justice The Binding His Monument A Praise Made for Daniel ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... ago there dwelt in Athens a fruit-dealer of the name of Kimon, who was possessed of two daughters,—the one named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I was forced to make something else do. It was a great education, ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Whether you may or not—I don't care! In fact I don't give a tinker's damn! If this thing is really decreed in the council of God, as the song has it—I want a dismissal in all due form: I refuse to be just coolly shunted off.—Rose, is there anything in the past for which I need ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... at the end of it; so Michael Stein's smithy is turned into a perfect armoury, and he and his two sons are at work at the anvil morning, noon, and night: they made Annot blow the bellows this morning, till she looks for all the world like a tinker's wife." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... sorts of trivial distinctions. Brewing Smiths and baking Smiths, hunting Smiths and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote Pilgrim's Progress. I point to the history of the Christian Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day. I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working, and where, if you go and ask them, they will let ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... writes of his daughter, that "she desires to spend some time in service & liked much Mrs Brenton, who wanted." This was, no doubt, in order to be well drilled in housekeeping, an example which might be followed still to advantage. John Tinker, himself the "servant" or steward of the second Winthrop, makes use of help in both the senses we have mentioned, and shows the transition of the word from its restricted to its more general application. "We have fallen a pretty deal of timber & drawn ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... was a shiftless creature. It had long been the consensus of opinion—freely expressed throughout Tinkletown—that he did not amount to a tinker's dam. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... anything else under God's Heaven, and had the same crank health, I should make an even zero. If I had, with my present knowledge, twelve months of my old health, I would, could, and should do something neat. As it is, I have to tinker at my things in little sittings; and the rent, or the butcher, or something, is always calling me off to rattle up a pot-boiler. And then comes a back- set of my health, and I have to twiddle my fingers ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the window and seen that Master Tom had managed to get the auto under a shed at the back. He was industriously putting up the curtains to the car, and making all snug against the rain, before he began to tinker with the machinery. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... office holders who, striving for personal popularity, catering to the meddler and busybody—a class who had no business of their own, but ever ready to attend to that of others. From a willing-to-be governed and peaceful city, discontent and confusion came. Every tinker, tailor or candle stick maker, every busybody in the city took it upon themselves, although without training, ability or experience, to advise how the ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... it when he was unpacking and returned it to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who doesn't give a tinker's damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask him not to leave another one around where I will come ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... beastly jungle-grass," he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as fast as ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not fall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish, but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor. The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly made the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... parts," he answered. "How does the old puzzle run? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, ploughboy, gentleman, thief. I think I have played all those parts, and others, too. Fling beggar and pirate into the dish. But I tell you this, honest John, I have never played a part so dear to me as that of captain to this divine commander. I thank my extravagant ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... next god to Pan; and such a pot it may be as he shall haue more servants then all the Pannes in a Tinker's shop. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... 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!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. You are an Island, you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... be at least refreshing to have you, or someone, demonstrate what Christianity is. It would be good for our souls. Instead," she added bitterly, "instead, you select one little thing here, and one little thing there, and putter, and tinker, and temporize, and gloss over, and build big churches, with mortgages and taxes and insurance to pay, in the name of Christianity! If I were little Annie Smith, down in the village here, I could get a divorce for twenty-five dollars, and you would never hear of it. But Clarence Breckenridge ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I am ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... period gives ample evidence of his extreme reluctance to reassume public responsibilities. To bring the matter to its true proportions, it must be remembered that to the view of the times the new constitution was but the latest attempt to tinker the federal scheme, and it was yet to be seen whether this endeavor would be any more successful than previous efforts had been. As for the title of President, it had already been borne by a number of congressional politicians and had been rather tarnished by the behavior of some of ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... had better work on hand than to tinker with their constitution. At the root of their troubles had been the neglect of the Bible. In order, therefore, to restore the Bible to its proper position in Church esteem, the Brethren now established the Theological College at Gnadenfeld (1818). There John Plitt ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, eyes, with ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... The prefix Mr. is not used in the entries; it is certain that he retained his freeholds in Henley Street all his life, and if he had "no goods whereon to distrain," he could hardly have been received as sufficient bail at Coventry, on July 19 of that year, for Michael Price, tinker, of Stratford-on-Avon, or as security for his brother Henry's debts. In 1586 he was removed ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... babes or madmen? Her port is all to make? You're manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming's sake? Well, tinker up your engines — you know your business best — She's taking tired people to ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... And as to this particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... children be mishandled too far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... young lady's reticule from her arm in Broadway and got clear off with it; but upon examining my prize, I found it contained nothing but a handkerchief and some letters. The wipe I kept for my own use; as for the letters, here they are—they are not worth a tinker's d——n, for they are ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... having put on the jackets, they set to work to the great admiration of the bystanders, one of whom, a drunken tinker, expressed his applause in such remarkable language that I mildly asked him to desist, which ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, and when they saw ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Kavin. After some more talk the king says, 'What are you?' 'I'm an honest man,' says Saint Kavin. 'Well, honest man,' says the king, 'and how is it you make your money so aisy?' 'By makin' ould things as good as new,' says Saint Kavin. 'Is it a tinker you are?' says the king. 'No,' says the saint; 'I'm no tinker by thrade, King O'Toole; I've a betther thrade than a tinker,' says he—'what would you say,' says he, 'if I made your ould goose as good ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, contain only one act. The Tinker's Wedding has two acts, and the rest are ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... few—who is content, who has no treasure to guard, whose rights there is none to dispute; who is his own magistrate, postman, architect, carpenter, painter, boat-builder, boatman, tinker, goatherd, gardener, woodcutter, water-carrier, and general labourer; who has been compelled to chip the superfine edges of his sentiments with the repugnant craft of the butcher; who, heedless of rule and method, adjusts the balance between wholesome ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might have ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... consisted of eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. El Dancaire and I got there ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... at the close of our day-watch on deck, he approached Handy Solomon. It was at the end of ten days, on no one of which had the seaman failed to tinker away at his steel claw. Darrow balanced in front of him with a ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... face and the sun-cover of my umbrella folded and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, two quilts were under it, and my canvas bag, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... poor parentage, his father being a tinker. At one time he was in the Parliamentary Army, and in 1645, was present at the siege of Leicester. Having left the army, he married. Then after a time of great spiritual agony and doubt, with quieter intervals, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... his fair face crimsoning with vexation. "She seems to me one of those shallow women who would sooner flirt with a tinker than pass unnoticed by the male sex. I don't like her," he concluded, with ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... Baines would have fallen down and worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest to the rescue. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
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