"Piecemeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us, for every modern society now, is not so much to redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... that he was glad to hear all this, but in the meantime what was he to do to prevent his battalion being blown piecemeal out of their trenches? ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... said, "I can. That machinery of life for the use of people who didn't know what they wanted of it, and which was known at the time as State Socialism, was partly put in motion, though in a very piecemeal way. But it did not work smoothly; it was, of course, resisted at every turn by the capitalists; and no wonder, for it tended more and more to upset the commercial system I have told you of; without ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... played awhile, they heard a mighty tumult, and a wailing of men, and a croaking of Ravens, as they carried the men in their strength into the air, and, tearing them betwixt them, let them fall piecemeal to the earth. And during the tumult they saw a knight coming towards them on a light grey horse, and the left foreleg of the horse was jet black to the centre of his hoof. And the knight and the horse were fully accoutred with huge heavy blue armour. And a robe of ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... deal of good, Polly, so don't repent of it.' She used to draw much better, and more quickly, than anything we had seen before, and knew much about celebrated pictures and painters. Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her 'what she saw in it.' She could always see plenty, and explained it very well. She made poetry and drawing at least exceedingly interesting ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... two mortal hours in this inn, fried by the sun, bored to death, murdered piecemeal by flies, and infuriated by the want of hospitality in this out-of-the-way ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... out at once. Now we often in the Christian life deal with ourselves as if we were painters and sculptors, not as if we were mirrors: we hammer and chisel away at ourselves to bring out some resemblance to Christ in some particulars, thinking that we can do it piecemeal; we might as well try to feed up our body piecemeal; we might as well try to make our eye bright without giving our cheek colour and our hands strength. The body is a whole, and we must feed the ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by an artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was Thompson, who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the rest of us) to set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince Barberini would be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "It was only a form," he said. "Yet we must do it. For look you, Signori," and here he shrugged up his shoulders, rolled his eyes, and puffed out his lips in a way that was possible to none but an Italian, "were it not thus the entire city would be carried away piecemeal!" ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... article as adopted was disliked by Sherman and Wilson, the latter especially declaring his willingness to remove the disqualifications as soon as possible after a settlement had been made. In point of fact they were removed piecemeal by Congress almost as freely as President Johnson had done the like, and were ended except for a few hundred by a sweeping amnesty ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... upon the census during the latter part of 1900, and nearly a thousand during the entire year, 1901. From July 14, 1900, piecemeal results were announced almost daily. By October the population of the principal cities was out. A preliminary statement of total population was given to the press, October 30, 1900, followed by a verified one a month later. The first official report on population was made December ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... quittor has its origin more often than not in contusions, punctures, or wounds of the region severe enough to cause death of a small portion of the tissues. In this case the low vitality of the parts does not allow of the dead portion being removed piecemeal by a process of phagacytosis, as is usually the case with similar injuries elsewhere. Instead, the tissues around, aided by a process of suppuration, cast the offending portion off as a slough. It is the wound remaining after the slough which we may really ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... investigated by Parliament, but instead of enforcing the old law they modified it by acts passed in 1803 and 1809, so as to allow of greater liberty. The old prohibition of using fulling mills passed in 1553 was also repealed in 1809. The Statute of Apprentices after being weakened piecemeal as just mentioned, and by a further amendment removing the wages clauses in 1813, and after being referred to by Lord Mansfield as "against the natural rights and contrary to the common law rights of the land," was finally removed from the statute book in 1814. Even the "Combination ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... always existed just as she teaches them, that Jesus instituted confession, extreme unction and marriage, and that he taught what was afterwards decided upon by the Nicene and Trent Councils. Nothing can be more erroneous. The Christian dogma has been formed, like everything else, slowly and piecemeal, by a sort of inward vegetation. Theology, by asserting the contrary, raises up a mass of objections, and places itself in the predicament of having to reject all criticism. I would advise any one who wishes to realise this to read ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Governments grow, piecemeal, both in their tasks and in the means by which those tasks are to be performed, and very few Governments are organized, I venture to say, as wise and experienced business men would organize them if they had a clean sheet of paper to write upon. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... things we're so proud of having built, including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Montagu-Stuart-Wortley; we were the first complete Territorial Force Division to cross the seas and go into action as a Division against the Germans. And it may be that the whole Territorial Force owe to our General, too, that they went in Divisions, and were not sent piecemeal as some earlier battalions, and dovetailed into the Regular Army, or, perhaps, even into the New Army. We live in the assurance that the confidence the Army Council extended ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... with time and space; it is not surprising, therefore, that logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly paid to her, is told to stand aside when people come to practice. In practice identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken slowly and piecemeal; nevertheless, that occasional periods of even rapid change are not held to bar identity, appears from the fact that no one denies this to hold between the microscopically small impregnate ovum and the born child that springs from it, nor yet, therefore, between the impregnate ovum and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... fine, powdery dust that bit and stung and filled the hair, penetrating to the skin. Voices were inaudible, but there was a weird chorus from the ropes and stays, and then a loud report as one of the storm sails burst into ribbons and was torn piecemeal ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... he would see to it that his friend Daniel should not be robbed. He intended, therefore, to go himself to Anjou to call upon those who were likely to purchase, and to be present at the sale. In his opinion, it would be wiser to sell piecemeal, without hurry. If money was needed, why, one could always ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... procession, which was to have marched in military order to overawe Parliament, resolving itself into a confused rabble easily dispersed by the police, and the monster petition, that should have numbered six million signatures, transported piecemeal to the House, and there found to have but two million names appended, many fictitious; the Chartist leader, completely cowed, thanking the Home Office for its lenient treatment; or, on the other hand, London and its peaceful inhabitants, distracted with wild rumours of combat and bloodshed, apprehending ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Paul, "for your Bible is no other than an imperfect, mutilated Bible, corrupted by the men who made your religion. The Catholic church, from which the Protestants stole their piecemeal Bible, always regarded the book of Machabeus as ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... brought out Dec. 26, 1815, and the same day he bound himself to furnish the second by Jan. 20, 1816, with no knowledge of what the libretto would be. Sterbini furnished him with the story of the "Barber" by piecemeal, and as fast as the verses were given him he wrote the music. The whole work was finished in less than three weeks. Its original title was "Almaviva, ossia l'inutile precauzione," to distinguish it from Paisiello's "Barber of Seville." The ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... me piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For that's the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... his chair with his fist and babbled profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the "organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts; of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven out with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot through ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and nod to passers as she talked. "There's no end going on. Dear me, it's a shame to come to you empty-handed, Phebe. I had two or three rosebuds for you,—beauties they were too,—but the fact is I gave them away piecemeal as I came along, and I haven't one left. It seemed as if I met every man there was this morning. How soon do you ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... Calendau felled the larches that grew upon the flanks of the mighty mountain, and hurled the forest piecemeal into the torrent below. At the Rocher du Cire he is frightfully stung by myriads of bees, during his attempt to obtain as a trophy for his lady a quantity of honey from this well-nigh inaccessible place. The kind of criticism that is appropriate for realistic literature is ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... then in the head of the triumphant youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique is that his abozzo is really a finished study. The Victory also shows how the deep folds ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... that she had gone to the top of the house, as they might have gone, if they had not been fools, etc. etc.; and that it 'looked as safe and as ugly as ever'; wherewith a brickbat or two having been sent up in answer, she shut the blinds, leaving them to halt, inquire, discover gradually and piecemeal, after the method of mobs, they had been following the nature of mobs; that no one had seen the church on fire, or seen any one else who had seen the same, or even seen any light in the sky in any quarter, or knew who raised the cry; or—or—in short, Alexander's church was two miles off; ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... look upon the Koran as the direct word of God sent down by Him to the seventh or lowest heaven, and then revealed from time to time to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel. A few chapters are supposed to have been delivered entire, but the greater part of the book was given piecemeal during a period of twenty-three years. The Koran is written in Arabic prose, but its sentences generally conclude in a long-continued rhyme. The language is considered to be of the utmost elegance and purity, and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... wounds in the so genial heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new healing under ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... or brutal mates; and a thousand beds received their occupants in full harness, booted and hatted, as though the enemy were at the gates. Everywhere strains of liquor-music surged up for the next thirty minutes, finally to die away piecemeal as ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the Publican's Journal. Young Duncan Macmorrogh was a limb of the law, who had just brought himself into notice by a series of articles in 'The Screw and Lever,' in which he had subjected the universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... while the company as a whole was permanent each individual could buy or sell "shares" in the joint stock, helped to make such "joint-stock" companies very popular after the opening of the seventeenth century. The English East India Company, organized as a regulated company in 1600, was reorganized piecemeal for half a century until it acquired the form of a joint-stock enterprise; most of the other chartered colonial companies followed the same plan. In these early stock-companies we find the germ of the most characteristic of present-day ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the same term that is applied to land, houses, and machinery. By universal practice supported by a long line of court decisions, these rights (whether evidenced by paper or not) are made subject to taxation, except as by piecemeal legislation certain grudging exceptions have been made. These views and this practice are supported by the popular desire to tax money-lenders. The result is "double taxation" of many sources of income. This involves a burden ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... like heroes, and fell by thousands into the infernal regions. What happiness would it be for the souls intended for these devilish repasts, if they were thereby to find an end to their torments! But no sooner are they swallowed, digested, and returned piecemeal into the pools of hell than they are regenerated, and arise to become the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... advancing and securing the money which the Jew had deposited upon the table. 'This is the exact sum that was paid to thee four weeks since. It is now returned, and you are a marked man. If seen again in these parts, I will myself have thee cut in piecemeal, and hung at my castle gates. Now, villain, ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... something of the sort," his mother said; "but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your father's father had worn the red shirt ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... constitutions were granted in Rome, Naples, Tuscany, and Piedmont; Venice and Rome declared themselves republics. But no real scheme for all Italy emerged; the Mazzinians were heroic but unpractical; and next year Austria returned once more, dealt as before piecemeal with the revolted provinces, and finally crushed the hopes of Italy again at the battle of Novara. Yet all was not lost. The republican dreams of Mazzini were, it is true, at an end. But Piedmont ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... cliffs of the lower Alma without difficulty. Menshikov relied apparently on being able to detach his reserves to cope with them, but the assailants moved with a rapidity which he had not counted upon, and the Russians only came into action piecemeal in this quarter. Opposite the British, who as usual deployed at a distance and then advanced in long continuous lines, the Russians were posted on the crest of a long glacis-like slope, which offered but little dead ground to an assailant. The village ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... its end with truly Indian ceremonial. But it did not come to a close until Kars had elicited from the old rascal a complete story of the murder of Allan Mowbray. To him this was of far more importance than all the rest of the old sinner's talk. The story was extracted piecemeal, and was given in rambling, evasive fashion. But it was given completely in the end, and with a veracity which Kars had no reason ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the wreck as if to tear the thing apart with his bare hands and carry it piecemeal to the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... indistinct, like a poor "impression"—as unnoticeable as one of his own early finds, yet, like them, with a quality, if one had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits together—"piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!" ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... roads in a few years and spreads the cost over the period during which the public is being benefited. Better prices are obtained on contracts for a large mileage than for smaller jobs, and the community can receive the benefit more quickly than where construction proceeds piecemeal with current funds. The vital consideration is to insure that the term of the bonds is well within the useful life of the road, and that ample provision is made to maintain the roads during that period. Under proper restrictions the bond method of financing is ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... because, when the Royal Personage who gave it to me was married, I signed certain papers in connection with this necklace and I can't sell it, either as a whole or piecemeal. I ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has been breathed, the aged eyes are closed for ever, corruption has done its work, and the grand skeleton lies bleaching upon seven hills, half covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The result is satisfactory to those who have brought it about, if not to the rest of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome is the ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... till your bones fall piecemeal from that chain," he said, "stay, through storm and shine, through light and darkness, while Roman and Jew alike make merry of your sufferings, which, if my voice had been listened to, would have been shorter, but more cruel. Daughter of Satan, go ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... truth—that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and that there is no growth for them—it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... all the coined currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot's wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... due and permanent use, must be earned. "Easy come easy go," is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth. While rules, lying isolated in the mind—not joined to its other contents as out-growths from them—are continually forgotten; the principles which those rules express piecemeal, become, when once reached by the understanding, enduring possessions. While the rule-taught youth is at sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a new case as readily as an old one. Between ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... new counsellors for new plans of defence. It was now gravely proposed, to build a fleet three times as powerful as that of the British, and station it near Singapore and Anjeer, to intercept the British vessels ere they reached China, and annihilate their fleet piecemeal. The forests were to be felled to supply materials: the only thing wanting was some English men-of-war, to serve as models. Again, Hou-chunn, the Marshal Ney of China, was ready to face the whole British fleet if he had but a steamer ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... changed color. Still those eyes regarded him—still Hiram continued to hesitate, and stammer, till some sort of response came out, by piecemeal, incoherently. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from my fingers the live Fly which I gave him. After killing his victim with the fangs of his mandibles, he was not satisfied, like most Spiders, to suck her head: he chewed her whole body, shoving it piecemeal into his mouth with his palpi, after which he threw up the masticated teguments and swept them ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... possible from the defects of the first one. These defects, which were the natural results of the somewhat hasty development of an experimental system, were of several kinds. In the first place, so large a growth had not been contemplated, and the extensions were made more or less piecemeal, instead of being on a regular plan; the location of the central station itself was very unfavorable, both as regards the facilities for obtaining coal and other supplies; the cost of water was excessive, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... mankind. And Pirates barter all that's left behind. [22] No more the hirelings, purchased near and far, Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war. The idle merchant on the useless quay Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; Or, back returning, sees rejected stores Rot piecemeal on his own encumbered shores: 270 The starved mechanic breaks his rusting loom, And desperate mans him 'gainst the coming doom. Then in the Senates of your sinking state Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... moreover, afflicted with a pending lawsuit; the sums he obtained for his plays from the manager were therefore very disproportionate and uncertain. His letters to Henslowe are urgent in solicitations for payment on account of work in hand; he was often obliged to send his manuscripts piecemeal to the manager, and on one occasion supplied a rough draft of the last scene of a play in order to obtain a few shillings in advance. The amounts paid for new plays at this time were very low. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... yourselves; but until then I will say nothing about it, not from any wish to disappoint your curiosity, or to make myself important, but simply because the whole story partakes so much of the marvellous, that I am afraid to tell it in a piecemeal, hasty fashion, for fear I should be set down as one of those common fellows of whom there are so many in my profession, who are not ashamed to narrate things they have not seen, and even to tell wonderful stories about wild ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... There is much in the writings of Marx and Engels that cannot be fitted into the rigid orthodoxy which grew up among their disciples. Bernstein's main criticisms of these disciples, apart from such as we have already mentioned, consist in a defense of piecemeal action as against revolution. He protests against the attitude of undue hostility to Liberalism which is common among Socialists, and he blunts the edge of the Internationalism which undoubtedly is part of the teachings of Marx. The workers, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... now, since your majesty hath returned from hell, I lay the matter for your decision." "Stay, we've not done with you yet," cried Pope Julius, and madly they engage once more, tooth and nail, until the strokes clashed like earthquakes; the three armies of the damned tore each other piecemeal, and like snakes became whole again, and spread far and wide over the jagged, burning crags, until Lucifer bade his veterans, the giants of Hell, separate them, which indeed was no ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Tolstoy, I have something to say about "Resurrection," which I have read not piecemeal, in parts, but as a whole, at one go. It is a remarkable artistic production. The least interesting part is all that is said of Nehludov's relations with Katusha; and the most interesting the princes, the generals, the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... reckless beings compose a scattered population, residing too far for the law to reach; or where if it could reach, the power of the government would prove much too weak to enforce obedience to it. To do justice to all parties, America should be examined and portrayed piecemeal, every state separately, for every state is different, running down the scale from refinement to a state of barbarism almost unprecedented; but each presenting matter for investigation and research, and curious examples of ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... logical sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all—entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the day of the ball, if he mounted guard faithfully and let no one enter. Birotteau, like the Emperor Napoleon at Compiegne, when the chateau was re-decorated for his marriage with Maria Louisa of Austria, was determined to see nothing piecemeal; he wished to enjoy the surprise of seeing it as a whole. Thus the two antagonists met once more, all unknown to themselves, not on the field of battle, but on the peaceful ground of bourgeois vanity. It was arranged that Monsieur Grindot was to take Cesar by the hand and show him the appartement ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... about or paced the floor or dropped in chairs and fought as they flung off their clothes piecemeal. She had combed and brushed her hair viciously as she raged, weeping the unbeautiful tears of wrath. But he had not had that comfort of tears; his tears ran down the inside of his soul and burned. She goaded him out of his ordinary self-control—knew ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... chains lay, perhaps all mingled together where they had fallen? It would need a longer time to find it than he had at first supposed. Yet would he falter? No! Rather than give up he would pass years here, till he had dismembered the whole ship and strewn every particle of her piecemeal over the bottom of the sea. Yet he had hoped to solve the whole mystery at the first visit; and now, since he saw no sign of any thing like treasure, he was for a while at a ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had conveyed things ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... with his pack-horse and the first load. All afternoon they went up and down over the hot bare face of the hill, until the baggage, heavy and light, was transported and dropped piecemeal on the shore. The torn-out insides of their home littered the stones with familiar shapes and colors, and Nancy played among them, visiting each parcel and ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... opposition in the west, for the Franks were then busy fighting each other, but luckily Muza fell into disgrace with the Caliph at this time and his great project was undertaken by less able hands and on a piecemeal plan. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of the twin hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure which one this partisan most desired to plunder. The Rajah intrigued ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion may perhaps repay a moment's attention; they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... think, Captain,' said Rob, looking round the room, 'that when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking little things away, piecemeal, not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... reason attacks on separate points of a position must be properly synchronised to be effective. The unbeaten enemy will otherwise possess a mobile reserve with which to reinforce threatened points. The attacks must be so timed that he throws them in piecemeal or fails to reach the point ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... famed for Hawawit. At first I thought of having it cut to portable size; but second thoughts determined me to leave it for another visit or for some more fortunate visitor. Lastly, we were informed, a few weeks afterwards, that the Ma'azah Shaykhs had carried it off to their tents—I fear piecemeal. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of small brown ants. It was really very interesting to watch the little creatures. They would saw off a leg, or a part of one, then several of them would drag it away to their hiding-place; and, piecemeal, they would, if given time, carry off the cockroach, leaving not a particle. Now there is a lesson ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... tempt him, sacrificing everything in the desperate straits to which she was reduced. Though he had loved her well, and sinfully, but truly, for so many years, his love had sometimes seemed an unbearable thraldom, to escape from which he would have given his heart piecemeal, though he should lose all the happiness life held for him, for the sake of a momentary freedom. Possibly, too, she knew that he never longed for that freedom so much as when she had just been most violent and despotic. She was prepared for the feeble dissent with ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... peace for a time, and watch the progress of events. If we hear that the people of these parts are aroused from their lethargy, we will come back and fight for our home and lands; if not, I will no longer stay in East Anglia, which I see is destined to fall piecemeal into the hands of the Danes; but we will journey down to Somerset, and I will pray King Ethelbert to assign me lands there, and to take me as ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... in, the box was not big enough to hold it. They had before wrapped it up in a blanket, out of which they took it; Mrs. Hayes proposed to cut off the arms and legs, and they again attempted to put it in, but the box would not hold it. Then they cut off the thighs, and laying it piecemeal in the ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... exactly such as would please the known taste of the Roman tribune, being composed of heterogeneous scraps of ancient marble, patched up with barbarous brick pilasters of his own age; affording an apt exemplification of his own character, in which piecemeal fragments of Roman virtue, and attachment to feudal state—abstract love of liberty, and practice of tyranny—formed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... all you can to be going on with. Preach revolutionary thoughts? Yes, but rely on the ameliorative method.... The minds of men are of slow development, and we must be content, we fear, to accomplish our revolution piecemeal, bit by bit, till a point is come to when, by accumulative process, a series of small changes amounts to the Great Change. The most important revolutions are those that happen quietly without anything particularly noticeable seeming ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... janitor's lodge, tramping up and down the paved courtyard with feverish impatience, for more than three hours, watching for every officer who came up and interviewing him, and thus it was that he had become acquainted, piecemeal, with the rapid series of events; how General de Wimpffen had tendered his resignation and then withdrawn it upon the peremptory refusal of Generals Ducrot and Douay to append their names to the articles of capitulation, how the Emperor had thereupon invested ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... but to contemplate upon; where it might see the world without travel, it being a lesser scheme of the creation, nature contracted a little cosmography or map of the universe. Neither was the body then subject to distempers, to die by piecemeal, and languish under coughs, catarrhs, or consumptions. Adam knew no disease so long as temperance from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician, and innocence and abstinence would have kept ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... of Marianne is interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from the literary value of a work which, as even critical La Harpe declares, "assures him ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... be given to certain lords under the nomination of the pope. In a subsequent examination before the commons, Bedloe added, (for these men always brought out their intelligence successively and by piecemeal,) that Lord Carrington was also in the conspiracy for raising men and money against the government; as was likewise Loro Brudenel. These noblemen, with all the other persons mentioned by Bedloe, were immediately committed to custody by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... learned of the science of the invisible realm was perforce picked piecemeal by us from all that we saw, experienced, and what several different times Tako was willing to explain to us. And it was later studied by the scientists of our world, whose additional theories I can incorporate ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... capture of Tully's house, Mr. Tener writes to me, "I found it being gutted by his family, who would have carried it away piecemeal. They had already taken away the flooring of one of the rooms." Thereupon Mr. Tener had the house pulled down, with the result of seeing a statement made in a leading Nationalist paper that he was "evicting the tenants and ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the Great Khan, and that it was his men who had used the arrows and made war upon the natives. It was no good for the natives to show him some of their mutilated bodies, and to tell him that the cannibals ate them piecemeal; he had no use for such information. His mind was like a sieve of which the size of the meshes could be adjusted at will; everything that was not germane to the idea of the moment fell through it, and only confirmative evidence remained; and at the moment he was not believing any stories ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... back—quantity was there, but the quality! Mournfully he gazed on two suits, complete in the three separate members of which man's raiments are composed: the one suit extended at length upon his bed, like a veteran stretched by pious hands after death; the other brought piecemeal to the invidious light—the torso placed upon a chair, the limbs dangling down from Jackeymo's melancholy arm. No bodies long exposed at the Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than those respectable defuncts. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... two, and would still have a balance left after the South had spent all. The expenditure in this proportion would be disagreeable; but if this was the inevitable and only price, Grant was willing to pay it, justly regarding it as cheaper than a continuation of the process of purchase by piecemeal. In a few hours the frightful struggle in the Wilderness was in progress. All day on the 5th, all day on the 6th, the terrible slaughter continued in those darksome woods and swamps. "More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent," said Grant. The Union troops could not force ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... sashes, and sat down at my table to eat a piece of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piecemeal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... his wide threefold throat barks as a dog Over the multitude immers'd beneath. His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard, His belly large, and claw'd the hands, with which He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs Piecemeal disparts. Howling there spread, as curs, Under the rainy deluge, with one side The other screening, oft they roll them round, A wretched, godless crew. When that great worm Descried us, savage Cerberus, he op'd His jaws, and the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... lost one arm by the premature discharge of a Fourth of July cannon, and within three months he got the other pulled out by a carding-machine. Aurelia's heart was almost crushed by these latter calamities. She could not but be deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she did, that he could not last forever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken him at first, before he had suffered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the knower. An example will make this clear: the roundness of a body is recognised in one way by sight, in another by touch. Sight looks upon it from a distance as a whole by a simultaneous reflection of rays; touch grasps the roundness piecemeal, by contact and attachment to the surface, and by actual movement round the periphery itself. Man himself, likewise, is viewed in one way by Sense, in another by Imagination, in another way, again, by Thought, in another by pure Intelligence. ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the staircase, and hurried on to the drawing-room, with the massive front door being broken piecemeal by the heavy sledge-hammer; but each chain and bolt still held, and there was no way in yet but for light and noise, so that, before they gave way, Frank had time to get a light and ignite the candles in two sets of branches in the drawing-room which ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... here the mighty queen of good and ill, Fortune; first marry, then enjoy thy fill Of lawful pleasures; but depart ere morn; Slip from her bed, or else thou shalt be torn Piecemeal by fiends; thy blood caroused in bowls, And thy four quarters blown to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... backs and up sledge I used an ice-axe to cut steps over the cornice and thus managed to get on top, then cut steps and surmounted the edge of the cornice. Helped Bowers up with the rope; others followed—then the gear was hauled up piecemeal. For Crean, the last man up, we lowered the sledge over the cornice and used a bowline in the other end of the rope on top of it. He came up grinning with delight, and we all thought the ascent rather ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... "It's them fellows down at the Landing trying to get a rise out of me. Or if it ain't that, it's some guy comin' in next spring, and sendin' in his outfit piecemeal ahead of him. And me powerless to protect myself! Ain't that an outrage! But when I meet him on the trail I'll put ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... full life history in great detail, thus obtaining a complete autobiography leading far down into the depths of the dreamer's mental life and into the inner world of his own. With the material so obtained one could truly reconstruct the complete life history, piecemeal, until the wonderful and inspiring structure of the mental world of the dreamer would be reared, reaching far back to early childhood and perhaps even to infancy, extending so far forward as to give us a prophecy, based on the dreamer's dynamic trends and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... as the child, and at length she came to know them so well that she accepted their invitation to pass the last month of her residence abroad under their roof. All this intelligence she wrote home, piecemeal as it came about, from time to time; and at last enclosed a polite note, from the head of the chateau, soliciting, on the occasion of his approaching mission to that neighbourhood, the honour of the company of cet ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... his manner of consuming it? Does he really eat, that is to say, does he divide his food piecemeal, does he carve it into minute particles, which are afterwards ground by a chewing-apparatus? I think not. I never see a trace of solid nourishment on my captives' mouths. The Glow-worm does not eat in the strict sense of the word: he drinks his fill; he feeds ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... more feared than other rules, He holds his people bound, like tamed bulls. Asia is banded with his paths of war; He is more of a scourge than Attila. He triumphs glorious—but, day by day, The earth falls at his feet, piecemeal away; And the bricks for his tomb's wall, one by one, Are being shaped—are ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of which Lincoln Cathedral was the first example on a large scale. In 1220 it was followed by Beverley Minster (see p. 189). The nave of Salisbury Cathedral was begun in 1240 (see p. 206), and a new Westminster Abbey grew piecemeal under Henry's own supervision during the greater part of the reign (see p. 205). Mental activity accompanied material activity. At Oxford there were reckoned 15,000 scholars. Most remarkable was the new departure taken by Walter de Merton, Henry's Chancellor. Hitherto each scholar ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... coolies with their loads still on the right bank of the river, leisurely proceeding to strip before wading across; the loads had to be carried on their heads, the water being well above their waists. Those loads that could be divided were carried over piecemeal, the coolie returning for the second part after taking the first across. This idea was all very fine in theory, but we found that most of the coolies, having made the first trip, sat down on the bank and proceeded to dress, leaving the remainder of ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... of philanthropy' [the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once to a 'total and immediate abolition of the trade.' One witness has ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... than romantic. But there would be cowardice in this as mean as that other cowardice. He believed himself to be bound by his duty to his family. Were he now to renew his promise of marriage, such renewal would be caused by fear and not by duty, and would be mean. They should tear him piecemeal rather than get from him such a promise. Then he thought of the Captain, and perceived that he must make all possible use of the Captain's character. Would anybody conceive that he, the heir of the Scroope family, was bound to marry ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... town-cycles from which they come will be seen at a glance on reference to the tables of pageants that appear in the Appendix. We may take it that all these town and country plays represent continually used and frequently tinkered texts, that must in some cases have passed through many piecemeal changes. In making them easy to the average reader of to-day, who takes the place of the mediaeval playgoer at a Corpus Christi festival, their latest copyists have but followed in the wake of a series of Tudor scribes who renewed the prompt-books from time to ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He must have been more than a quarter of a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... From Manning I elicited piecemeal some few and vague ideas. This meagreness was not due to a disinclination on Manning's part, but only to the fact that he never quite grasped my interest in mere surroundings. Yes, said he, it was a pretty flat country, and some brush. Yes, there ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... ships, and revictual; for I have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, with the 'Destiny,' in the harbour of Kinsale, and on June ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Vitensis, de Persecut. Vandal. l. i. c. 8, p. 11, 12, edit. Ruinart. Deogratius governed the church of Carthage only three years. If he had not been privately buried, his corpse would have been torn piecemeal by the mad devotion of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... ingot in his hands. What did a dead Chinaman signify? "We shall have to take this stuff to the mainland piecemeal, and bury it there for a while. How shall we get it to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... observes: "People had told us that this hill was most dangerous, and that we would scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the first to travel this way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the Shanidore [Shenandoah] to the ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... the skeleton firm and solid. Then comes the new roof of whatever type of shingles selected. Along with it starts the work of enclosing the side walls. These steps, of course, apply to a structure taken apart piecemeal. With a "flaked" house, roofs and walls are returned to position as panels. Making saw-cut cracks tight is the ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... drew on—came—passed, and the villagers assembled on the heights (their eyes fixed the while on the devoted vessel like vultures watching for their prey) had at length the satisfaction of seeing the laboring bark yield to the war of the elements, and her timbers float, piecemeal, over the waters. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... James, in his royally flowing apron, and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office, and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to be ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... immediately under her forefoot; and, in a moment, there she stuck hard and fast, bumping and scraping her bottom, with a harsh, grating sound and a quivering and rending of her timbers, as if every plank below the water-line was being torn out of her piecemeal. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... pictures, jewels, and curiosities, were sold and dispersed by the regicide powers; from this fate, happily, the royal collection of manuscripts and books was preserved; neither was it, like the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, doled out piecemeal to Hugh Peters and his brother fanatics. This good service was mainly owing to Bolstrode Whitelocke. When the British Museum was founded, King George II. presented to it the whole of the royal library; and Ferrar's Concordance, with another similarly illustrated compilation by him, is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... each woman received as her dowry a portion of territory, and enlarged by that amount her husband's little state; but the property she brought might, in a few years, be taken by her daughters as portions and enrich other houses. The fief seldom could bear up against such dismemberment; it fell away piecemeal, and by the third or fourth generation had disappeared. Sometimes, however, it gained more than it lost in this matrimonial game, and extended its borders till they encroached on neighbouring nomes or else completely absorbed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... endeavoured to condense into a connected story the facts learnt piecemeal from Sir John in conversation. To a certain extent they supplied, if not an explanation, at least an account of the change that had come over my friend. But only to a certain extent; there the explanation broke down and I was left baffled. I could imagine that a life of unwholesome ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... before Calton had been on the point of going to her and trying to get the secret out of her—that is, if she knew it; but now fate appeared to be playing into his hands, and a voluntary confession was much more likely to be true than one dragged piecemeal from unwilling lips. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... opening, and from which aperture there issued from time to time a very fine worm, like the finest silk-thread, and sometimes not much thicker than a spider's web, in small detached lengths. This worm is often of the enormous length of twenty yards, gradually oozing out piecemeal. It is a common disease of Soudan where the merchants catch the infection, and bring it over The Desert. It is said to be acquired principally by drinking the waters of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... column. Half a mile of it had disappeared—where or how I never learned. To this day I do not know what became of that half-mile of humanity—whether it was blotted out by some frightful bolt of war, whether it was scattered and destroyed piecemeal, or whether it escaped. But there we were, at the head of the column instead of in its middle, and we were being swept out of life by ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... thought he might make the point of concentration for Hardee's troops, coming from Charleston to Cheraw by railroad, and those with Beauregard, which were in the main the divisions of Hood's army, coming forward piecemeal, and now amounting to something over 9000 men. He suggested that Bragg should join him at Fayetteville also. [Footnote: Id., p. 1271. At the end of February, the portions of S. D. Lee's corps which had joined Beauregard had 2502 present ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... its sides were under water, although it had a high freeboard. Consequently, it shipped so much water that the waves washed over the decks with great noise and uproar, and entered the berths where the better-class passengers are generally quartered. The rigging had to be repaired piecemeal. Consequently, for those reasons, and as the vessel lacked other necessities, some tried to make them put back to Manila. However, this was without effect, and they proceeded on their way with some storms; and in the last, which was frightful, the people had no safety, even inside the boat, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... 9th the disorder grew worse; and the King beheld the whole surface of his body coming off piecemeal and corrupted. Deserted by his friends and by that crowd of courtiers which had so long cringed before him, his only consolation was the piety of his daughters.—SOULAVIE, "Historical and Political Memoirs," ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Kreisler reluctantly acceded to the suggestion that he write out his personal memories of the war for publication. He has completed his narrative in the midst of grave difficulties, writing it piecemeal in hotels and railway trains in the course of a concert tour through the country. It is offered by the publishers to the public with confidence that it will be found one of the most absorbing and informing narratives of the ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... to give Madame Lacelooper, for whom he entertained the highest regard, so much trouble. Legations were peculiarly situated at times, he said. In reply to an intimation from the gentleman in waiting, he said, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps never paid in piecemeal. Here Thomas would put an end to the comedy by announcing the arrival of the 'Minister for Foreign Affairs,' and politely bowing out the retiring gentleman, who, you may well imagine, maintained a reluctant gravity. There ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... in sturdy democratic fashion, had to be endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling and ducking his head, to the cries of "Out wi' it, Jim!" and, "Where's your stomach?" came still ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... against a strong one, but a hopeless plan for an armament strong enough to have met its opponents on the open sea, ship to ship. At Svold, Erik Jarl had shown that such an array could be destroyed piecemeal if assailed on an exposed flank, and at Sluys the left, where the "Great Cristopher" lay to seaward, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... slopes down to the stream, some of it is sixteen feet deep. It has been suggested that it might have been dug out in order to obtain the coarse slate; but the difficulty of working a confined seam like this, in any other way than by picking it out piecemeal with immense labour, seems impossible. It can never have been meant to convey water to the mill, as the highest part begins in the solid rock, and the object must always have been to keep the water on the highest possible level, until it reached the top of the millwheel. Nothing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... anxious concern, as we should for a friend wandering, in a dark night, amidst torrents and precipices; or preparing to land on a strange island, while he knew not whether he should be received, on the shore, by cannibals waiting to tear him piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish him with fond hospitality." Both writers have expressed themselves well, but meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as Jinns walk ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... knowledge,—all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives understanding to the world's great teachers. To fear science or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—uncovering,—of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... gave him the hand; the hand, the arm; the arm, the shoulder. He reconstructed her piecemeal with a rare faithfulness, till by the time he was on the moorland overlooking the smiling valley, where the railroad went shining away into the old world, there stood his lady beside him, complete, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself down and died, leaving little other than ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... wherein particles which once, by their operation on each other, produced a living and energetic whole, are reduced to a condition of perfect passiveness, in which they are seized upon and appropriated, one by one, piecemeal, by whatever has need of them, without any power of resistance or energy of their own. And thus there is a peculiar painfulness attached to any associations of inorganic with organic matter, such as appear to involve the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... as is the cry of a lioness over her cubs, while Ino, for her part, set her heel on the body, and brake asunder the broad shoulder, shoulder-blade and all, and in the same strain wrought Autonoe. The other women tore the remnants piecemeal, and to Thebes they came, all bedabbled with blood, from the mountains bearing not ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... like the element carbon! Doubtless, with his extraordinary sleight of hand, he had substituted real diamonds for the shapeless mass that came out of the apparatus, in the interval between handing the pebbles round for inspection, and distributing them piecemeal to the men of science and representatives of the diamond interest. We all watched him closely, of course, when he opened the crucibles; but when once we had satisfied ourselves that something came out, our doubts were set at rest, and we forgot to watch whether he distributed ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... end of the twenty-eighth century, or the year 2807 A.D., the moon had been completely hacked away and sent piecemeal into space, the job having required 86 years. I give, herewith, the result of John Jones's Dollar, both at the date when the moon was completely removed and also at the close of the 900th year ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... Chateau le Comte, within three or four leagues of Hesdin. The Emperor's soldiers were in garrison there, with a number of peasants from the country road. M. de Vendosme called on them to surrender; they made answer that he should never take them, unless it were piecemeal; let him do his worst, and they would do their best to defend themselves. They trusted in their moats, which were full of water; but in two hours, with plenty of faggots and casks, we made a way for our infantry to pass over, when they ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Portent, casting a shadow now That swallowed sea and sky; and then, Anchors and nails and bolts Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang, A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay, A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal About the waters; and her crew Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left To drown. All the long night I swam; But in the morning, O, the smiling coast Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike, Skirted with shelving sands! And a ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... have it, and very fiercely she dragged piecemeal from his reluctant lips the story of the surprised idyl. He had seen the princess with an arm round the Terror's neck, and they ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... upon this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... distress. If he escaped, they would have hunted him with bloodhounds, and so brought him back; and if he sickened under his torture, they would have left him, naked and unsheltered, to languish with wasting disease and devouring vermin,—to die, or to rot and drop away piecemeal while yet alive. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the bones to drop from their places—yea, the spirit to faint. What is empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! Here were a hundred thousand shoutings, hoarse sighs, and strong ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... to the foot of the malign gray slopes. And I, who stood intent to gaze, saw muddy people in that swamp, all naked and with look of hurt. They were smiting each other, not only with hands, but with head, and with chest, and with feet, mangling one another piecemeal with ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... by piecemeal brought the pile; No barks embowel'd Portland Isle; Dig, cried experience, dig away, Bring the firm quarry into day, The excavation still shall save Those ramparts which its entrails gave. "Here kings shall ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... supply of oil and alcohol, which Marvin and Borup were to bring to me, was, I felt, vital to our success; but even if they did not come in with it, I could not turn back here. While pacing the floe, I figured out how we should use our sledges piecemeal as fuel in our cookers, to make tea after the oil and alcohol were gone. By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted, it would be warm enough so that we could suck ice or snow to assuage our thirst, and get along ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... tribes-men and kinsfolk in Houndsditch and the Minories there was great joy at first, and afterward bitter, endless litigation. They screamed and battled over the heritage like vultures over a mighty carrion, tearing it at length piecemeal. He did not keep a pet dog, and so no living creature regretted him, unless it were the thin, delicate girl, with white cheeks and hollow eyes, who came once, and knelt to pray by his grave for hours, her tears ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... brought in new robbers from the sea. Yes, but not all. Much of the preciousness was hidden and the place of its hiding forgotten. Bit by bit the churls found the treasure-trove, but they did not tell their lords. They melted down jewels and sold them piecemeal to Jews for Jews' prices, and what they did not recognise as precious they wantonly destroyed. I have seen the marble heads of heathen gods broken with the hammer to make mortar of, and great cups of onyx and alabaster ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan |
