|
|
|
More "Bludgeon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should take. They came to a resolution of driving them in by force, and gave orders to their sepoys to beat any one of the women who should attempt to move forward; the sepoys accordingly assembled, and each one being provided with a bludgeon, they drove them, by dint of beating, into the zenanah. The women, seeing the treachery of Letafit, proceeded to throw stones and bricks at the sepoys, and again attempted to get out; but finding that impossible, from the gates being shut, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... to keep a noisome ditch running at large there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from knocking me down with a bludgeon, why he should not be authorised to interfere to save me from a typhus fever; and if he can prevent boys from endangering the lives of passengers by firing guns on the high roads, why he should not also be enabled to forbid the open sewers and other nuisances, which, if not so noisy, are even ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... afternoon about six, and to have driven home along the Falmer Road in his car an hour or so later. And in a copse close by to where the body of the murdered man was found had been discovered a thick bludgeon of a stick, broken it would seem by some violent act, into two halves. On the top half was rudely cut with a pen-knife M. ASSHE ... What was puzzling, however, was the apparent motive of robbery about the crime; it will be remembered that the victim's ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... "With bludgeon or dagger!" echoed the excited voice of the morio, whose appearance had undergone a transformation. The indescribable vacancy with which he had listened to the minstrel was replaced by an ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of the so-called Danda Fauj dignified by the name of bludgeon-army by Mr. Pennington. There was no rebel army in Amritsar. The crown that committed the horrible murders and incendiarism contained no one community exclusively. The sheet was found posted only ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... an enterprise the danger of mutiny always looms large and the bludgeon of blackmail lies ready to the hand of the mutineer. Therefore the actual handling of the money had been a matter of extreme care to Lute and those in his closest confidence. When the leader had taken most of his men out of the mine he had led away those of whom he ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps, is surer. But there is the difference of cricket:—when your stumps are down, you are idle, at leisure; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me, do not you see that the Marquise is the tool of that tall lean man who never uttered a word? There is a strain of Cain in him, but of the Cain who goes to the Law Courts for his bludgeon, and there, unluckily for him, we keep more ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... minutes past eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the two looked over his head and seemed ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table with them, 'it does me good to think of. There was a opportunity! But it led to nothing. For my part, I don't know what would. There's no spirit among the people in these here times. Bring something to eat and drink ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... obeyed its lord. From Janasthan they sallied out With eager speed, and din, and shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver urged each gold-decked steed. Then forth the warrior's ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... melancholy employment for an invalid, breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and when he found he was bound hard and fast, his face turned as red as fire and he opened his mouth, whether to swear or yell I know not. I had already closed the door, and before the man had uttered more than a premonitory sound, David had clapped the end of his bludgeon against his mouth. ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... feet than fists the cur relies, And on that crowded "Corner" keeps his eyes. With straightening shots ENTELLUS threats the foe, } But DARES dodges the descending blow, } And back into his Corner's prompt to go. } Where bludgeon, knuckleduster, knotted sticks, Foul sickening blows and cruel coward kicks Are in his interest on ENTELLUS rained At every point that plucky boxer gained. ("Oh!" groaned SAYERIUS. "And this sort of thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... farm—and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... strength, and insist on their privileges. They howl and growl then at their own discretion, fly at the accidental stranger with open mouth, attack him singly, charge him en masse, and nothing but a stout bludgeon, wielded by a strong arm, can save the passenger from feeling that he is in the kingdom ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... young man to attempt a flirtation with Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon so that ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... prints of the period the gangsmen are generally armed with stout clubs answering to Smollett's "good oak plant." Apart from this artistic evidence, however, there is no valid reason for believing that the bludgeon ever came into general use as the ganger's weapon. As early as the reign of Anne he went armed with the "Queen's broad cutlash," and for most gangs, certainly for all called upon to operate in rough neighbourhoods, the hanger remained the stock weapon throughout the century. In expeditions ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a distinction that ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... weather-beaten. The talus against the cliff was composed of loose fragments of stone and other products of wash and erosion. This was overgrown with a thicket of stunted shrubs, wry-necked goblin thistles and murderous devil's clubs. These bludgeon-shaped plants, thickly covered with sharp thorns, reared aloft their weapons as if in menace to all living things; the unstable ground and thorny thicket formed the only shelter where we could be ambushed in the rear, and it was not a likely ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... short, heavy bludgeon with a nail-studded head. You thump Fritz on the head with it. Very handy at close quarters. The knuckle knife is a short dagger with a heavy brass hilt that covers the hand. Also very good for close work, as you can either strike or stab ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... this bit of brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the bully's hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown off his coat to fall to work on the ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... Paisley, between the two great Chartist champions—Feargus O'Connor and the Rev. Mr. Brewster. The subject debated was, Whether is moral or physical force the fitter instrument for obtaining the Charter? The Doctor espoused the moral hocussing system, and Feargus took up the bludgeon for physical force. After a pretty considerable deal of fireworks had been let off on both sides, it was agreed to divide the field, when Feargus, waving his hat, ascended into a tree, and called upon his friends to follow him. But, alas! few answered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... be d——d to you!' cried the fellow, raising a heavy bludgeon, and dealing the poor Doctor a blow on the head which felled him senseless to ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... not be quiet!" screamed the goodman, brandishing his bludgeon. "You have made matters worse by cheating me with ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... determined to right him, and when the aristocratic firm of Leasem and Fashun takes refuge according to the custom of respectable repudiators, in the cool arbors of the Court of Chancery, why, a mere bill-discounting attorney like David Discount, need not hesitate about cutting a bludgeon out of ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of the copse at the turning and struck at me with a bludgeon," said Mr. Juxon. "Knocked my hat off, into the bargain, and then ran away with Stamboul after him. If I had not come up in time there would have been nothing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... which might indifferently contain "genuine Nantz" or gunpowder. One of the "insides," an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig, is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... little sunny room, felt bruised by that bludgeon word—which, as it happened, was not accurate, for Maurice, by this time, had gained a maturity of thought and patience that put him practically out of boyhood. When Eleanor repeated her caller's remarks to him, she left that one word out; "Auntie implied," she said, "that you wouldn't ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... that hour in the rather extreme negligee of the early morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors. There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers of Truth—have you ever heard of a permanent one? In the very nature of man such a person is impossible. However, to drop back to the text—training: all training is one ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common excellences, into a thing ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... delicate cane of yours," said Travis, glancing from the other's stupendous bludgeon to his own gold-headed Malacca, which, as he would have expressed it himself, had knocked a big hole in a fifty dollar bill. "Preparing for the meeting to-night, you see," answered Lloyd, with a significant waggle of the big stick, that would have gladdened ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive. Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective. The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, taken unawares, was defenceless. He reminded you of a frightened sheep running aimlessly hither and thither. He was startled and amazed. At last ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... with one of the most influential of the Whig party at New York, he was talking about their success in the contest—"We beat them, sir, literally with their own weapons." "How so," replied I. "Why, sir, we bought over all their bludgeon men at so many dollars a head, and the very sticks intended to be used to keep us from the poll were employed upon the heads of the Loco-focos!" So much for ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... involved in a dangerous squabble, which might mean his death, over a girl whom he had only seen for a few minutes, had the sense to take it. But it was no easy task to extricate himself. A burly ruffian was approaching him with arm uplifted and whirling a bludgeon. Vane caught the fellow a blow in the waist and he immediately collapsed. Before the prostrate man could get his wind, Vane darted through the Traitors' Gate and racing towards the Borough with a score or so of the rabble ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... for a moment with ironical amusement, then remarked: "When you want to die, does it matter much whether you kill yourself with a bludgeon or a pin, take gas from a tap or cyanide of potassium, jump in front of a railway train or use the revolting razor? You are dead neither less nor more, and the shock to the world is the same. It's only the housemaid or the undertaker that notices any difference. I knew a man at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... having left his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he had disabled, in ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... restoration of the constitution of 1793. He was now in open conflict with the whole trend of public opinion. In February 1795 he was again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burnt in the Theatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse doree, the young men whose mission it was to bludgeon Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mad scramble he was aware that the color sergeant flinched suddenly, as if struck by a bludgeon. He faltered, and then became motionless, save for his ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... And it illustrates the habit of Johnson's mind which has always made the unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing theory to the test of fact. For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the final blow. We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but every man thinks he can understand facts and figures. The quickness of Johnson in applying ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... Jackson's partiality for his own arm was as marked as was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... "overthrow," and even its exaggeration, was of value, in its day, to prevent a recurrence to the old and discredited methods. But its work is done, and blind adherence to it without regard to the principles on which it rests tends to turn the art of war into mere bludgeon play. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... "A rest-day; Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So far well—he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger was looming; already he set her to ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... desired to mind my own business; while the fellow continued, in a most unmerciful manner, to beat the wretched unresisting beast upon a raw place on the upper end of his tail. Exasperated at the fellow's brutality, I rode up to him, and having seized his bludgeon, as he was brandishing it in the air about to apply it once more to the already lacerated rump of the poor ass, with an effort of strength I wrenched the bludgeon from the inhuman monster's hand, and threw it with great violence ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... with Mr O'Brien in his policy of national reconciliation—he used to dub us "Factionists." It was not fair fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics. It was the base weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... than just calling attention to the nondescript gilt monster, with its riveted wings and forked tongue and tail, which glares down on us from its perch above the Town Hall, in the High Street; or to a "cigar" vane (over 2 ft. long and as thick as a bludgeon), large enough to give Verdant Green's famous "smoke" many points, hoisted over an enterprising tobacconist's a little lower down; or to the skewered and unhappy-looking weathercock on the Parish Church; or the blackened griffin in Earl Street, all head and tail, which does duty on an old dismantled ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hinted, are treated in a horribly cruel manner, judged from our standpoint; but in reality they know not what cruelty is, because they are absolutely ignorant of kindness. They are the beasts of burden, to be felled to the earth with a bludgeon when they err in some trivial respect; and when camp is moved each woman carries virtually the whole household and the entire worldly belongings of the family. Thus it is a common sight to see a woman carrying a load consisting of one or two children and a quantity of miscellaneous ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Various well-intentioned and benignant fools look in on Punch to pass the time of day, and get—very properly—knocked out for their pains. (Loud and prolonged laughter.) This is followed by the side-splitting incident in which a handy clown not only eludes the thirsty bludgeon, but surreptitiously steals the inevitable sausages. Exit clown. Punch, already irritated at having missed clown, misses sausages, and exit in high dudgeon. Re-enter Judy, followed by sausaged clown, who comforts her. (Oh, Judy!) Re-enter Punch. Justifiable tussle. Punch sees sausages ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... terrible words, each of which was a blow with a bludgeon to the Baroness, the old lady, whose courage was not equal to her spirit, shrank over the side of her arm-chair, and cried piteously,—'He threatens me! he threatens me! I am frightened!'—and put up her trembling hands, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Thiers' return to Versailles from his visit to the European capitals, prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the Hotel de Ville—how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful, how the members of the Government of National Defense had been made prisoners and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... behind the arras; and the Tory government licks his patent-leather boots. Vile is the attitude of England, vile her threats, her sneers, her wicked contempt of a great people in agony. Her murderous government, bludgeon in hand, stands snarling at us in Mexico; her ministers glare at us from every war port; her press mocks in infamous caricature our unhappy President; only her poor are with us—the poor of England whom our war is starving. Again and again we have forgiven her. But now, standing ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... animal. I had rescued him, when a puppy, from the clutches of a malignant little villain in Nantucket who was leading him, with a rope around his neck, to the water; and the grown dog repaid the obligation, about three years afterward, by saving me from the bludgeon of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... earth. Once he returned from New Orleans, whither he had gone to sell his cotton, with the story that he had been knocked senseless and robbed of his wallet, and in proof of this he produced a newspaper account of the midnight outrage, and exhibited a wound on the head, inflicted by the bludgeon of the footpad. And with such drollery did he recite this story that the Major laughed at him, which meant, of course, that his tenure of the old plantation was not to be disturbed. The memory of this ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... case of Ireland the old oppressions have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been robbing a man's till for ten years, and then ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... Schiller or I; they ought rather to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater than these gentlemen.' He freely ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... people whom the noise had attracted, came upon the anticipated scene of murder, they found poor little Pitichinaccio lying as if dead on the ground, whilst Michele was thrashing the Pyramid Doctor with a formidable bludgeon. And they saw the Doctor reel to the floor just at the moment when Signor Pasquale painfully scrambled to his feet, drew his rapier, and furiously attacked Michele. Round about were lying pieces of broken guitars. Had not several people grasped the old man's arm he would assuredly have run Michele ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... with monuments of those who were once dear to me, with no insincere wish that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. My pains were those of the heart, and had something flattering in their character; if in the head, it was from the blow of a bludgeon gallantly received ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... going to do—oh, it was just ranting—but everybody clapped and applauded—only the man next to me said it was politics instead of reform—and then he went on to talk about that ordinance 147, and what it really meant, and how they were going to use it like a bludgeon over the heads of wrong-doers, and all that sickening sort of thing—and the more he talked the more I kept thinking.... My dear, all that ordinance says—at least, all they claim it says—is that we can't keep open on Sunday for ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... nothing less then to be engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle within the next few minutes; therefore, I waited in some suspense, straining my eyes to wards the shadows with my fingers clasped tight upon my bludgeon. ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... indeed. It is because of the peculiarly feminine attitude of mind of our present women-novelists. At least, this is the arresting pronouncement delivered with much robust eloquence by my leonine friend, Colonel Bludgeon. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... plain in the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... strong, though not sufficiently so to suit such as my friend of the railroad. Objectors laid great stress on the word "practical;" than which, with all its most respectable derivation and association, I know none more frequently—nor more effectually—used as a bludgeon for slaying ideas. Strictly, of course, it means knowing how to do things, and doing them; but colloquially it usually means doing them before learning how. Leap before you look. The practical part is bruising ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... appeared to be about two years of age, with its mother's eyes and a combative disposition. The latter was indicated by the manner in which it banged its own legs and the sides of its carriage with a wicker bludgeon that had once been a rattle. It looked earnestly at the young man, and gave the edges of its carriage a whack which knocked the bludgeon out of its hand. Lodloe picked up the weapon, and, restoring it to its owner, began to ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... thus indicated is characteristic; Johnson was as a rough but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him advice, sympathy, and applause, and at times criticised him pretty sharply, or brought down his conversational bludgeon upon his sensitive friend. "He has nothing of the bear but his skin," was Goldsmith's comment upon his clumsy friend, and the two men appreciated each other at bottom. Some of their readers may be inclined to resent Johnson's attitude of superiority. The admirably ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... state of her mind. Although a lady of great moral courage, and accustomed from infancy to self-control, she felt, on first beholding her timid little daughter, strongly disposed to seize Fatma by the hair of the head, and use her as a bludgeon wherewith to fell her Algerine mother; but, remembering the dignity of her position as, in some sort, a reflected representative of the British Empire in these parts, and also recalling to mind the aptitude of ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... he exclaimed. "It is impossible to go so! You must have a club! Wait a minute!" and he rushed back into the house to get me a bludgeon from his private armory. My driver, meanwhile, who evidently disapproved, on personal grounds, of this suggestion, laid his whip across his horses' backs with a cry of "Noo, rebatta!" ("Now then, boys") and we dashed away from the house, just as ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... portcullis. The flying plunderers were entrapped. Close behind them came the excited burghers—their antique Belgic ferocity now fully aroused—firing away with carbine and matchlock, dealing about them with bludgeon and cutlass, and led merrily on by Haultepenne and Elmont armed in proof, at the head of their squadron of lancers. The unfortunate patriots had risen very early in the morning only to shear the wolf. Some were cut to pieces in the streets; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... might as well an anvil "lick," Or stand against a horse's kick And fear not shattered rib or jaw As risk a smash from Martin's paw. I've seen him in the days of yore His fist crash through a panel door. Martin soon ran his wild race out, For "Doctor" Whitney with a "clout" Of a great bludgeon laid him out Heady for post mortem and bier, Thus ended Martin's rough career. Ah! those were happy halcyon days, Well worthy of immortal lays. Here I must summon from the band Of the departed shadowy land George Parsons, and his name ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There are times and seasons and individuals at which and on whom the bludgeon must be used—the greater good covering the lesser evil; but such cases are less common than present practice ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... cure for the sickly in the mind is reality. Something real has to be felt or experienced. Life that is over-delicate and remote through something unbalanced in the mind is not life but decay. The knife, the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's remedies for those who fail to live. We are the earth's children; we have no business in limbo. Living in limbo is like living in the ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... of his stick for the face of another of the boarding strangers. The fellow strove to protect his face, and would have guarded easily enough, but, instead, the other end of Tom's bludgeon struck him in the pit of his stomach, depriving him of all ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... child; I had drunk pretty freely and had just fallen asleep, when a cock, I suppose in a greater hurry than the rest, began to crow. I thought it was dawn and set out for Alimos.[223] I had hardly got beyond the walls, when a footpad struck me in the back with his bludgeon; down I went and wanted to shout, but he had already made off ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... altogether naked and showing in the candle-light a claylike yellow. It had, however, broad maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful lacerations; the skin was ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... formerly distinguished the gentleman, who then wore a sword as a part of his dress. He is now contented with a regular stand-up fight, and exhibits a fist like a knuckle-bone of mutton—hard, coarse, and of certain magnitude. The bludgeon hammer-headed whip, or a vulgar twig, succeeds the clouded and amber-headed cane; and instead of the snuff-box being rare, and an article of parade, to exhibit a beauty's miniature bestowed in love, or that of a crowned head, given for ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... approached him. But those bandy legs tottered and before he could turn the awful visitants were upon him. One raised a round shot above his head, or so it appeared to be, and smote him full upon the crown. The other whirled a flat bludgeon and hit him on the jaw. With the smell of brimstone was mingled the pungent flavor of ripe cheese and salt-fish. Blackbeard measured his length, and the ghost of Jesse Strawn delayed an instant to dump a pot of sizzling combustibles ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... eyes; his cheeks were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Terry. After Peg Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs. Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of Thespis, calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"—from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs. Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... ceased to pay interest, had added that she was in the same boat with many of the best people; which ought to have been a consolation, had she needed any. But this loss of the means of living had seemed a mere trifle beside her other griefs; indeed, it acted as a spur rather than a bludgeon. The same pride which had prompted her to continue to dance bade her bestir herself to make a living. Upon reflection, the plan of starting a school struck her as the most practicable. But it should be a school for ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... two monks, my masters," cried the man with the boar. "Then let each state his case with bludgeon or dagger." ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... words were scarcely uttered, when he was felled to the ground by the bludgeon of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the bonnet rouge, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this fete, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed against the laws; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... extravagances and violences of the Slave Power. It is its conscious and admitted weakness that has made Texas and Mexico and Cuba, and our own Northwestern territory, necessary to be devoured. It is desperation, and not strength, that has made the bludgeon and the bowie-knife integral parts of the national legislation. It has the American Government, the American Press, and the American Church, in its national organizations, on its side; but the Humanity and the Christianity of the Nation and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... pays, but a foreign Government must not expect love. Respect for the British rule depends upon the strength of that rule. Oudh still sends many recruits to the native army, though the young men no longer enjoy the advantage of a training in 'bhumiawat'. An occasional gang-robbery or bludgeon fight is the meagre modern substitute. The Rajputs or Thakurs of Bundelkhand and Gwalior still retain their old character for turbulence, but, of course, have less scope for what the author calls their 'sporting propensities' than they had in ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... ghastly did appear. The head became the stone to this strange sling, Of which the body was the potent string; And while 'twas brandished in a deadly way, The dislocated arms made monstrous play With hideous gestures, as now upside down The bludgeon corpse a giant force had grown. "'Tis well!" said Eviradnus, and he cried, "Arrange between yourselves, you two allied; If hell-fire were extinguished, surely it By such a contest might be all relit; From kindling spark struck out from dead King's brow, Batt'ring ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... companions came after him sword in hand. Syme's sword was broken, but he rent a bludgeon from the fist of a fisherman, flinging him down. In a moment they would have flung themselves upon the face of the mob and perished, when an interruption came. The Secretary, ever since Syme's speech, had stood with his hand to his stricken head as if dazed; ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... Rudel. Sire Edward snapped his fingers now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He wasn't human," I said, and remembered that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... arrows more suited to his size, and, being naturally sanguine, he had also made for himself a sling with the cord he chanced to possess and the leathern tongue of one of his shoes. He likewise carried a heavy bludgeon, somewhat like a policeman's baton, which was slung at his side. Not content with this, he sought and obtained permission to carry the axe in his belt. Of course, none of the bolts or arrows had metal points; but ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... by a minute guard-chain on a ruffled shirt-front of snowiest linen, where clung dry crumbs of the "fine-cut" which puffed the lower side pockets of his gray alpaca sack coat. His gold-headed cane was almost a bludgeon. He had come aboard at Memphis, having reached that city but a few hours earlier by rail-way train from White Sulphur Springs, Va., where he had had the good fortune to find great relief from rheumatism. The young lady in his company, now back in the ladies' cabin, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... bit," said Joe halting. "I shan't need this now," and he drew the piece of gas-pipe from his trousers pocket. "I'd have hammered the life out of Andy Gilmore!" he said, as he tossed the ugly bludgeon from him. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... She wondered what Jack would say if he saw her talking with a perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A great seal-ring bore an elaborate monogram, while the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... music Gipsy and Hungarian have become practically identical terms. It was a Hungarian gentleman who said: "When I hear the 'Rakoczy' I feel as if I must go to war to conquer the whole world. My fingers convulsively twitch to seize a pistol, a sword, or bludgeon, or whatever weapon may be at hand; I must clutch it, and march forward." It is because of this spirit, scarcely overstated in this story, that the Austrian Government, fearful of the influence of the "Rakoczy" ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... not far, and she was there before she had time to recover from the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's bludgeon-like snub. As timidly as the waif and estray that she was, she ventured into the crowded, gorgeous lobby with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big columns. At one side a long corridor ran brokenly ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of the storm spirit itself, for the wilder the gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be to see or hear or smell the hunter. Gaff or paddle in hand, the Aleut leaps from rock to rock, or dashes among the tumbling beds of tossed kelp. A quick blow of the bludgeon; the otter never knows how death came. This is the club hunt. But where the shore is honeycombed with caves and narrow inlets of kelp fields, is a safer kind of hunting. Huge nets now made of twine, formerly of sinew, with wooden floaters above, iron sinkers below, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... to his ordinary dress, Jack tied a belt of cocoa-nut cloth round his waist, into which he thrust the axe. I was also advised to put on a belt and carry a short cudgel or bludgeon in it; for, as Jack truly remarked, the sling would be of little use if we should chance to come to close quarters with any wild animal. As for Peterkin, notwithstanding that he carried such a long, and I must add, frightful-looking spear over his shoulder, we could not prevail ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... height of the orgy. They were hard cases, rough, tough fighting men, but they gave the big fellow plenty of sea-room. No ruffling or swaggering in his direction. No gibes or practical jokes. The bludgeon-like wit of the house very carefully passed him by. For he was ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... village. The idol consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the gateway of the negro villages in Surinam bears ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... plunderer's toils are done. Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, While round the hut are in disorder laid The tools and booty of his lawless trade; For force or fraud, resistance or escape The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape; His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards, And the filched lead the church's roof affords— (Hence shall the rector's congregation fret, That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.) ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... when the man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' for Mr. Rarey. Phlegon and Vatican ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... reasons of high policy satisfactory to himself, had determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the little daughter of Powhatan, a ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... removed for the time a potential cause of failure, namely, the uncertainty, to which perhaps the escape of De Wet at Poplar Grove may be due, whether a battle was to be fought with the Commander-in-Chiefs rapier or with the Chief-of-the-Staff's bludgeon. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... heart seemed to stand still; the blood left his face; for an instant the sunshine left the world. It was a terrible blow, the worst a man can receive—a bludgeon on the head is nothing to it. He half turned, he looked again for an instant at the form that was more to him than all the world besides, unable to face the dreadful loss, and recovering speech, falteringly said, "Is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to Mr. Choate's profession and exactly descriptive of the thing itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the Constitution with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... as sensible and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard—guiding and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... item in the curriculum, but, on the other hand, there was something to show for it; all those who passed through his hands when they subsequently fell into the clutches of the Law could endure as many as five-and-twenty strokes from the hardest bludgeon without so much as wincing. They had been case hardened by ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to promise to do it ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I may tell you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around as a ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... with resplendent plants in their hands. Dhatri stood, bow in hand, and Jaya with a thick club. Tvashtri of great strength took up in wrath, a huge mountain and Surya stood with a bright dart, and Mrityu with a battle-axe. Aryaman stalked about with a terrible bludgeon furnished with sharp spikes, and Mitra stood there with a discus sharp as a razor. And, O monarch, Pusha and Bhaga and Savitri, in wrath, rushed at Krishna and Partha with bows and scimitars in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... novel, and the historical one that she had been touching up, and the detective tale that she had been copying afresh, and she had started feverishly upon a short story that she had entitled Hypocrites. And she had tried desperately to "lay about her with a bludgeon," and say biting, savage things of hypocritical human nature, and hold a relentless mirror up to its little faults. Kinross would have been convulsed ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... upwards, with an enormous face, huge nose, mouth widely grinning, projecting chin, cheeks covered with grog blossoms, a large protuberance on his back, another on his chest; yet with these deformities he appeared uncommonly happy. This was Mr. Punch. He held in his right hand a tremendous bludgeon, with which he amused himself by rapping on the head every one who came within his reach. This exhibition seems very absurd, yet not less than one hundred were present—children, boys, old men, and even gentlemen and ladies, were standing by, ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... "My lord, I saw Denis Halligan (that's in the dock there) take a vacancy (Irish word for 'aim' at an unguarded part) at the poor soul that's kilt, and give him a wipe with a clehalpin (Irish word for 'bludgeon'), and lay him down as quiet as a child." They were found guilty. The judge, sentencing the first four, gave them seven years' imprisonment. But when he came to Halligan, who really killed the deceased, the judge said, "Denis Halligan, I have purposely reserved ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... bearing the mighty bludgeon was slinking toward Carthoris. The Heliumite's fingers were working as he kept his eyes upon his executioner. Kar Komak bent his gaze penetratingly upon the apes. The effort of his mind was evidenced in the sweat upon his ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... direct their attention, for the most part, to the worthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath their regard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even this is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie; "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!" He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuff-box and his cane— "Now back, my boon companions, to our bordel with our gain!" And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly, If I were Francois ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... on me and squeezing the life out of me jumped up when he heard Lopez coming, and struck him over the head with a bludgeon. I heard the blow, though I was pretty well done for at the time myself. I don't think they hit me, but they got something round my neck, and I was half strangled before I knew what they were doing. Poor Lopez bled horribly, but he says ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... little that the sense of honour was crude and rough. It was there, and all bullies and blackguards were compelled to abide by it So long as it was the fashion to fight with fists, the use of the knife, the bludgeon, and the brickbat was far rarer than it is now. The most ignorant crowd could be trusted to police a brace of combatants. There is no harm in a stand-up fight with the weapons of nature. Men will fight, and we English ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... the other, and when he found he was bound hard and fast, his face turned as red as fire and he opened his mouth, whether to swear or yell I know not. I had already closed the door, and before the man had uttered more than a premonitory sound, David had clapped the end of his bludgeon against ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... with a bow and arrows more suited to his size, and, being naturally sanguine, he had also made for himself a sling with the cord he chanced to possess and the leathern tongue of one of his shoes. He likewise carried a heavy bludgeon, somewhat like a policeman's baton, which was slung at his side. Not content with this, he sought and obtained permission to carry the axe in his belt. Of course, none of the bolts or arrows had metal points; but that mattered ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... in New York have set the fashion of having costly diamonds set into their front teeth. The attention of robbers and garotters is called to this fact, with the recommendation that no greater force be used than is necessary. The use of the ordinary bludgeon or slung shot would be quite needless; a gentle tap on the head with a clay pipe or a toothpick will place the victim in the proper condition to be despoiled. Great care should be exercised in extracting the jewels; ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... in the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... shoulders, arms, and chest, were shocking; and I felt that, with the limited appliances at our command, there was but very small hope of saving his life. He still grasped in his right hand a formidable bludgeon, and a similar weapon lay on ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... as heard a performance of "Acis and Galatea" and been entertained with the spectacle of Polyphemus crushing the head of presumptuous Acis with a stave like another Fafner while singing "Fly, thou massy ruin, fly" to the bludgeon which was playing ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and I do not love their kind attentions. Now and then I may defy them, when I need an excitement of that kind; but not to-night. To-night I mean to be clever, and show you how I can twist a cold-blooded Englishman round my finger. If you go, then I will scream—it is a woman's bludgeon, my child, as her tongue is her dagger. Bah! be quiet and listen to me. You shall not divorce me, for if you try I will accuse you of all sorts of things—basenesses that will blast your ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... found himself involved in a dangerous squabble, which might mean his death, over a girl whom he had only seen for a few minutes, had the sense to take it. But it was no easy task to extricate himself. A burly ruffian was approaching him with arm uplifted and whirling a bludgeon. Vane caught the fellow a blow in the waist and he immediately collapsed. Before the prostrate man could get his wind, Vane darted through the Traitors' Gate and racing towards the Borough with a score or so of the rabble after him, darted into the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... him out. This injunction was of course disregarded, for when the man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' for Mr. Rarey. Phlegon ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... attention, for the most part, to the worthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath their regard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even this is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow dull and that ridicule ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... great Chartist champions—Feargus O'Connor and the Rev. Mr. Brewster. The subject debated was, Whether is moral or physical force the fitter instrument for obtaining the Charter? The Doctor espoused the moral hocussing system, and Feargus took up the bludgeon for physical force. After a pretty considerable deal of fireworks had been let off on both sides, it was agreed to divide the field, when Feargus, waving his hat, ascended into a tree, and called upon his friends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... bludgeon which bears a distinctive character . . . merely a round piece of wood, three feet long and two and a half inches thick, brought to a blunt point at the end. The mallee is the wood from which it is ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... use his great wealth as a bludgeon with which to stun all competition at the start. But one of the voyageurs, looking on El- Soo with sparkling eyes, raised the bid ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of these sites, in company with Count Berchtold. As we were climbing about the ruins near the mosque, a sturdy goatherd, armed with a formidable bludgeon, came before us, and demanded "backsheesh" (a gift, or an alms) in a very peremptory tone. Neither of us liked to take out our purse, for, fear the insolent beggar should snatch it from our hands; so we gave him ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... incomprehensible truth in 1917. All in me that is spiritual, reasonable, all that was once hopeful, revolts at this actuality and its meaning. But there is another side, that dark one, which revels in anticipation. It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay. I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades. I fancied that I alone had suffered a retrogression. I have a deep consciousness of baseness that is going to keep me aloof from them. I seem to be alone with my own soul. Yet I seem to be abnormally keen to ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... exactly descriptive of the thing itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the Constitution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... thrown into a ferment by this; meetings were held which attempted some rough organisation for the holding of another meeting to retort on the authorities. A huge crowd assembled in Trafalgar Square and the neighbourhood (then a place of crowded streets), and was too big for the bludgeon-armed police to cope with; there was a good deal of dry-blow fighting; three or four of the people were killed, and half a score of policemen were crushed to death in the throng, and the rest got away as they could. This was a victory for the people as far as ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... his ordinary dress, Jack tied a belt of cocoa-nut cloth round his waist, into which he thrust the axe. I was also advised to put on a belt and carry a short cudgel or bludgeon in it; for, as Jack truly remarked, the sling would be of little use if we should chance to come to close quarters with any wild animal. As for Peterkin, notwithstanding that he carried such a ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... "Let the Senator remember hereafter that the bowie-knife and bludgeon are not the proper emblems of senatorial debate. Let him remember that the swagger of Bob Acres and the ferocity of the Malay cannot add dignity to this body.... No person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, without ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Latin Mimi, through the Italian Pullicenella. It was originally intended as a characteristic representation. The tale is this: Punch, in a fit of jealousy, strangles his infant child, when Judy flies to her revenge. With a bludgeon she belabors her husband, till he becomes so exasperated that he snatches the bludgeon from her, knocks her brains out, and flings the dead body into the street. Here it attracts the notice of a police officer, who enters the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... bedroom, a coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... "I hate to have to tell you, but I hear, and I'm afraid it's true, that Archelaus is starting bush-beating on the estate again. I met John-Willy Jacka coming back from the direction of the wood late one night with a suspicious-looking sack and a bludgeon, and next day I asked John-James if he knew anything. He didn't give anyone away, but ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... LANG," writes the Baron's Assistant Reader, "I have read your criticism in Longman's Magazine upon Mr. BARRY PAIN's In a Canadian Canoe. It's an ugly piece of bludgeon work, I admit, but not convincing to anyone who has read the book of which you speak. You tear away a line or two from the context, and ask your readers to say if that is wit or humour. How your admirers would have protested had any sacrilegious critic ventured ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... from father to daughter, and smiled. "Pardi!" said he. "I am between bludgeon and dagger. If I escape with my life, I shall be fortunate. Why, then, since you pin me to the very wall, I'll tell you what I should do. I should go back to the original and help ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... boot appeared, his corduroy leg followed, and next moment he stood in the room with a menacing look and attitude and a short thick bludgeon in his knuckly hand. Bill quickly stood beside him. After another cautious look round, the two advanced with extreme care—each step so carefully taken that the hobnails fell like rose-leaves on the carpet. Feeling that the "coast was ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... taking him prisoner," replied the rat, "the object of that bludgeon is to me a matter of mere conjecture. However, it is easy enough to see you have changed your mind; and it may be barely worth mentioning that I ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... huge nose, mouth widely grinning, projecting chin, cheeks covered with grog blossoms, a large protuberance on his back, another on his chest; yet with these deformities he appeared uncommonly happy. This was Mr. Punch. He held in his right hand a tremendous bludgeon, with which he amused himself by rapping on the head every one who came within his reach. This exhibition seems very absurd, yet not less than one hundred were present—children, boys, old men, and even ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... with an oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table with them, 'it does me good to think of. There was a opportunity! But it led to nothing. For my part, I don't know what would. There's ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to the genii ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... his faith, an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy world ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... steps moaning for water. Of our own small company not one had escaped unscathed. Three of our followers had been slain outright, while a fourth was lying stunned from a blow. Buyse and Sir Gervas were much bruised. Saxon was cut on the right arm. Reuben had been felled by a bludgeon stroke, and would certainly have been slain but for the fine temper of Sir Jacob Clancing's breastplate, which had turned a fierce pike-thrust. As to myself it is scarce worth the mention, but my head sang for some hours like a good wife's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... vermilion with blue trimmings, or the Dioxys-bee, with a red scarf across her black abdomen, and the mistress of the house will let her have her way, or, if she become too pressing, will drive her off with a mere flick of her wing. With her, there is no serious fray, no fierce fight. The Bludgeon is reserved for the friend of the family. Now go and practice your mimesis in order to receive a welcome from the Anthophora or the Chalicodoma! A few hours spent with the insects themselves will turn any one into a hardened scoffer at these ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... ladies to her companion, "don't go too near him. Gracious! look at the bludgeon, or beam, or something he carries in his hand, to fight' and beat the people, I suppose: yet," she added, putting up her glass, "the man is actually not ill-looking; and, though not so tall as the Irishman in Sheridan's Rivals, ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... a typical cave man—squat muscular, and hairy, and of a type I had not seen before. His features, like those of all the primeval men of Pellucidar, were regular and fine. His weapons consisted of a stone ax and knife and a heavy knobbed bludgeon of wood. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." "All training," he avers, "is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downward or they train ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... It is because of the peculiarly feminine attitude of mind of our present women-novelists. At least, this is the arresting pronouncement delivered with much robust eloquence by my leonine friend, Colonel Bludgeon. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... foot-soldier. But Jackson's partiality for his own arm was as marked as was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... when Saint-Just, in the name of the Convention, affirms anything, it must be believed; his dissertation is a peremptory injunction and not an effort of reason; it commands obedience; it is not open to examination; it is not a report which he draws from his coat pocket, but a bludgeon. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... packs on the ground. One by one they bent low and got through the doorway. Yuara, with a word to a clubman and a motion to the equipment, followed the whites, trailed in turn by his three companions of the forest. The clubman, after a curious inspection of the packs, stood on guard among them, his bludgeon grasped loosely but suggestively, ready to prevent any undue inquisitiveness by the rest. But soon he found himself alone, for the other tribesmen transferred their attention and themselves to the interior ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... end of his stick for the face of another of the boarding strangers. The fellow strove to protect his face, and would have guarded easily enough, but, instead, the other end of Tom's bludgeon struck him in the pit of his stomach, depriving him of all ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... keep a noisome ditch running at large there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from knocking me down with a bludgeon, why he should not be authorised to interfere to save me from a typhus fever; and if he can prevent boys from endangering the lives of passengers by firing guns on the high roads, why he should not also be enabled to forbid the open sewers ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... the middle of the battle. There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps. Mind-voices shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in the wind. One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... quiet!" screamed the goodman, brandishing his bludgeon. "You have made matters worse by cheating me with that ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... face the danger: he stopped therefore; and, turning round, he perceived close to his elbow a man in no very respectable attire, so far as the obscurity would allow him to judge, but half muffled up in a cloak, and armed with a stout bludgeon. Much as he had just now been wishing for some guide, he yet could not congratulate himself on so unpropitious a rencontre. The stranger's dress and unceremonious greeting were not more suspicious than the abruptness of his appearance: for Bertram felt convinced that he must ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Feemy, who was still insensible, upon the path; but he could not do so quick enough to prevent the stunning blow which brought him on his knees. His hat partially saved him, and he was on the point of rising, when Thady again struck him with all his power; this time the heavy bludgeon came down on his bare temple, and the young man fell, never to rise again. He neither moved nor groaned; the force of the blow, and the great weight of the stick falling on his uncovered head as he was rising, had shattered his brains, and he lay as dead as though he had been struck down ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... best people; which ought to have been a consolation, had she needed any. But this loss of the means of living had seemed a mere trifle beside her other griefs; indeed, it acted as a spur rather than a bludgeon. The same pride which had prompted her to continue to dance bade her bestir herself to make a living. Upon reflection, the plan of starting a school struck her as the most practicable. But it should ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... noble end. For this work his whole life had been a preparation. Accustomed from early youth to spend ten hours a day with books on law, history, and classic literature, he knew as no other man then knew what aid the past could offer to the struggle for freedom. The bludgeon of the would-be assassin had not impaired his memory, and four years of enforced leisure enabled him to fulfill his highest ideals of perfect oratorical form. Personalities he eliminated from this final address, and blemishes he pruned away. In his earlier ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... decidedly unpleasant, I confess, for I expected nothing less then to be engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle within the next few minutes; therefore, I waited in some suspense, straining my eyes to wards the shadows with my fingers clasped tight upon my bludgeon. ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... stood there with resplendent plants in their hands. Dhatri stood, bow in hand, and Jaya with a thick club. Tvashtri of great strength took up in wrath, a huge mountain and Surya stood with a bright dart, and Mrityu with a battle-axe. Aryaman stalked about with a terrible bludgeon furnished with sharp spikes, and Mitra stood there with a discus sharp as a razor. And, O monarch, Pusha and Bhaga and Savitri, in wrath, rushed at Krishna and Partha with bows and scimitars in hand. And Rudras ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... returned from New Orleans, whither he had gone to sell his cotton, with the story that he had been knocked senseless and robbed of his wallet, and in proof of this he produced a newspaper account of the midnight outrage, and exhibited a wound on the head, inflicted by the bludgeon of the footpad. And with such drollery did he recite this story that the Major laughed at him, which meant, of course, that his tenure of the old plantation was not to be disturbed. The memory of this rascally trick came back to the Major ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... anything in the world can be bought for money, if only there is money enough. But Donovan would not have insisted on justifying his faith by putting it to the test. No one does that. Not even a church, though firmly convinced of its own infallibility, will bludgeon the world into an acceptance of its claim by making decisions about matters which are susceptible of proof. Donovan would have been quite content to believe that he could purchase the Crown of Megalia without actually doing so. It was Miss Daisy, who had no theories about the power ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... was one day with one of the most influential of the Whig party at New York, he was talking about their success in the contest—"We beat them, sir, literally with their own weapons." "How so," replied I. "Why, sir, we bought over all their bludgeon men at so many dollars a head, and the very sticks intended to be used to keep us from the poll were employed upon the heads of the Loco-focos!" So ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... contemporaries of Pitt, who likened the ejected Chancellor to Lucifer or to a Titan blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. In this age we find it difficult to account for the prestige of Thurlow. His legal learning was far from profound, his speeches were more ponderous than powerful, and his attacks were bludgeon blows rather than home thrusts. Of the lighter graces and social gifts he had scant store. Indeed, his private life displayed no redeeming feature. Everyone disliked him, but very many feared him, mainly, perhaps, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... cliff was composed of loose fragments of stone and other products of wash and erosion. This was overgrown with a thicket of stunted shrubs, wry-necked goblin thistles and murderous devil's clubs. These bludgeon-shaped plants, thickly covered with sharp thorns, reared aloft their weapons as if in menace to all living things; the unstable ground and thorny thicket formed the only shelter where we could be ambushed in the rear, and it was not a likely spot to be chosen ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... and remorseless zeal, a conquered people were struggling to turn his own weapon against their conqueror, and beat his brains out with the bludgeon he had placed in the hands ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... did not seem to be much, but it struck a blow which to this day makes the earth stagger like an ox under a butcher's bludgeon. To find out the consequences of that one sin, you would have to compel the world to throw open all its prison doors and display the crime, and throw open all its hospitals and display the disease, and throw open all the insane asylums ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of no use with this man; a bludgeon was the only instrument, yet it might wound, and she only wanted to prick. Had the creature never seen Olive sketching, nor ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance - still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. I. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Drover to forbear, In Smithfield's muddy, murderous, vile environ,— Staying his lifted bludgeon in the air! Bullocks don't wear Oxide of iron! The cruel Jarvy thou hast summon'd oft, Enforcing mercy on the coarse Yahoo, That thought his horse the courser of the two— Whilst Swift smiled down aloft!— O worthy pair! for this, when ye inhabit Bodies of birds—(if so ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... continued, in a most unmerciful manner, to beat the wretched unresisting beast upon a raw place on the upper end of his tail. Exasperated at the fellow's brutality, I rode up to him, and having seized his bludgeon, as he was brandishing it in the air about to apply it once more to the already lacerated rump of the poor ass, with an effort of strength I wrenched the bludgeon from the inhuman monster's hand, and threw it ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... address on behalf of the citizens of "this great metropolis." It was also resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive us ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... came to a resolution of driving them in by force, and gave orders to their sepoys to beat any one of the women who should attempt to move forward; the sepoys accordingly assembled, and each one being provided with a bludgeon, they drove them, by dint of beating, into the zenanah. The women, seeing the treachery of Letafit, proceeded to throw stones and bricks at the sepoys, and again attempted to get out; but finding that impossible, from the gates being shut, they kept up a continual ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... "Factionists." It was not fair fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics. It was the base weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more legitimate ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... first seized hold of a good bludgeon, feigned dead. Then the foxes arrived, and spoke thus: "Panaumbe! You are to be pitied. Were you frozen to death, or were you starved to death?" With these words, all the foxes came up close to him, and wept. Thereupon Panaumbe ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... strong, would have been an insignificant protection against popular fury. If conspirators had resolved to take his life, they would have tried to effect their purpose by shooting or stabbing him, not by knocking him on the head. A steel-plated hat would have been but a poor guard against a bludgeon, and a still poorer defence against poignard or pistol. It is far more probable that in laying aside the ordinary head-dress of an English common law judge, and in assuming a high-crowned hat, the usual covering ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. Southward ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common excellences, into a thing ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Down came the portcullis. The flying plunderers were entrapped. Close behind them came the excited burghers—their antique Belgic ferocity now fully aroused—firing away with carbine and matchlock, dealing about them with bludgeon and cutlass, and led merrily on by Haultepenne and Elmont armed in proof, at the head of their squadron of lancers. The unfortunate patriots had risen very early in the morning only to shear the wolf. Some were cut to pieces in the streets; others climbed the walls, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Therefore not one outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, not a single bullet or bayonet thrust of the soldiery, could have been spared. Nothing but just this discipline of failure, disappointment, and defeat on the part of the earlier reformers could have educated the people to the necessity of attacking the system ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... and using the terrible savate in Flynn's stomach, just as Shad Wells rushed at him from one side. Peter saw the blow coming from a broken axhandle—but he had no time to avoid it. Instinctively he ducked his head and threw up his left arm, but the bludgeon descended and Peter fell, remembering ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian franchise law must accept all the consequences of their political ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... victims had gone before him. It was a melancholy employment for an invalid, breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, which include some of his highest achievements, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce moustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting-gallery, and pass amongst my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... desire, for were they not victims of the same vicious system of treatment to which I was subjected? In every institution where the discredited principles of "Restraint" are used or tolerated, the very atmosphere is brutalizing. Place a bludgeon in the hand of any man, with instructions to use it when necessary, and the gentler and more humane methods of persuasion will naturally be forgotten or ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... seized the youth by the ankles and swung him like an animate bludgeon over his head. The attacking party was too precipitate to halt in time and the yelling weapon swung round, horizontally mowing down the foremost pair of men like wooden pins. The weight of the boy, more than the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ingratitude. For I am not a fool; I know my faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quo ante. In the case of Ireland the old oppressions have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide—by the way you have not yet decided—to leave off, ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his table, and who listened with one ear ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Constance heard this, it seemed as if a bludgeon were falling on her to make her defeat complete. And so, even if she should now let Denis, in his turn, kill himself, another Froment was coming who would replace him. There was ever another and another of that ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... exterminated; small holdings abolished; the process of eviction rendered superfluous; the landlord's word made law; the refuge of the discontented reduced to a workhouse, and all without a shot, or a bludgeon, or ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... dropped from his hand on to the pavement with a bump and a rattle. Stooping swiftly, the Kid picked it up, and handed it to Psmith. His fingers closed upon it. It was a short, wicked-looking little bludgeon, the black-jack of ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 1793. He was now in open conflict with the whole trend of public opinion. In February 1795 he was again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burnt in the Theatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse doree, the young men whose mission it was to bludgeon Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators who ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... encountered Mrs. Major. Now she was girt against the weather and against exercise. Beneath her chin were firmly knotted the strings of her sober bonnet; a short skirt hid nothing of the stout boots she had donned; her hand grasped the knob of a bludgeon-like umbrella. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... and would have fled as the spirits approached him. But those bandy legs tottered and before he could turn the awful visitants were upon him. One raised a round shot above his head, or so it appeared to be, and smote him full upon the crown. The other whirled a flat bludgeon and hit him on the jaw. With the smell of brimstone was mingled the pungent flavor of ripe cheese and salt-fish. Blackbeard measured his length, and the ghost of Jesse Strawn delayed an instant to dump a pot of sizzling combustibles ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... many—or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play—it's lost then—but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the two looked over his head and seemed no whit ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own stick in ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... and the blade was sinking again and again into the savage side. Nor was the man-thing either longer fleeing, or idle. He too, creature of the wild, had sensed on the instant the truth of the miracle of his saving, and turning in his tracks, had leaped forward with raised bludgeon to Tarzan's assistance and Numa's undoing. A single terrific blow upon the flattened skull of the beast laid him insensible and then as Tarzan's knife found the wild heart a few convulsive shudders and a sudden relaxation marked the passing of ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was galling and barren work. He had to ask favours of fellows whom he hated, and to stand their refusals, and pretend to believe their lying excuses, and appear to make quite light of it, though every failure stunned him like a blow of a bludgeon, and as he strutted jauntily off with a bilious smirk, he was well nigh at his wits' end. It was dark as he rode out by the low road to Chapelizod—crest-fallen, beaten—scowling in the darkness through his horse's ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... was in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given place to the bludgeon. For sarcasm to be effective, the user of it must be met half-way. His hearer must appear to be conscious of the sarcasm and moved by it. Mike, when masters waxed sarcastic towards him, always assumed an air of stolid stupidity, which was as a suit ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... European capitals, prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the Hotel de Ville—how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful, how the members of the Government of National Defense had been ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... looking back to the political lampoons of Rowlandson's and Gilray's time they would find them coarse and brutal. In some countries abroad still, 'even in America,' the method of political caricature was of the bludgeon kind. The fact was we had passed the bludgeon stage. If they were brutal in attacking a man, even for political reasons, they roused sympathy for the man who was attacked. What they had to do was ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... writing-folk to-day Like those whose names, in days gone by, Upon the scroll of fame stood high. And when I think of Smollett's tales, Of waspish Pope's ill-natured rails, Of Fielding dull, of Sterne too free, Of Swift's uncurbed indecency, Of Dr. Johnson's bludgeon-wit, I must ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... stone to this strange sling, Of which the body was the potent string; And while 'twas brandished in a deadly way, The dislocated arms made monstrous play With hideous gestures, as now upside down The bludgeon corpse a giant force had grown. "'Tis well!" said Eviradnus, and he cried, "Arrange between yourselves, you two allied; If hell-fire were extinguished, surely it By such a contest might be all relit; From ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... disputant, controversialist, polemic, litigant, belligerent; competitor, rival, corrival^; fighter, assailant; champion, Paladin; mosstrooper^, swashbuckler fire eater, duelist, bully, bludgeon man, rough. prize fighter, pugilist, boxer, bruiser, the fancy, gladiator, athlete, wrestler; fighting-cock, game-cock; warrior, soldier, fighting man, Amazon, man at arms, armigerent^; campaigner, veteran; swordsman, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of half-consumed wood, with which he aimed at McDermot's head, broke across the bludgeon which was raised to ward the blow. Debriseau closed; and, clasping his arms round his neck, tore him with his strong teeth with the power and ferocity of a tiger, and they rolled together in the dust, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... blows, they need not trouble about anything more for the moment; for their progress down the lane would simply be a continuous succession of evasions of three blows aimed at them at the same moment. Their object, therefore, was each to secure a bludgeon before receiving a disabling blow; and this they contrived to do, their sudden spring taking the Indians so completely by surprise that the weapons were wrenched out of their hands without the slightest difficulty. Then, instead of sprinting for their lives down the lane, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the door. The key was in the lock, but he didn't have a chance to turn it before all three threw themselves on him. A scuffle followed which Judson brought to a quick stop by striking Jack a stunning blow on the head with his bludgeon. With a million stars dancing before him in a void of ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... such an enterprise the danger of mutiny always looms large and the bludgeon of blackmail lies ready to the hand of the mutineer. Therefore the actual handling of the money had been a matter of extreme care to Lute and those in his closest confidence. When the leader had taken most of his men out of the mine he had led away those of whom ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of "Spider" Kelley to elevate ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... back upon our sorrow and he or she who caused it with wonder, yes even with scorn and bitter laughter. But it is not so when the blow falls in later life. It may not hurt so much at the time, it may seem to have been struck with the bludgeon of Fate rather than with her keen dividing sword, but the effect is more lasting, and for the rest of our days we are numb and cold, for Time has no salve ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... large ivory buttons, and their hats slouched on, sat in a corner smoking their pipes. They bore the exact appearance of being half poachers, and half tillers of the earth; fellows who, upon a pinch, would have no objections to take the road with a bludgeon—the very models of country blackguards. They were both in liquor—the shorter one so much so, that he had became quite obstreperous, and had once or twice interrupted the other vocalists; and now, as if unable to contain himself any longer, broke ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... large enough, in all conscience. Alas, young outlander, who call yourself a king! you carry the bludgeon of a highwayman, and I am afraid ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... indefinitely, for Birotteau stood still, petrified. Every phrase was a calamity, like the blows of a bludgeon. He heard the death-bells tolling in his ears,—just as his eyes had seen, at the first word, the flames of his fortune. Alexandre Crottat, who thought the worthy perfumer a strong and able man, was alarmed ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... fever and the tyranny has done its work, in thy sanctimonious prudishness, drugging thy respectable conscience by a "searching inquiry" as to how it all happened—lest, forsooth, there should have been "foul play!" Is the knife or the bludgeon, then, the only foul play, and not the cesspool and the curse of Rabshakeh? Go through Bermondsey or Spitalfields, St. Giles's or Lambeth, and see if there is not foul play enough already—to be tried hereafter at a more awful coroner's ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... away, exposing the entire body, altogether naked and showing in the candle-light a claylike yellow. It had, however, broad maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful lacerations; the skin was ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the copse at the turning and struck at me with a bludgeon," said Mr. Juxon. "Knocked my hat off, into the bargain, and then ran away with Stamboul after him. If I had not come up in time there would have been nothing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew only a rawhide instead of what I expected—a bludgeon or pistol. With it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it off, and afterwards on the side of the head. As he moved away to get a better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a chance under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the height of the orgy. They were hard cases, rough, tough fighting men, but they gave the big fellow plenty of sea-room. No ruffling or swaggering in his direction. No gibes or practical jokes. The bludgeon-like wit of the house very carefully passed him by. For he was so ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... many of these sites, in company with Count Berchtold. As we were climbing about the ruins near the mosque, a sturdy goatherd, armed with a formidable bludgeon, came before us, and demanded "backsheesh" (a gift, or an alms) in a very peremptory tone. Neither of us liked to take out our purse, for, fear the insolent beggar should snatch it from our hands; so we gave him nothing. Upon this he seized the Count by the arm, and shouted out something in Arabic ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... pony-chaise, intent upon discovery and vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers, arrayed in the white topcoat and tied up in various shawls and handkerchiefs, issued forth in another chaise in another direction, taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong cord, and a stout labouring man; all provided and carried upon the expedition with the sole object of assisting in the capture, and (once caught) insuring the safe custody of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... with the premeditated murder of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel and in all other ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Rev. Mr. Brewster. The subject debated was, Whether is moral or physical force the fitter instrument for obtaining the Charter? The Doctor espoused the moral hocussing system, and Feargus took up the bludgeon for physical force. After a pretty considerable deal of fireworks had been let off on both sides, it was agreed to divide the field, when Feargus, waving his hat, ascended into a tree, and called upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of "Spider" Kelley to elevate ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... burial-place filled with monuments of those who were once dear to me, with no insincere wish that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. My pains were those of the heart, and had something flattering in their character; if in the head, it was from the blow of a bludgeon gallantly received ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man—the only one in our annals—appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... to his thinly veiled advances. Did I say thinly veiled? There is a race of men in New Zealand, or Australia, I have forgotten which, who indicate their preference for the lady of their affections by banging her over the head with a bludgeon. By comparison with this method Hooja's lovemaking might be called thinly veiled. At first it caused me to blush violently although I have seen several Old Years out at Rectors, and in other less fashionable places off Broadway, ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and be d——d to you!' cried the fellow, raising a heavy bludgeon, and dealing the poor Doctor a blow on the head which felled him senseless to the ground, covered ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... an invalid, breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, which include some of his highest achievements, I must ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... ought to bring the conversation to a close. She wondered what Jack would say if he saw her talking with a perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A great ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... done in good time, Dr. Dohl. I will proceed as rapidly as possible, considering that the law, finance, and politics are all concerned. As you are leaving," he added, giving his visitor the blunt hint that the interview was over, "I must draw your attention to the fact that if you bludgeon the Consolidated with a report like this it may be a long time before we can move in the matter. You'll only scare the banks and set the cranks to yapping. Just remember that you're a state officer and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... in thy sanctimonious prudishness, drugging thy respectable conscience by a "searching inquiry" as to how it all happened—lest, forsooth, there should have been "foul play!" Is the knife or the bludgeon, then, the only foul play, and not the cesspool and the curse of Rabshakeh? Go through Bermondsey or Spitalfields, St. Giles's or Lambeth, and see if there is not foul play enough already—to be tried hereafter at a more awful coroner's inquest ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... hour scarcely moved lest he should break it and his torment return. Annie was equally silent, but with a smile saw the effects of her ministry. At last she looked into his face, and said, with an arch smile, "Shall I send for Doctor Bludgeon and Sairy Gamp to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... out With eager speed, and din, and shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver urged each gold-decked steed. Then forth the warrior's ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... done. Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, While round the hut are in disorder laid The tools and booty of his lawless trade; For force or fraud, resistance or escape The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape; His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards, And the filched lead the church's roof affords— (Hence shall the rector's congregation fret, That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.) The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there, Dog-hides, and pheasant ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... your life. You will appreciate its truth, and the even greater truth of its converse, when you are a Queen. But soldiers are stupid creatures, obviously so, since killing is no argument, or the word philosopher would mean a man armed with a bludgeon. If they do away with a tyrant and elect his successor, they are apt to acquire the habit. Soldiers are meant to obey, not to rule, and these Kosnovian Kingmakers ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... out the helping hand; to encourage the ignorant citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There are times and seasons and individuals at which and on whom the bludgeon must be used—the greater good covering the lesser evil; but such cases are less common than present practice ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... who likened the ejected Chancellor to Lucifer or to a Titan blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. In this age we find it difficult to account for the prestige of Thurlow. His legal learning was far from profound, his speeches were more ponderous than powerful, and his attacks were bludgeon blows rather than home thrusts. Of the lighter graces and social gifts he had scant store. Indeed, his private life displayed no redeeming feature. Everyone disliked him, but very many feared him, mainly, perhaps, because of his facility for intrigue, his power of bullying, and his ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... little more that way. I suppose you can't sit quiet, ma'am?—then never mind!" (This resignation was intended as a stinging reproach.) "Mr. Cibber, with his sneering snuff-box! Mr. Quin, with his humorous bludgeon! Mrs. Clive, with her tongue! Mr. Snarl, with his abuse! And Mr. Soaper, with his praise!—arsenic in treacle I call it! But there, I deserve it all! For look on this ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... heard this, it seemed as if a bludgeon were falling on her to make her defeat complete. And so, even if she should now let Denis, in his turn, kill himself, another Froment was coming who would replace him. There was ever another and another of that ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance—still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... head with his long pike. The blow fell upon her forehead, cutting a deep gash, and the blood gushed out over her face. The assassins around, deeming this the signal for their onset, fell upon her. A blow from a bludgeon laid her dead upon the pavement. One, seizing her by the hair, with a saber cut off her head. Others tore her garments from her graceful limbs, and, cutting her body into fragments, paraded the mutilated remains upon their pikes through the streets. The dissevered head they ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul. How strange indeed to find that the ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... refused, and with an oath I was desired to mind my own business; while the fellow continued, in a most unmerciful manner, to beat the wretched unresisting beast upon a raw place on the upper end of his tail. Exasperated at the fellow's brutality, I rode up to him, and having seized his bludgeon, as he was brandishing it in the air about to apply it once more to the already lacerated rump of the poor ass, with an effort of strength I wrenched the bludgeon from the inhuman monster's hand, and threw it with great violence ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... in which the majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau was instantly ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... JULY. "A rest-day; Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. Southward 10 miles is Radeberg [not RadebUrg, observe]; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a very valued friend of his in England should possess something from Ohio, had cut down a small sapling, which, when divested of its branches and otherwise trimmed, made a very formidable-looking bludgeon or cudgel, nearly four feet long. This being too lengthy for my trunks was tied to my umbrella, and on this day in the cars excited no little curiosity, several persons eyeing it, then me, as if wondering in what relation we stood to each other. Finally they ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. The deed ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So far well—he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... religious reticence who was misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession of his faith, an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy world ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... head. The other villain, hastening to meet Brown, called to his companion to come along, "for that one's content," meaning, probably, past resistance or complaint. One ruffian was armed with a cutlass, the other with a bludgeon; but as the road was pretty narrow, "bar firearms," thought Brown, "and I may manage them well enough." They met accordingly, with the most murderous threats on the part of the ruffians. They soon found, however, that their near opponent was equally stout and resolute; and, after exchanging ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down the lawn, through ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... you see that things have come to a strange pass, and the question now is, what course to pursue. The miscreants hitherto have defied all vigilance, and Stirn recommends the employment of a regular nightwatch with a lanthorn and bludgeon." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... extreme negligee of the early morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... a clubman and a motion to the equipment, followed the whites, trailed in turn by his three companions of the forest. The clubman, after a curious inspection of the packs, stood on guard among them, his bludgeon grasped loosely but suggestively, ready to prevent any undue inquisitiveness by the rest. But soon he found himself alone, for the other tribesmen transferred their attention and themselves to the interior ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' for Mr. Rarey. Phlegon and Vatican would ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... doubt began to give way. He always carried a bludgeon and razor about with him. One day he said to his wife: "It is easy to kill one's self with blows ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... use of such equipments, Ben-Hur stepped into the street so close to the line of march as to bring every one of the company under view while passing. The torches and the lanterns were being borne by servants, each of whom was armed with a bludgeon or a sharpened stave. Their present duty seemed to be to pick out the smoothest paths among the rocks in the street for certain dignitaries among them—elders and priests; rabbis with long beards, heavy brows, and beaked noses; men of the class potential in the councils of Caiaphas and Hannas. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... historical one that she had been touching up, and the detective tale that she had been copying afresh, and she had started feverishly upon a short story that she had entitled Hypocrites. And she had tried desperately to "lay about her with a bludgeon," and say biting, savage things of hypocritical human nature, and hold a relentless mirror up to its little faults. Kinross would have been convulsed could he have ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... was aware that the color sergeant flinched suddenly, as if struck by a bludgeon. He faltered, and then became motionless, save for ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... advanced toward the cripple, who retreated with astonishing agility to the lighted room. There he bent the wooden leg behind him, slipped the end of the brace from beneath the leather belt, seized the other, peg end in his right hand, and so became possessed of a murderous bludgeon. This he brandished, hopping at the same time back and forth in such perfect poise and yet with so ludicrous an effect of popping corn, that the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him for a moment with ironical amusement, then remarked: "When you want to die, does it matter much whether you kill yourself with a bludgeon or a pin, take gas from a tap or cyanide of potassium, jump in front of a railway train or use the revolting razor? You are dead neither less nor more, and the shock to the world is the same. It's only the housemaid or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... own rod. This was no doubt an extra item in the curriculum, but, on the other hand, there was something to show for it; all those who passed through his hands when they subsequently fell into the clutches of the Law could endure as many as five-and-twenty strokes from the hardest bludgeon without so much as wincing. They had been case hardened by ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... kneeling on me and squeezing the life out of me jumped up when he heard Lopez coming, and struck him over the head with a bludgeon. I heard the blow, though I was pretty well done for at the time myself. I don't think they hit me, but they got something round my neck, and I was half strangled before I knew what they were doing. Poor Lopez bled horribly, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... painful to hear, but his brother acted like a madman; rushing hither and thither, with a heavy bludgeon in his hand, with which he indiscriminately beat the fences and whatever came in his way, crying "Oh my brother, my poor brother! Who has murdered ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... bullet perforated a felt cap and penetrated the forehead of the deceased. The defendant asserted that he was within three feet of his victim when he fired, and that the other was about to strike him with a bludgeon. A quantity of felt, of weight similar to that of the cap, was procured and the revolver discharged at it from varying distances. A microscopic examination showed that certain discolorations around the bullet-hole (claimed by the defence to be burns made by the powder) were, in fact, grease ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... quick to turn a laugh on a hostile bungler, but never cruel; prompt in returning a serious thrust, but never venomous. Many of his speeches were masterpieces in their way of handling opponents. An attack which Bismarck would have met with a bludgeon, Bulow parried with weapons infinitely lighter, but in some cases really more effective. A very good example was on an occasion when the old charge of "Byzantinism" was flung at the present regime, to which ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Distance, as he was when he fell, the Soldier firing so soon. Others swear that he was leaning on his Stick when he fell, which certainly was not a threatning posture. It may be supposd that he had as good Right to carry a Stick, even a Bludgeon, as the Soldier who shot him had, to be armd with Musquet & ball; & if he at any time lifted up his Weapon of Defence, it was surely not more than a Soldiers leveling his Gun at the Multitude chargd with Death - If he had killed a Soldier, he might have ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... than this doughty champion of orthodoxy. But Warburton was in his element when engaged in controversy. He was quite ready to meet combatants from whatever side they might come; and, wielding his bludgeon with a vigorous hand, he dealt his blows now on the orthodox, now on the heterodox, with unsparing and impartial force. Judged, however, from a literary point of view, 'The Divine Legation' is too elaborate and too discursive ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and upstanding young man; he had removed his helmet and was carrying it by the chin strap. He had no bludgeon, no revolver, yet he impressed Jones almost as much as ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Villon and Francois Villon I, To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie; "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!" He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuff-box and his cane— "Now back, my boon companions, to our bordel with our gain!" And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly, If I were Francois ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered first, and, looking over the volume in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be to see or hear or smell the hunter. Gaff or paddle in hand, the Aleut leaps from rock to rock, or dashes among the tumbling beds of tossed kelp. A quick blow of the bludgeon; the otter never knows how death came. This is the club hunt. But where the shore is honeycombed with caves and narrow inlets of kelp fields, is a safer kind of hunting. Huge nets now made of twine, formerly of sinew, with wooden floaters above, iron sinkers below, are spread ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... he used to roar in the Gazette against the opposite party, and yet I never heard anything from him myself but what was diffident and tender. He had acquired, as an instrument necessary to him, an extraordinarily extravagant style, and he laid about him with a bludgeon, which inevitably descended on the heads of all prominent persons if they happened not to be Conservative, no matter what their virtues might be. One peculiarity, however, I noted in him. Although he ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive us ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on the farm—and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Union. The cashier's own bank testified its gratitude by endeavoring to show (but humiliatingly failed in it) that the peerless servant's accounts were not square, and that he himself had knocked his brains out with a bludgeon to ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... left alone in the house of a Sunday evening, heard a knock at the door. Opening the door she found a tramp who tried to force his way into the house. She struggled to prevent his entrance, but he struck her with a bludgeon and rendered her insensible, whereupon he entered the house and robbed it. She related the vision to her friends, but, as nothing happened for some time, the matter almost passed from her mind. But, some seven years afterward, she was left ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... of her own, to say nothing of an arm a blacksmith might envy) and when he has a duty to perform in his official capacity. It is in the latter instance that he rises magnificently to the dignity of his position. The majesty of the law in his hands becomes at once a bludgeon and a pandemonium. No one has ever been arrested in Radville, since Pete became sheriff, without the entire community becoming aware of it simultaneously. Pete's voice in moments of excitement carries like a cannonade. Legrand Gunn said that Pete had only ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... middle, and was led through the streets with a soldier on each side of him. At every turning the soldier on his right hand side cut a gash in his flesh, and the soldier on his left hand side struck him with a bludgeon, both saying, at the same instant, Will you go to mass? will you go to mass? He still replied in the negative to these interrogatories, and being at length taken to the bridge, they cut off his head on the balustrades, and threw both that and his ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... what he is. Napoleon is the sinister shape behind the arras; and the Tory government licks his patent-leather boots. Vile is the attitude of England, vile her threats, her sneers, her wicked contempt of a great people in agony. Her murderous government, bludgeon in hand, stands snarling at us in Mexico; her ministers glare at us from every war port; her press mocks in infamous caricature our unhappy President; only her poor are with us—the poor of England whom our war ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk little chap steps up and gives me a caning in St. James's ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... foreign Government must not expect love. Respect for the British rule depends upon the strength of that rule. Oudh still sends many recruits to the native army, though the young men no longer enjoy the advantage of a training in 'bhumiawat'. An occasional gang-robbery or bludgeon fight is the meagre modern substitute. The Rajputs or Thakurs of Bundelkhand and Gwalior still retain their old character for turbulence, but, of course, have less scope for what the author calls their 'sporting propensities' than ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... glad to regain her precious staff; and giving the knife a toss on the grass, she ran for her stick. The elf shouted and danced again, and, shouldering the knife as if it had been a great bludgeon, he disappeared in the forest, the rabbit-skin ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... the first plunge, a brother hatero lassoes the animal's hind legs, and it is permitted to rear and kick as frantically as it can, until it drops to the ground exhausted and strangled. The Llanero immediately approaches the prostrate colt, and deliberately beats its head with a heavy bludgeon until it becomes quite senseless. He then places his saddle upon its back, adjusts a murderous bit in its clammy mouth, and seats himself firmly in the saddle at the moment when the animal recovers strength ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... admonitions to your understanding, and they will so contrive to reconcile with it the natural caperings of the wayward young sprig Conduct, that the latter, who commonly learns to walk upright and straight from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon on his crown, shall foot soberly, appearing at least wary of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... all plain in the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded with ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... who had been left in charge of the Fort were quite worthy of the trust. Stationing themselves a few yards apart all round the palisades inside, they kept guard. Mr Tucker, armed with an axe-handle as a bludgeon—for he objected to taking life if he could avoid it—mounted guard at the gate. Pretty little Loo kept him company. The other women were stationed so as to carry ammunition to the men, or convey orders from the blacksmith who had ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... a body of men as are to be found in all Western China. Probably the Metropolitan police of dear old London could not be re-forced from their ranks, but disciplined and well-ordered they certainly are withal. Swords seem to take the place of the English bludgeon, and a peaked cap, beribboned with gold, is substituted for the old-fashioned helmet of blue; and if the time should ever come, with international rights, when Englishmen will be "run in" in the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a murmur; and then one by one a file of figures came through. In the hand of each was an instrument of some kind, a pick or a bludgeon; and it was evident that it was these who ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... childhood; and this not in the haste of an epithet or heat of a paragraph, but as a fixed part of his scheme of history and of mind. The reason is found in his own intellectual habits. And the savage fury with which he plies his critical bludgeon upon Lord Bacon is due, not so much to that great man's infirmities, nor even to his possession of intellectual qualities which our author cannot appreciate and must therefore disparage, as to the profound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... man's king and ruler. The warlock of Essendean, they say, had made a mirror in which men could read the future; it must have been of other stuff than burning coal; for in all the shapes and pictures that I sat and gazed at, there was never a ship, never a seaman with a hairy cap, never a big bludgeon for my silly head, or the least sign of all those tribulations that were ripe to ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sheppard"], we have a Rembrandtish etching, quite equalling in power and intensity that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. The gloomy depths of the well hole are illumined only by the pine torch of the frightened Jew, as Wild hammers with his bludgeon on the fingers of the doomed wretch who, maimed and faint from loss of blood, clings with desperate tenacity to the bannister, from which his relaxing grip will presently plunge him ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... timidly gave way, when they saw men of quality rushing along with fury in their eyes, and legs of chairs and clubs in their hands. Gracchus attempted with a few attendants to escape. But in his flight he fell on the slope of the Capitol, and was killed by a blow on the temples from the bludgeon of one of his furious pursuers —Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus afterwards contested the infamous honour—before the statues of the seven kings at the temple of Fidelity; with him three hundred others were slain, not one by weapons of iron. When evening had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... property. And there was a particularly brutal villain with leery eyes, ugly mouth, with one tooth gone, and an iron jaw like a hull-dog's. He was attired in a fur cap, brown corduroy jacket, with a blood-red handkerchief twisted about his throat, and he carried a bludgeon. When the double-dyed villain proceeded in the third act to pound the head of the lovely maiden to a jelly at the instigation of the base uncle, concealed behind a painted tree-trunk, and the lover rushed ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... would have fled as the spirits approached him. But those bandy legs tottered and before he could turn the awful visitants were upon him. One raised a round shot above his head, or so it appeared to be, and smote him full upon the crown. The other whirled a flat bludgeon and hit him on the jaw. With the smell of brimstone was mingled the pungent flavor of ripe cheese and salt-fish. Blackbeard measured his length, and the ghost of Jesse Strawn delayed an instant to dump a pot of sizzling ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... of the constitution of 1793. He was now in open conflict with the whole trend of public opinion. In February 1795 he was again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burnt in the Theatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse doree, the young men whose mission it was to bludgeon Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators who were ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... strung; You might as well an anvil "lick," Or stand against a horse's kick And fear not shattered rib or jaw As risk a smash from Martin's paw. I've seen him in the days of yore His fist crash through a panel door. Martin soon ran his wild race out, For "Doctor" Whitney with a "clout" Of a great bludgeon laid him out Heady for post mortem and bier, Thus ended Martin's rough career. Ah! those were happy halcyon days, Well worthy of immortal lays. Here I must summon from the band Of the departed shadowy land George Parsons, and his name entwine In this poetic wreath of mine. Beside the ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own stick ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... wish I could drive the fact into this head of yours that rudeness is not synonymous with wit. I shall not have lived in vain if I teach you in time to realize that the rapier of irony is more effective an instrument than the bludgeon ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... and Bohemia: for—Alas, after all, we shall have to cast a glance into that unbeautiful Hungarian-Bohemian scramble, comparable to an "Irish Donnybrook," where Albert Achilles long walked as Chief-Constable. It behooves us, after all, to point out some of the tallest heads in it; and whitherward, bludgeon in hand, they seem to be swaying and struggling.—Courage, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... trimmed my bludgeon to a nicety, I laid it by, and sat brooding, the knife betwixt my knees; now a beam of sun falling athwart the leaves lit upon the broad blade of the knife and made of it a glory. And beholding this and the hand that grasped it, I took pleasure to ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... sangversxo—ado. Bloodvessel sangvejno. Bloom flori. Blossom flori. Blot makulo. Blotch skabio. Blotting paper sorba papero. Blow (stroke) bato. Blow blovi. Blouse kitelo. Blow (of flowers) ekflori. Bludgeon bastonego. Blue blua. Bluish dubeblua. Blunder erarego. Blunt malakra. Blunt (mannered) malafabla. Blur malpurigi. Blush rugxigxi. Bluster fanfaroni. Boa boao. Boar porkviro. Board (food) nutrado—ajxo. Board (plank) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... my own sake, as for the sake of the thirty poor families on the common, whose wants it had been my intention to relieve. I gave up the money, finding my prayers and expostulations were in vain; and the dog then, brandishing over my head an enormous bludgeon, said—what abominable language!—'I think, doctor, I shall put an end to an existence derogatory to your self and useless to others.' At that moment the young gentleman beside me sprang over the very gate by which the tall ruffian had disappeared, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of crutches, although a pleasant companion, bore upon his person unequivocal marks of having met with rough handling on the ocean or on the land. He was MINUS an eye, his nose had been knocked athwart-ships to the great injury of his beauty, and a deep scar, from a wound made with a bludgeon, adorned one of his temples! I learned that this man, who seemed to have been the football of fortune and had received many hard kicks, had never been in the army or the navy, that his wounds had been received in CIVIL wars, battling with his countrymen. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... the need for it." And so courts of law and equity arose, based on the need of humanity; laws were passed defining rights and limiting aggression; and when one man wronged another, that wrong was settled in court by the power of the whole people and not in personal combat with the bludgeon or the knife. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... prison. To-day I have no such desire, for were they not victims of the same vicious system of treatment to which I was subjected? In every institution where the discredited principles of "Restraint" are used or tolerated, the very atmosphere is brutalizing. Place a bludgeon in the hand of any man, with instructions to use it when necessary, and the gentler and more humane methods of persuasion will naturally be ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... combats of Sauroren, and each was, in Wellington's own phrase, "bludgeon work"—a battle of soldiers rather than of generals, a tangle of fierce charges and counter-charges, of volleys delivered so close that they scorched the very clothes of the opposing lines, and sustained so fiercely that they died down only ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... love him too, though he treats me as an outcast—I will always love you, but I will never more enter my father's dwelling. He has degraded me with his whip—he has attempted my life with his bludgeon. I forgive him, but will never expose myself again to his cruelties or indignities. You will always find me a son, and a dutiful one, in ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Sire Edward snapped his fingers now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... over fire in middle of orchard, brewing a charm in her caldron. Ogre stalks in, grinning frightfully, swinging his bludgeon in triumph. ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... G. Ingerman was a foeman worthy of even a novelist's skill in repartee. Thus far, he, Grant, had been merely uncivil, using a bludgeon for wit, whereas the visitor was making play with a ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... who caused it with wonder, yes even with scorn and bitter laughter. But it is not so when the blow falls in later life. It may not hurt so much at the time, it may seem to have been struck with the bludgeon of Fate rather than with her keen dividing sword, but the effect is more lasting, and for the rest of our days we are numb and cold, for Time has ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... disengagement from Lord Roberts removed for the time a potential cause of failure, namely, the uncertainty, to which perhaps the escape of De Wet at Poplar Grove may be due, whether a battle was to be fought with the Commander-in-Chiefs rapier or with the Chief-of-the-Staff's bludgeon. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... could not do so quick enough to prevent the stunning blow which brought him on his knees. His hat partially saved him, and he was on the point of rising, when Thady again struck him with all his power; this time the heavy bludgeon came down on his bare temple, and the young man fell, never to rise again. He neither moved nor groaned; the force of the blow, and the great weight of the stick falling on his uncovered head as he was rising, had shattered his brains, and he ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... we will kill him by a phrase put in the paper morning by morning; and afterwards you can slay the slain with a solemn article in Finot's weekly. Indeed, if it is a matter of capital importance to you, Finot would allow you to bludgeon your man in a big paper with ten or twelve thousand subscribers, if you make yourself indispensable ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... some hundred and fifty feet beyond the point where the ravine turns west. It has a big enough trunk for a stick to stand upright against it, as was shown by Inspector Snow who had charge of this affair. But we are told that after demonstrating this fact with the same bludgeon which had done its bloody work in the Hollow, the prisoner showed a sudden interest in this weapon and begged to see it closer. This being granted, he pointed out where a splinter or two had been freshly whittled from the handle, and declared that no knife had touched it while ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... at the turning and struck at me with a bludgeon," said Mr. Juxon. "Knocked my hat off, into the bargain, and then ran away with Stamboul after him. If I had not come up in time there would have been nothing left ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... lips and chins of most of them were decorated, gave to their physiognomies a manly and determined air, fully borne out by their unrestrained carriage and deportment. To a man, almost all were armed with a tough vine-wood bludgeon, called in their language an estoc volant, tipped and shod with steel—a weapon fully understood by them, and rendered, by their dexterity in the use of it, formidable to their adversaries. Not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The bludgeon of a ministerial myrmidon paralyzed his brilliant intellect, and he was not allowed to participate in the scenes of the Revolution which ensued. Just as the white banner of peace began to wave over his country, after a struggle of twenty years to which he gave ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the ears of little Martin, who, accompanied by his father, came into the barn to catch the intruder. Poor Hintze, frightened at the sight of the bludgeon the parson carried, flew at his legs, scratching and biting him, until the saintly man fainted. Then, taking advantage of the confusion, Hintze managed to slip out of the noose and effect his escape. He returned to court minus one eye, and there poured ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... noisome ditch running at large there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from knocking me down with a bludgeon, why he should not be authorised to interfere to save me from a typhus fever; and if he can prevent boys from endangering the lives of passengers by firing guns on the high roads, why he should not also be enabled to forbid the open sewers and other nuisances, which, if not so noisy, are even ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... howling and screeching (I believe they call it singing), so that before even the dust raised by a new party could be seen, the ear was deafened by their clamour. Every Takrurie warrior—that is, every one who can howl and carry a bludgeon or lance—is entitled to a vote; for this privilege he pays a dollar. The polling consists in counting the money, and the amount decides the ruler's fate. The re-elected Sheik (such was the result of the election we witnessed) killed cows, supplied jowaree ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... in Tebron's mind, and suddenly he was in the middle of the battle. There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps. Mind-voices shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in the wind. One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust with his sword; the warrior fell to one side at the last moment ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the gateway of the negro villages ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... ought rather to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater than these ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... sound of the blow and the sight of the fall both the old man and the young ran out from their place of concealment. Burt was standing over the body, his bludgeon ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from his hand on to the pavement with a bump and a rattle. Stooping swiftly, the Kid picked it up, and handed it to Psmith. His fingers closed upon it. It was a short, wicked-looking little bludgeon, the black-jack of the New ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and all we could think of was to stand by the entrance and defend it as we best might. Ben with the long musket, and I with a brand, which I still clutched, but which no longer blazed, and could only be used as a bludgeon. Should these weapons fail, we would have to take out our knives, and make the best fight we could; but we knew that if the baboons once got inside, so as to surround us, we should ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... meetings were held which attempted some rough organisation for the holding of another meeting to retort on the authorities. A huge crowd assembled in Trafalgar Square and the neighbourhood (then a place of crowded streets), and was too big for the bludgeon-armed police to cope with; there was a good deal of dry-blow fighting; three or four of the people were killed, and half a score of policemen were crushed to death in the throng, and the rest got away as they could. This was ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... the apartment, and with his bludgeon struck many blows on the bed, in the very place where Jack had laid the log; and then he went back to his own room, thinking he had broken all ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... face, intensified with perhaps a touch of insanity, which made it painful to look at him. As he never accepted money or anything but food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... feeble way of expressing the state of her mind. Although a lady of great moral courage, and accustomed from infancy to self-control, she felt, on first beholding her timid little daughter, strongly disposed to seize Fatma by the hair of the head, and use her as a bludgeon wherewith to fell her Algerine mother; but, remembering the dignity of her position as, in some sort, a reflected representative of the British Empire in these parts, and also recalling to mind the aptitude ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... Wellington wrote, "I never saw such fighting as we had here. It began on the 25th of Jury, and, excepting the 29th, when not a shot was fired, we had it every day till the 2nd of August. The battle of the 28th was fierce bludgeon work. The fourth division was principally engaged, and the loss of the enemy was immense. I hope Soult will not feel any inclination to renew his expedition. The French army must have suffered considerably. Between the 25th of last month and the 2nd of this ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... this was like a blow from a bludgeon. The insolence, the contempt, and the hardness of it were such as no self-respecting woman could endure. It put an end to their acquaintance, as Swift undoubtedly intended it should do. He would have been less censurable had he struck Varina with his ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... a country family in Oxfordshire, dreamt one night that she had been left alone in the house upon a Sunday evening, and that hearing a knock at the door of the chief entrance she went to it and there found an ill-looking tramp armed with a bludgeon, who insisted on forcing himself into the house. She thought that she struggled for some time to prevent him so doing, but quite ineffectually, and that, being struck down by him and rendered insensible, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... Dirk Stroeve came up and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive. Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective. The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, taken unawares, was defenceless. He reminded you of a frightened sheep running aimlessly hither and thither. He was startled and amazed. At last the tears ran from his eyes. And the worst of it was that, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... towards Miss Greeby, who had just stepped out on to the terrace. The banker's daughter was in a tailor-made gown with a man's cap and a man's gloves, and a man's boots—at least, as Mrs. Belgrove thought, they looked like that—and carried a very masculine stick, more like a bludgeon than a cane. With her ruddy complexion and ruddy hair, and piercing blue eyes, and magnificent figure—for she really had a splendid figure in spite of Mrs. Belgrove's depreciation—she looked like a gigantic Norse goddess. With a flashing display of white teeth, ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... moment, there was no fresh sound. Then brutus slipped down the front stairs in no time; he found the front door not bolted; he did not quite understand that, and drawing a short bludgeon, he opened it very cautiously; the caution was not superfluous. Two gentlemen made a dash at him from the outside the moment the door was open; one of their heads cracked like a broken bottle under the blow the ready ruffian ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... surface of the stone was clean bare and weather-beaten. The talus against the cliff was composed of loose fragments of stone and other products of wash and erosion. This was overgrown with a thicket of stunted shrubs, wry-necked goblin thistles and murderous devil's clubs. These bludgeon-shaped plants, thickly covered with sharp thorns, reared aloft their weapons as if in menace to all living things; the unstable ground and thorny thicket formed the only shelter where we could be ambushed in the rear, and it was not a likely spot ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... financiering. It was galling and barren work. He had to ask favours of fellows whom he hated, and to stand their refusals, and pretend to believe their lying excuses, and appear to make quite light of it, though every failure stunned him like a blow of a bludgeon, and as he strutted jauntily off with a bilious smirk, he was well nigh at his wits' end. It was dark as he rode out by the low road to Chapelizod—crest-fallen, beaten—scowling in the darkness through his horse's ears along the straight black line of road, and wishing, as he passed the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his brutal bludgeon—to use a metaphor of "terror"—had each delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, there is a change of fashion in fiction. How far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible to determine. Mr. Flosky, "who has ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... pen like a bludgeon. Even at this distance of time Cheetham's "View of Aaron Burr's Political Conduct," in which is traced the Vice President's alleged intrigues to promote himself over Jefferson, is interesting and exciting. Despite its bitter sarcasm and torrent of vituperation, Cheetham's array of facts ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... to his friend, who told him, that having left his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... observing that rule. In the open air pitch out a fact or two—not too many—or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play—it's lost then—but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he squirms ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... all our parks an gardens, wherein we are wont to expatiate. Come on, then, plague, war, famine and viragos! Come on, I say, for who shall stay ye? Come on, and healthfulize the census! And more especially, oh War! do thou march forth with thy bludgeon! Cracked are, our crowns by nature, and henceforth forever, cracked shall they be ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... he would do so. So he set her up by that wall, and took a heavy stick from the wood-pile, raised it as high as the room would permit, and then brought it down with great violence, burying the end of the bludgeon in the plastering. I suppose he came within three inches of her head, and she never winked. It was a very interesting experiment, as it illustrated the genuineness of her desire for death Otherwise the case is much ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... might mean his death, over a girl whom he had only seen for a few minutes, had the sense to take it. But it was no easy task to extricate himself. A burly ruffian was approaching him with arm uplifted and whirling a bludgeon. Vane caught the fellow a blow in the waist and he immediately collapsed. Before the prostrate man could get his wind, Vane darted through the Traitors' Gate and racing towards the Borough with a score or ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... from Ohio, Houston assaulted and severely pounded him. The House voted that Houston should be brought before the bar and reprimanded by the Speaker, which was done, although Mr. Stevenson's reprimand was really complimentary. That night a friend of General Houston, with a bludgeon and a pistol, attacked Mr. Arnold, of Tennessee, who had been active in securing the reprimand, but the latter soon got ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... sensuous and lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... pictures—that Powhatan, for reasons of high policy satisfactory to himself, had determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the little daughter of Powhatan, a ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
