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Plaster   /plˈæstər/   Listen
Plaster

noun
(Formerly written also plaister)
1.
A mixture of lime or gypsum with sand and water; hardens into a smooth solid; used to cover walls and ceilings.
2.
Any of several gypsum cements; a white powder (a form of calcium sulphate) that forms a paste when mixed with water and hardens into a solid; used in making molds and sculptures and casts for broken limbs.  Synonym: plaster of Paris.
3.
A medical dressing consisting of a soft heated mass of meal or clay that is spread on a cloth and applied to the skin to treat inflamed areas or improve circulation etc..  Synonyms: cataplasm, poultice.
4.
A surface of hardened plaster (as on a wall or ceiling).  Synonym: plasterwork.
5.
Adhesive tape used in dressing wounds.  Synonyms: adhesive plaster, sticking plaster.



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"Plaster" Quotes from Famous Books



... protested Ned, "if you'd put on a couple of good round pieces of sticking-plaster, and let me wear it in a sling for a day or two, it would be ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... moment I perceived that my head was cut open. Happily my blood, or that of my comrades, or perhaps the torn skin of my horse, who knows, had in coagulating formed a sort of natural plaster. But, in spite of it, I fainted away when my head came into contact with the snow. However, the little warmth left in me melted the snow about me; and when I recovered consciousness, I found myself in the ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... and extracted the ball—from the folds of his voluminous breeches. Then he went indoors for ointment and plaster, the flame of the powder having scorched him severely. Later he had the bent guelder (which had diverted the bullet) fastened to a little gold chain, and his wife wore it always on the front of her bodice. Finally it became an heirloom in a thriving ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... She climbed a chair and started on a row of shelves where lay the dust of ages. It was a jerry- built house, and the result was that she brought the whole lot down about her head, together with a quarter of a hundred-weight of plaster. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... thirty feet from our cellar refuge the sailors began throwing out the bricks, and in a few minutes they uncovered the body of a comrade. All the village has the smell of desolation. That smell is compounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster, wet clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose took it as we crossed the canal, and held it till we shook ourselves on the run home. Thirty minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my spirits for hours afterward. But those chaps stood up to it for twenty-four hours a ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason

... sent for by a gentleman who had just received a slight wound, and gave his servant orders to go home with all haste imaginable, and fetch a certain plaster. The patient turning a ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... sighed at that. A chord in her responded to the extravagance of his speech, even though vaguely it did not quite satisfy. A woman of the warm-blooded south and no plaster saint, she answered presently with shy, reluctant lips the kisses of her lover. Why should she not? Had he not won her by meeting the test she had given him? Was he not a gallant gentleman, of her own race and caste, bound ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... time and rain had diluted their primitive red colour into numberless nameless tints. One of those minarets which from afar appeared so slender and so beautiful, now that it was close to me proved to be merely a small column devoid of symmetry, while its covering of cracked plaster seemed on the point of falling to pieces. The Turkish promenaders whom from a distance I had taken for richly attired merchants, proved to be a set of miserable tatterdemalions with ragged turbans. Behind the porters who crowded to the landing-place, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... Italy; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing under the sanction of other names;—heathenisms christened. A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets, concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a friend of mine, how ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... opened the carcass, and then trotted back to camp. Next morning I returned and with much labor took off the skin. The fur was very fine, the animal being in excellent trim, and unusually bright colored. Unfortunately, in packing it out I lost the skull, and had to supply its place with one of plaster. The beauty of the trophy, and the memory of the circumstances under which I produced it, make me value it perhaps more highly than any other in ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... the bronze and plaster poet of France. Cheek by jowl with Rosseau, (their squabbles are forgotten in the roll of fame), you see him perched on mantel, bracket, ecritoire, and bookcase: in short, their effigies are as common as the plaster figures of Shakspeare and Milton are in England. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various

... had wainscots, behind which the mice were always scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white potato-shoots ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... she had won too easily. They were strange ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—china pugs, tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes' heads in coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... mustard plaster than a patch any time," he replied gravely; "but as long as there's no help for it, lay them on—don't slight the job a bit because of my feelings. I can stand pretty well having my jean clothes darned and mended, but I do object to dressing up on ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... corner of the once handsome room, there were spots and splashes on the white wall, and terrible stains on the floor. The plaster of the sides, too, was scarred and dotted with bullet holes, and we could grasp the terrible fact that some one, probably more than one, had made a desperate defence in that corner, for there was a sword, broken in two pieces, lying behind a shattered piano, in whose woodwork were dozens ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... as well as religious is due, was not easy to adopt in an old country like the Netherlands. Splendid churches and cathedrals, the legal possession of which would be contended for by rival sects, could scarcely be replaced by temporary structures of lath and plaster, or by humble back parlours of mechanics' shops. There were questions of property of complicated nature. Not only the states and the communities claimed in rivalry the ownership of church property, but many private families could show ancient advowsons and other claims to present or ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... present at the clearing of a part of the arena of this colossal erection, and witnessed the disclosure of paintings which had not seen the light for above seventeen hundred years. They were executed in what is termed fresco, a process of coloring on wet plaster, but which, after it becomes hard, almost defies the effects of time. The subjects of those I allude to were nymphs, and the coloring of the draperies, in some instances, was as fresh as ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... of her honey, for she thought dripping more suitable for such as Kettles, but she could not refuse Nancy anything. So she answered readily enough,—"To be sure, my dear," and made no objection; while Nancy, choosing the biggest piece of toast, proceeded to plaster it thickly with honey. When, however, these preparations being finished, she dragged up a chair and hospitably invited Kettles to take a seat between herself and Pennie, Nurse felt ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... the key. The door was unlocked, and the light established. The party entered a large and lofty chamber with ceiling of elaborate plaster work and silver-grey walls, the paper on which was somewhat tarnished. A pattern of dim, pink roses as large as cabbages ran riot over it. A great oriel window looked east, while a smaller one opened upon the south. Round the curve of ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... the worst is the papered wall; the next worst is plaster. But the plaster can be redeemed by frequent lime-washing; the paper requires frequent renewing. A glazed paper gets rid of a good deal of the danger. But the ordinary bed-room paper is all that ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... thickness. On the top of the arches were first laid large flat stones, sixteen feet long, and four broad; over these was a layer of reeds, mixed with a great quantity of bitumen, upon which were two rows of bricks, closely cemented together with plaster. The whole was covered with thick sheets of lead, upon which lay the mould of the garden. And all this floorage was contrived to keep the moisture of the mould from running away through the arches. The earth laid hereon was so deep, that the greatest trees might take root in ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... Greek into the bargain. Och! I wish you'd hear the sackin' I gave Tom Reilly the other day; rubbed him down, as the masther says, wid a Greek towel, an' whenever I complimented him with the loan of a cut on the head, I always gave him a plaster of Latin to heal it; but the sorra worse healin' flesh in the world than Tom's is for the Latin, so I bruised a few Greek roots and laid them to his caput so nate, that you'd laugh to see him. Well is it histhory we are to begin wid? If it ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... break in a gale, than give way. Where an oak and a beech grow side by side, close together, the oak suffers more than the beech, from the dense shade of the latter; and if they are so near as to touch and rub together in the wind, the oak will throw out a plaster or protection of bark, to act as a styptic to the wound in the first place, and eventually as a solid barrier against ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... and she vanished into the kitchen. She scraped the smoking griddle, and washed it and greased it, then she stirred the grey liquid and placed two or three spoonfuls on the griddle, then she essayed to turn them—sticking plaster never stuck tighter than those cakes adhered to that griddle; she worked carefully, she insinuated her knife under just the outer edge of the cake, then gradually approached the centre, but when the final flop came, they went into little sticky hopeless ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston

... is the metal that wins my heart for ever! O precious gold, I admire and adore thee as much as Bradshaw, Prynne, or any villain of the same stamp. This is that incomparable medicament, which the republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster. It is truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit's powder, but more effectual. The virtues of it are strange and various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out spots of the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap does common stains; it ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... man," returned Lawless, "there are worse misfortunes happen at sea; a little sticking-plaster will set all to rights again. But look here, Fairlegh," he continued, taking my arm, "I'm glad I happened to meet you; I want to have five minutes' ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... produced but a faint Yellow, even in that part of the Powder that lay nearest the top of the Crucible, yet having purposely enquired of an Experienced Stone-cutter, who is Curious enough in tryng Conclusions in his own Trade, he told me he had found that if Alabaster or Plaster of Paris be very long kept in a Strong fire, the whole heap of burnt Powder would exchange its Whiteness for a much deeper Colour than the Yellow I observ'd. Lead being Calcin'd with a Strong fire turns (after having purhaps run ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle

... watched while Polly finished the placing of the dreadful shades, then she looked about at the colored prints tacked upon every available spot of rough plaster-walls. Her brow puckered at the conglomeration of subjects and sizes of the chromos, but she knew how carefully Polly had saved every one of them that had arrived with tea or soap, so she ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... in such a case as this, what was religion good for? One believed things, but only so far as they were based on law; and law is a stiff sort of moral plaster to apply to a bleeding wound. Of course, there was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... Green's favourite Alderney spoke on that occasion, or conducted itself otherwise than as unaccustomed to public speaking as usual. Neither can we verify the assertion of the intelligent Mr. Mole the gardener, that the plaster Apollo in the Long Walk was observed to be bathed in a profuse perspiration, either from its feeling compelled to keep up the good old classical custom, or because the weather was damp. Neither are we bold enough to entertain an opinion that the chickens in the poultry-yard ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... on her bed in the room under the gable—the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft behind ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair

... a stout woman, wearing heavy outdoor boots and carrying her arms interlaced before her, with the hands hidden in the ample sleeves of her habit, and her face was so white and expressionless, that it might have been cast in plaster of Paris. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... narrow and ill arranged, and their walls were decorated at foot with slabs of bare limestone instead of sculptured alabaster. Above the plinth thus formed they were covered with roughly executed paintings upon plaster, instead of with enamelled bricks. Both plan and decoration show evidence of haste and disquiet. The act of sovereignty had to be done, but all certainty of the morrow had vanished. From the moment in which Assyrian sculpture touched its highest point in the reign of Assurbanipal, the material ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... tufts like curl-papers about its face, sopping from the rain, came into the shed and stared with curiosity at Yegorushka. It seemed to be hesitating whether to bark or not. Deciding that there was no need to bark, it went cautiously up to Yegorushka, ate the sticky plaster and ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... sewn up and then bandaged, as was that on the arm. The other and slighter wounds were simply drawn together by slips of plaster. When all was done, Reuben ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty

... scraped with a knife, except perhaps with the back, but they might be touched up with oil or water. If a sandal tie broke on the Sabbath, the question of what should be done was so serious and profound that the Rabbis were never able to settle it. A plaster might be worn to keep a wound from getting worse, but not to make it better. False teeth were absolutely prohibited, for they might fall out, and replacing them involved labor. Elderly persons with a full artificial ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... combined with oil, it forms a cheap and useful liniment, but it should be dissolved in proof spirit before the oil is added. One part of this salt, and three parts of extract of belladonna, mixed and spread upon leather, makes an excellent plaster for relieving rheumatic pains. As a local stimulant it is well known, as regards its effects in hysterics, faintness, and lassitude, when applied to the nose, as ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... For the English plaster or half-timber house the architect will doubtless design a special mantel, in scale and in harmony with the dark paneling and other architectural woodwork, probably with a paneled over-mantel if the cost is not too ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor

... to get full control over the production or distribution of some product, in order to manipulate prices for their own profit. From railways and corn-stores down to slate-pencils, coffins, and sticking-plaster, everything is tending to fall under the power of a Trust. Many of these Trusts fail to secure the union of a sufficient proportion of the large competitors, or quarrels spring up among the combining firms, or some new firms enter into competition too strong ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... their business. The house was rebuilt towards the close of the century, and the Apollo Room was added as a banqueting hall for the judges on circuit. This is now used as a showroom, but it still retains its elaborate plaster ceiling bearing the date 1695, and the original oak panelling. The frieze consists of a series of wreaths upholding shields charged with the armorial bearings of many county families, together with the royal arms and those ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath

... attended the service. It was a Catholic church, a small edifice which had once been white, but, by the action of the weather for many years, it had now become brown. The seats and altar had never been painted, and the plaster of the inner wall had, in places, fallen from the lath. The parishioners seemed quite devout people, and the pastor a sincere man. In his prayers he remembered the President and the government, and he supplicated for peace. ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... you smash your finger or drop something on your foot? There, don't cry. I'll get the witch-hazel and arnica and court-plaster. What is it? Where? Why-ee!" she gasped bewildered, "why, Lila!" for her weeping roommate had pushed her gently away and turned her face to ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... germinating; but what is better still, a shade of muslin can be used, supported by the upper edges of the frame and narrow strips laid across, which can remain until the plants are well above ground, when it should be removed, the plants sprinkled with tobacco dust, air slacked lime, ashes or common plaster, and a covering of mosquito netting be substituted for the muslin, which will admit light, air and sunshine, yet be a partial shade, and will help to protect the plants from insects. This cover may be removed during rainy weather, and, ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier

... Creed, pale, hollow-eyed, a strip of Nancy's home-made sticking plaster over the cut on brow and cheek, but otherwise composed and as usual, at the pine table in his little shack, working over the references which applied to the case he was to try that morning. But an hour later brought old Keziah Provine to ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... availed themselves of the treasures and the appliances of the gorgeous enemy they had vanquished and despoiled. Few ever rebuild their houses on as plain a scale as the old ones. In the city itself the residences of the great remained plain and simple; they were mostly built of plaster and unburnt brick, and we are told that the houses of Cimon and Pericles were scarcely distinguishable from those of the other citizens. But in their villas in Attica, in which the Athenians took a passionate delight, they exhibited their taste and displayed their wealth [213]. And the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... very small room, with a ceiling so low that the tall lodger could only just stand upright with safety; perhaps three inches intervened between his head and the plaster, which was cracked, grimy, cobwebby. A small scrap of weedy carpet lay in front of the fireplace; elsewhere the chinky boards were unconcealed. The furniture consisted of a round table, which kept such imperfect balance on its central ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... tiny shack, where thin building-paper took the place of plaster, the wind screaming across the plains, hurling the snow against that frail protection, defenseless against the elemental fury of the storm, was like drifting in a small boat at sea, tossed and buffeted by waves, each one ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... funds that flow through his hands. Cannon have been added, but there are not enough balls to go round. The walls have been repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet plaster. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... had to sew up a bad cut in Hester's arm. She sat all through school without a word to me, and then I could not close the wound with sticking-plaster, so there was no alternative. She behaved like a Spartan—her black skin made it easier for me, but not for her, I fancy. So much for my first attempt at surgery. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... their cells were barracks for Austrian soldiers, Who in their turn have followed the Augustinian Friars. As to the frescos, little remained of work once so perfect. Summer and winter weather of some three cycles had wasted; Plaster had fallen, and left unsightly blotches of ruin; Wanton and stupid neglect had done its worst to the pictures: Yet to the sympathetic and reverent eye was apparent— Where the careless glance but found, in expanses of plaster, Touches of incoherent color ...
— Poems • William D. Howells

... rooms on the ground floor of the house, but all three had been knocked into one by the visitation of shells. The boys picked their way over the uneven masses of plaster, and Frank gave an exclamation as he perceived an opening that seemed to lead down ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

... article of furniture was entitled to that designation. Across one corner of the room stood a tall white monument composed of glazed tiles laid in mortar, built into the room as a chimney might have been, with a hidden flue in the rear connecting it with the wall. A drab cornice and plaster ornaments of the same color set off the four or five feet above the mantel which surrounded it, and a brass door, about ten inches by twelve, was in the middle front of the part below. On the mantel were disposed sundry ornaments, including vases of dried grasses, ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... of the Acadmie des Inscriptions, M. Hron de Villefosse exhibited four painted plaster busts from El-Kargeh, in the Great Oasis, which have recently been sent to the Louvre by M. Bouriant, director of the French School at Cairo. They have been taken from the lids of sarcophagi; but the peculiarity about them is that the heads were not in the same plane with the ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified, and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white between the ranges ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... "flesh wounds," when no large blood-vessel is divided, wash the part with cold water, and, when bleeding has ceased, draw the incision together, and retain it with narrow strips of adhesive plaster. These should be put on smoothly, and a sufficient number applied to cover the wound. In most instances of domestic practice, the strips of adhesive plaster are too wide. They should not exceed in width one fourth of an inch. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... to the north-east; the well-to-do, those who have slowly amassed a fortune, and those engaged in the liberal professions, here occupy houses set out in straight lines and coloured a light yellow. This district, which is embellished by the Sub-Prefecture, an ugly plaster building decorated with rose-mouldings, numbered scarcely five or six streets in 1851; it is of quite recent formation, and it is only since the construction of the railway that it has been growing ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... to hang him," responded Galloway curtly. "Let us proceed to the pit, gentlemen. May I ask you to keep clear of the footprints? I do not want them obliterated before I can take plaster casts." ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... "Not of the plaster—no. But don't you think it possible that truth, emanating from certain regions and affecting the souls of men, might move them unconsciously to embody it in symbol? What if this Pool were blessed, and men, feeling that it was blessed, put San Francesco ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... any blessing is going to fall upon a church whose every stone is reeking with the bloody sweat and anguish of the human creatures whom the wealth of men like that has driven to despair? Shall we base God's altar in the bones of harlots, plaster it up with the slime of sweating-dens and slums, give it over for a gaming-table to the dice ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy

... wigged, and padded set. Bugles was resplendent. He had on a dress scarlet coat, lined and faced with yellow satin (one of the properties, we believe, of the Victoria), a beautifully worked pink shirt-front, a pitch-plaster coloured waistcoat, white ducks, and jack-boots, with brass heel spurs. He carried his whip in the arm's-length-way of a circus master following a horse. Some dozen of these curiosities were staggering, and swaggering, and smoking in front ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... rock, penetrated by a vaulted passage, which may well have been one of King Cymbeline's gateways; and on the top of the rock sits a small, old church, communicating with an ancient edifice that looks down on the street. It presents a venerable specimen of the timber-and-plaster style of building; the front rises into many gables, the windows mostly open on hinges; the whole affair looks very old, but the state of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... and more heath, paler than the first, but still yellow. Finally, on the far horizon a range of chalk-topped hills gleams white, even in dull weather, as though it were lightened with perpetual sunshine; and here and there on the dazzling whiteness of its lower slopes some plaster-like, nebulous patches represent far-off villages which lie too remote for the eye to discern their details. Indeed, only when the sunlight touches a steeple to gold does one realise that each such patch is a human settlement. Finally, all is wrapped in an immensity ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... exchanging loud protests: 'He is mine, and I mean to keep him;' 'Not yours at all, and it is no use your saying he is.' One of them seemed to be a working woman, masculine looking, with untidy hair, horny hands, and dress kilted up; she was all powdered with plaster, like my uncle when he was chipping marble. The other had a beautiful face, a comely figure, and neat attire. At last they invited me to decide which of them I would live with; the rough manly ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... note I sallied forth. The house lies opposite the fountain—how deafening the waters sounded in my ears! I ascended the simple staircase; in the wall stand plaster statues which impose silence—at any rate I couldn't utter a sound in this sacred hallway. Everything is cheery and yet solemn! The greatest simplicity prevails in the rooms, and yet it is all so inviting! "Do not fear," said the modest walls, "he will come, and he will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... of the materials? For instance, one man may make wine, or oil, or corn, out of another man's grapes, olives, or sheaves; or a vessel out of his gold, silver, or bronze; or mead of his wine and honey; or a plaster or eyesalve out of his drugs; or cloth out of his wool; or a ship, a chest, or a chair out of his timber. After many controversies between the Sabinians and Proculians, the law has now been settled as follows, ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... alone; upon which the bailiff waited on him up-stairs into an apartment, the windows of which were well fortified with iron bars, but the walls had not the least outwork raised before them; they were, indeed, what is generally called naked; the bricks having been only covered with a thin plaster, which in many places was ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... studio he made many friends. With one he went to Siena to assist him in some fresco painting he had to do there. Of course you know that fresco is painting on wet plaster so that the colors dry in with ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor

... very fond of complimenting Mr. Crittenden in these days, Mr. Crittenden has said there was a falsehood in that whole business, for there was no slavery agitation at that time to allay. We were for a little while quiet on the troublesome thing, and that very allaying plaster of Judge Douglas's stirred it up again. But was it not understood or intimated with the "confident promise" of putting an end to the slavery agitation? Surely it was. In every speech you heard Judge Douglas ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... made his convert Wilgan renounce individually and by name individual evil fashions of heathenism, just as St. Boniface made the Germans forsake Thor and Odin by name. There were twenty-five more nearly ready, and a coral-lime building was finished, 'like a cob wall, only white plaster instead of red mud,' says the Devonshire man. It was the first Church of Mota, again reminding us of the many 'white churches' of our ancestors; and on the 25th of June at 7 A.M., the first Holy Eucharist was celebrated there. It is also the place of private prayer for the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of the Fourth of July a rider topped the summit of the last swell of land, and loped his animal down into the single street of Pereza. The buildings on either side were flat-roofed and coated with plaster. Over the sidewalks extended wooden awnings, beneath which opened very wide doors into the coolness of saloons. Each of these places ran a bar, and also games of roulette, faro, craps, and stud poker. Even this early in the morning every ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... wreck, 'bout a year ago. We was ridin' a fast freight goin' west. He said he was goin' home, but he never said where it was. Hit a open switch—so they said after—and when they pulled the stitches, and took that plaster dingus off me leg, I starts out huntin' for Billy. Nobody knowed anything about him. Wasn't no signs in the wreck,—so they said. You see I was in ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... was gone to find Mrs. Rogers, who had left about ten minutes before, having first made the tea in which the poison had been taken. Jackson hurried out of the apartment, but was gone so long that Morgan, becoming impatient, scraped a quantity of plaster off the wall, and administered it with the best effect. At last Jackson came back, and said there was unfortunately not a particle of soap in the house. A few minutes afterwards the young wife, alarmed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... has important interests in lumber, besides foundries, machine shops, granite works—there are several granite (notably red granite) quarries in the vicinity—a tannery, and manufactories of shoes and calcined plaster. Big Island, now in the city of Calais, was visited in the winter of 1604-1605 by Pierre du Guast, sieur de Monts. Calais was first settled in 1779, was incorporated as a town in 1809, and was chartered as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... he said, "stick that plaster over the hole, and nail the board tightly over it. I will answer for it that no water gets through, whatever it ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... dreams of building or managing a theatre; another longs for the honors of mayoralty; this one desires a country-house, ten miles from Paris with a so-called "park," which he will adorn with statues of tinted plaster and fountains which squirt mere threads of water, but on which he will spend a mint of money; others, again, dream of distinction and a high grade in the National Guard. Provins, that terrestrial paradise, filled the brother and sister with the fanatical longings ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... of Jupiter excel in mechanical skill. They build houses, but not by long, tedious days of painstaking labor. Such things as plaster and paint are unknown. A Jupiterite can purchase, from one of the mammoth structural factories, house sides, house ends, house floors or partitions, after any general design he wishes, and have them trimmed in any style ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... side being occupied by a huge brick chimney inclosing a built-in range half devoured with rust; wall cupboards, a sink and a decrepit table showed gray and ugly in the greenish light of two tall windows, completely blocked on the outside with over-grown shrubs. An indescribable odor of decaying plaster, chimney-soot and mildew hung ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... with its double burners, and beneath long rows of leafless trees, were colossal plaster statues of Victory, alternating with colossal vases burning incense by day, and inflammable materials for illumination by night. Thus the procession attending the body had about five miles to march from the place of disembarkation to the Invalides, on the left bank of ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... generations, and now of late by the Roman church: all which we hope, through the blessing of God upon this work, shall be brought to an end. Had the Pope at Rome the knowledge of what is doing this day in England, and were this covenant written on the plaster of the wall over against him, where he sitteth, Belshazzar-like in his sacrilegious pomp, it would make his heart to tremble, his countenance to change, his head and mitre to shake, his joints to loose, and all his cardinals and prelates to ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... without its emotional sincerity, and which—amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms—jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,— something strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had its ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... Japanese Language. Modelling in Plaster. Piano, Violin. Sketching from Nature. Stenography. Typewriting. Watercolouring. And preparation for the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... was not Smollett's notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only put ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... concert with the Prince de Cellamara, to whom, upon one occasion, he acted as coachman, and drove him to the Duchesse du Maine at the Arsenal. This Comte de Laval is always sick and covered with wounds; he wears a plaster which reaches from ear to ear; he is lame, and often has his arm in a sling; nevertheless, he is full of intrigue, and is engaged night and day in writing ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans

... The shell reached, smashed down part of the house, and burst in the basement a couple of yards from me. I heard no more, but stone, plaster, and bricks fell all around me on the coal heap. I was gasping, but found myself untouched. I got up and saw the poultry struggling and the horses struck down. I ran to the cellar, with the same luck as ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... fussing around, "is careful nursin'. Trust old Bones and he'll pull you back to health, sir. Keep up your pecker, sir, an' I'll bring you back so to speak from the valley of the shadow—go to bed an' I'll have a mustard plaster on your ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... couldn't you see it was the sight of your ugly faces made him roar, not the jacket? Keep him there till further orders;" and he went off to plaster his ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... high spirits to inspect their new abode, to which some portion of their furniture had already been transferred. They went from room to room, inspecting and planning, till they came to an apartment the ceiling of which was elaborately decorated with plaster Cupids, baskets of flowers, etc., modeled in high relief, and with a centre-piece of unusual size and magnificence. A small table, the only article of furniture the room contained, was placed directly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... day, at least, Mr. Ladley became Mr. Holcombe again, and as such accepted ice in quantities, a mustard plaster over his stomach, and considerable nursing. By evening he was better, but although he clearly intended to stay on, he said nothing about changing his identity again, and I was glad enough. The very name of ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... any idea of what drawing really meant. What was taught was the faithful copying of a series of objects, beginning with the simplest forms, such as cubes, cones, cylinders, &c. (an excellent system to begin with at present in danger of some neglect), after which more complicated objects in plaster of Paris were attempted, and finally copies of the human head and figure posed in suspended animation and supported by blocks, &c. In so far as this was accurately done, all this mechanical training of eye and hand ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... be grafted is more than an inch, it is best to insert two grafts, placed so that each cion will stand near the edge of the cut, in juxtaposition with the bark of the limb. Immediately after setting the graft, plaster the cut over with a heavy coat of wax, being careful to leave no crack or crevice open through which it would be possible for air or water to enter. Each cion, in wedge-grafting, is cut in the shape of a wedge; the whole cion ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan

... worse, everybody loses his head, each one dodges the responsibility to place it upon somebody else, and instead of seeking the causes in order to combat the evil in them, devotes himself at best to attacking the symptoms: here a blood-letting, a tax; there a plaster, forced labor; further on a sedative, a trifling reform. Every new arrival proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint, the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal

... Sunday morning was conspicuous by the absence of Potts and Benz. But Curns was present with a smiling face and piece of court plaster attached to his chin. He attracted crowds of students as a magnet attracts iron filings. The students clung to him until they heard the last word of the episodes of one Judd Billings and then, bent almost double with laughter, they rushed off to tell the news to someone else. ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman

... Hawarden Castle stands in front of the massive ruin of the old Castle, which has looked down on the surrounding country for six centuries. A recent writer speaking of the new structure as a sham Castle, with its plaster and stucco, and imitation turrets, says: "It would not have been surprising if the old Castle had, after the manner of Jewish chivalry, torn its hair of thickly entwined ivy, rent its garments of moss and lichen, and fallen down prostrate, determined ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... a graduate, medicine droppers, hot water bags, a flat ice bag, a fountain syringe, a Davidson's syringe, a baby syringe, sterile gauze, absorbent cotton, gauze bandages of various widths, a yard of oiled silk, one roll of one inch "Z O" adhesive plaster, a bottle of Pearson's creolin, hydrogen peroxide (fresh), one ounce tincture of iodine in an air-tight bottle, a can of Colman's mustard, two ounces of syrup of ipecac, a bottle of castor oil (fresh), one pound of boracic acid powder, one pound of boracic acid crystal, a bottle of glycerine, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... docks, and turned in between the great ware-houses that line Mission Street. The hot streets were odorous of leather and machine-oils, ropes and coffee. Over the door of what had been Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's hung a new bright sign, "Hunter, Hunter & Brauer." Susan caught a glimpse, through the plaster ornamentation of the facade, of old Front Office, which seemed to be full of brightly nickeled samples now, and gave back a blinking flash of ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... Paris and its hotels, so let myself be guided by a fellow-traveller. We went to the Hotel du Louvre, then so new that it smelt of plaster and paint. In those days, big, splendid hotels were almost unknown in Europe. The vast dining-hall, with its palatial decoration, impressed my inexperience very strongly. During my stay in the Hotel du Louvre, I made the acquaintance of some English officers. One was a splendid-looking man of about ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... them at last, seated, in the official durbar room. The bandages were gone from his face, but a strip of flesh-colored court-plaster from eye to lip gave him an almost comical look of dejection, and he lolled in the throne-chair with his back curved and head hung forward, scowling as a man does not who looks forward ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... quarried there for the manufacture of plaster of Paris occurs as a granular crystalline rock, and, together with the associated marls, contains land and fluviatile shells, together with the bones and skeletons of birds and quadrupeds. Several land-plants are also met with, among which are fine specimens of the fan-palm or palmetto tribe ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... the remaining roughnesses are afterwards removed by friction with coarse paper. Articles that are not round, and the round ones that have embossed designs on their surface, are made of thin sheets of clay rolled out like dough, and then pressed into moulds of plaster of Paris; the moulds being previously dried, absorb the superficial moisture of the clay, and thus allow it to part from them without injury. The two or three separate pieces composing the article are then united by means of fluid slip. Spouts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various

... to heart; and I am sure it was only natural. I parted from him at my own door, and was glad on going in to find Jane had stayed up for me. I soon figured in her eyes as the hero of a thrilling adventure, while her clever hands applied sticking-plaster ad libitum. We were both so full of the events of the evening, and the letter which I was to write to the Times about it the next day, that it never entered the heads of either of us, on retiring to bed, to remove Sir John's jewels from ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... There all the essential elements seem conserved; here just the essentials seem to be lost and the aim of the drama to imitate life with the greatest possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the flat, colorless pictures of the photoplay. Still more might we say that the plaster of Paris cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue. It shares with the beautiful marble work the same form and imitates the body of the living man just as well as the marble statue. Moreover, this product of the mechanical process has the same white color which the original work ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry—next to Swift and Prior—moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... some pretty grove, and invested with a warmth and cheerfulness that cannot fail to make a few years' residence in them rather desirable than otherwise. These in turn are relieved with portraits of distinguished missionaries. Earnest-faced busts, in plaster, stand prominently about the room, periodicals and papers are piled on little shelves, and bright bookcases are filled with reports and various documents concerning the society, all bound so exactly. The good-natured man of the kind face sits in refreshing ease behind a little desk; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... one of those old-fashioned people who think that a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the Parks. A quite new man is necessarily afraid of such a locality as Bloomsbury Square, for he has no chance of getting any one into his house if he do not live westward. Who would ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... on a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin. It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate. The plaster, gnawed away by winds laden with searching sea-moisture, had fallen to earth, exposing the underlying masonry of cheap construction whose rusty colour was the same as that of the ground from which it had arisen, and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... night his bed got a fire. It seemed as if every thing under the sun wus a goin' to happen to that man while he wus here. You see, the house wus all tore up a repairing and I had to put him up-stairs: and the bed had been moved out by carpenters, to plaster a spot behind the bed; and, unbeknown to me, they had set it too near the stove-pipe. And the hot pipe run right up by the side of it, right by the bed-clothes. It ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... interfered with her operations, and clapped on the wound some lint besmeared with a vulnerary salve, esteemed sovereign by the whole dale (which afforded upon fair nights considerable experience of such cases); she then fixed her plaster with a bandage, and, spite of her patient's resistance, pulled over all a night-cap, to keep everything in its right place. Some contusions on the brow and shoulders she fomented with brandy, which the patient did not permit till the medicine had paid a heavy toll to ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... represented to him that he would only have to study a very little, he remarked that nothing at all was still better; and when the Bridge Farmer asseverated by all that was holy that he would become a saint, just like those plaster men in the church at Eynhofen, he replied that he didn't care ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... him and old Abbio to join in cutting the cart-road through the forest from Mooge. I gave Abbio a mixture of sulphate of zinc for his eyes, and put a mustard plaster on Wani the interpreter's stomach. At first he said it was of no use, as it only felt like cold water, but when it began to burn, he was greatly amazed, and said the cold ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... matter, and it isn't wrong, and we are quite alone.' She picked off the little flake of plaster, and her heart sprang into her mouth as she did so, for there came an indignant snort from her very elbow, and there was a queer little smoke-dried, black-dressed person who seemed to have risen, like the Eastern genii or a modern ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... they parted. Guivret takes his way back alone, while Erec resumed his road, in dire need of plaster wherewith to heal his wounds. He did not cease to travel until he came to a plain beside a lofty forest all full of stags, hinds, deer, does, and other beasts, and all sorts of game. Now King Arthur and the Queen and the best of his barons had come there ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... good fortune, too, hast thou escaped the heat and toil of this irksome weather. By my halidom the valor trickleth down my knightly chin as I pen these few lines, and my shirt cleaveth to my back like a porous plaster. The good knight of the Talking Cat speaketh to me of taking his vacation in the middle of August, whereat I much grieve, having a mind to hie me away ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... finger-nails with pieces of earthenware to scratch himself withal. His wife took the diagnosis of his complaints and prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel better if between the paroxysms of grief and pain he would swear a little. For each boil a plaster ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... after from ten to twenty cultures, he found that a portion of the liquid containing a few bacteria, when used for inoculating a rabbit, quickly caused the latter to die of charbon, while the same liquid, when filtered through plaster or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... demand, the class called boticarios (apothecaries) brought rivals into the market; and extensive imitation's with apples, loquats (Japanese medlars), and other frauds, brandied to make the stuff keep, plastered or doctored with Paris-plaster to correct over-acidity, and coloured and sweetened with burnt sugar and with boiled 'must' (mosto) to mock the Madeira flavour, gave the island-produce a bad name. Again, the revolution in the wine-trade of 1860-61 brought ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... of any other body with which it is placed in contact; cohesive expresses the tendency of particles of the same substance to hold together. Polished plate glass is not adhesive, but such plates packed together are intensely cohesive. An adhesive plaster is in popular language a sticking-plaster. Sticky expresses a more limited, and generally annoying, degree of the same quality. Glutinous, gummy, viscid, and viscous are applied to fluid or semi-fluid substances, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... contour of the baboon, be deemed so. Add to this the ornaments of scarification and tattooing, adopted by the sex to a greater extent than by the men: and the imagination will at once be sensible how much divinity attaches to Fernandian beauty. Like the men, the women plaster the body all over with clay and palm-oil, and also in a similar manner wear the hair long, and in curls or ringlets, well stiffened with the above composition. The children of both sexes, or those who have not obtained the age of puberty, have the hair cut short, and ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... modern artist. Like the Greeks, he painted with wax, resins, and in water colors, to which the proper consistency was given with gum and glue. The use of oil was unknown. The artists painted upon wood, clay, plaster, stone, parchment, but not upon canvas, which was not used till the time of Nero. They painted upon tablets or panels, and not upon the walls. These panels were framed and encased in the walls. The style ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... fighters. These, after endeavouring to take out a few of the creases contracted in the journey, he displayed over the fireplace and above the door, attaching them to the wall by means of garden nails, which had an awkward way of digging prodigious holes in the plaster and never properly reaching the laths behind. Most of the pictures consequently required frequent re-hanging, and by the end of the evening looked as if they, like the shady characters painted on them, had been in ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... growing hair and flowers and corn, but never of growing tired. What is it?" asked Sticken Plaster, leaning toward Dorothy. ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... of Mrs. Fazakerly's arm swept the pack on to the floor. "Frida," she cried, "take your father and put a mustard plaster on the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... thought: "In a hundred years my body will be dust. It doesn't matter what becomes of it now or hereafter; but people will gather in front of this head, and artists will come from all over the world to see it. And there will be plaster casts of it in city museums and village libraries. And I suppose I'm the most conceited idiot in the world, but—but it's good. ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... did not trouble themselves to secure correctness of costume, but represented ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans in the garb of Italian gentlemen. Many of their pictures were frescoes, that is, the colors were mixed with water and applied to the plaster walls of churches and palaces. After the process of mixing oils with the colors was discovered, pictures on wood or canvas (easel paintings) became common. Renaissance painters excelled in portraiture. They were less successful ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... the parlour hearth- rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor shadows. I mustn't forget, however, that it's not for wayside effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for the strong sense of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... parts of the structure, and built a new staircase and lobby for the Combination Room, which is considered without a rival in Cambridge or Oxford. It is a long panelled room occupying all the upper floor of the north side of the second court and with its richly ornamented plaster ceiling, its long row of windows looking into the beautiful Elizabethan court, its portraits of certain of the college's distinguished sons in solemn gold frames, it would be hard to find more pleasing surroundings for the leisured discussion of subjects which the ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home

... which his first sermoun was made, he took fra the hundreth and sevin Psalme; the sentence thareof, "He send his woorde and heallod thame;" and tharewith joyned these woordis, "It is neather herbe nor plaster, O Lord, butt thy woord healleth all." In the which sermoun, he maist confortablie did intreat the dignitie and utilitie of Goddis woord; the punishment that cumis for the contempt of the same; the promptitude of Goddis mercy to such as trewlye turne to him; yea, the great happynes of thame ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... swiftly-moving shadow in the dark water, save for a curious burden of air-bubbles which went with it. Its close under-fur, which the water could not penetrate, was thickly sprinkled with longer hairs, which the water seemed, as it were, to plaster down; and under these long hairs the air was caught in little silvery bubbles, which made the swimmer conspicuous even under two inches of clear ice and ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... would be thrown, clubs used. The wounds made by the spears would be dreadfully jagged, for about half a yard of the end of the spear was toothed with bones or fishes' teeth. But the black fellows' flesh healed wonderfully. A wound that would kill any European the black would plaster over with mud, and in a week or ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox

... of the places she showed me, places where the plaster was off the walls in great patches, and the paper hung in greasy tatters, and where we encountered so many nauseating sights and smells that by the time we were back at her house I didn't have any appetite for lunch. She told me that it affected ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston

... Abbeville every day and meet his friend. The shelling had got very bad, and the inhabitants began to leave the town. Germaine, however, remained calm. One day a shell hit the shop next door to hers, and shattered the whole of the whitewashed front of the house, and the plaster crumbling away revealed a fine wooden building which for the last two centuries had been concealing its splendid carved beams beneath a wretched coat of whitewash. So also did Germaine, divested by danger of her superficial vulgarity, suddenly ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... however, show any of the beautiful decorations of the vaults, for all this had been smeared over with a dirty yellow wash about 1815, which earned for the church the name of "the leather breeches cathedral." And when, later, the plaster on the stone-filling between the ribs was removed, the paintings were utterly obliterated for ever, excepting only the small portion remaining in the lady-chapel bearing the Wykeham motto upon a scroll. But this recital is but a prelude to the changes that were ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette

... it a little bit awry. It looked so absurd, hanging there, all crooked, that I thought it kinder to him to remove it altogether. The thing peeled off with difficulty; for it was a work of art, very firmly and gracefully fastened with sticking-plaster. But it peeled off at last—and with it the whole of the Count's and Dr. Fortescue-Langley's distinction. The man stood revealed, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... moment's quiet or a moment's comfort, with all those grimy noisy creatures rushing in and out. I found her sitting up in bed yesterday, in danger of breaking a blood-vessel through coughing, because one of the imps had fallen down and cut his head and she was trying to plaster it.' ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... time for talk. A moment later my uncle was laid, still unconscious, upon his bed, and Jeanne and Madeleine were preparing a mustard-plaster together, in perfect harmony. M. Charnot and I waited in silence for the doctor whom we had sent the office-boy to fetch. M. Charnot studied alternately my deceased aunt's wreath of orange-blossoms, preserved under a glass in the centre of the chimney-piece, and a painting of fruit ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... marble quarries, out of which we can carve statues and table tops, and tops for seats. Our marble is full of colored veins just like jewels. Then we also have gypsum mines, which furnish both fertilizer for land, to make crops grow high, and plaster of Paris, out of which we ...
— Fil and Filippa - Story of Child Life in the Philippines • John Stuart Thomson

... the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man's already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... stack was written "Tobacco," and on a plaster facade could be read "Doremus Labiche, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... Northumberland had obtained a grant from Edward VI., and that scarcely a stone remained to protect the dust of these descendants and progenitors of kings! She instantly gave orders for the erection of suitable monuments to their honor: but her commands were ill obeyed, and a few miserable plaster figures were all that the illustrious dead obtained at last from her pride or her piety. These monuments however, such as they are, remain to posterity, whilst of the magnificent castle, the only adequate commemoration of the power and greatness ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... does not corrode them and which distributes the heat while refusing to conduct the electric current. A network of wire, crossing and recrossing but always carrying the same current, may be embedded in plaster and a gentle heat may be imparted to the whole mass through the resistance of the wires to the electricity and their contact ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... powders, purging powders, sweating powders, fever powders, calomel pills, laudanum, cough drops, stomach tincture, bark, scurvy drops, hartshorn, peppermint, lotion, Friar's balsam, Turner cerate, basilicon (for healing "sluggish ulcers"), mercurial ointment, blistering ointment, sticking-plaster, and lint. ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton

... temple in which the priest, who showed me a fine collection of robes, conducts his services is between forty and fifty mats in area. Behind it is the room in which the ihai or tablets of the dead are arranged. This part of the building is covered on the outside with plaster in the manner of a kura (godown) so as to be fire-proof. On either side of the actual temple are rooms very much as in a spacious private house. There are two of eighteen and fifteen mats, two of twelve and ten mats and ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat, and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his lips began to move and he ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... this Fortafix," he remarked; "it makes excellent casts, and saves the trouble and mess of mixing plaster, which is a consideration for small work like this. By the way, if you want to know what was on that poor girl's pillow, just take a peep through the microscope. It ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... induce me to print pastor, where the oldest authority had paster. As the following part of the sentence speaks of "suppling and suaging wounds," I am inclined to suspect that "paster" might be an old way of spelling, "plaster." Can any of your correspondents supply me with any instance in which "plaster" or "plaister" is spelt "paster" by any old ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various

... customer to customer and through it all is dimly conscious of the fact that outside under the awning Dolly Beatty is waiting anxiously for the men folks to get out before she ventures in to buy her Joe's special brand of corn salve and bunion plaster. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... but good for many years more. The frame is of timber and plaster, and a Horsham stone roof. These stones are a little damp and moss-covered (for our ancestors insisted on building in a hole, or where would Friday's fish come from?), and the place is as Tudor as Queen Bess herself, in whose reign its foundations were dug. The chimney ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... the Pagans, so the great Christian Artist of our times culled from the antique all he could assimilate. It is clear to me, judging from the internal evidence of his works, that as a student Overbeck went through the usual course of drawing from the plaster cast. Many are the passages in his compositions which might be quoted in point, particularly Biblical incidents, such as the Expulsion from Paradise, wherein appear undraped figures. Here are seen to advantage the generic form, the typical beauty, the harmony ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson

... Didn't the villains of painters—I won't mention a single name, not even the rascals Belisario[2.10] and Ribera[2.11]—didn't they bribe Domenichino's servant to strew ashes in the lime? So the plaster wouldn't stick fast on the walls, and the painting had no stability. Think of all that, and examine yourself well whether your spirit is strong enough to endure things like that, for if not, your artistic power will be broken, and along with the resolute ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... good taste (1787) amputated it, and thought it quite enough to cover the wound with that large leaden plaster which looks like the lid of a stewpan. Thus was the marvelous art of the Middle Ages treated in almost every land, but particularly in France. We find three sorts of injury upon its ruins, these three marring it to different depths; first, Time, which has made insensible ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... do," said the Colonel; and cutting off two pieces a yard long, he thrust them into the watering-pot, soaked them, wrung them out, and then rolled both in the flower-pot amongst the plaster-of-Paris. ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn

... wicker bowls in which they had been molded—not entirely to be removed, it seems, by the most assiduous smoothing before burning; for, however smooth any exceptional specimen may appear, a squeeze in plaster will still reveal ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and glass and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... looking the same way as the back of the temple, on which the moon, when she got up, would not shine, and at once began fixing in the pegs. He soon found that he could not place them one above another, but had to choose the spots from which the plaster had fallen out; so that the pegs were sometimes on one side and sometimes on another. He could have proceeded much faster had he been able to use a stone for driving them in; but, of course, the noise that would have made would ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston

... Whitford handed him a quite unnecessary cup of tea and a superfluous plate of toasted English muffins. He wished his hands had not been so big and red and freckled. Also he had an uncomfortable suspicion that his tow hair was tousled and uncombed in spite of his attempts at home to plaster it down. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine

... engravings in cheap frames adorned the wall. In spite of the simplicity of the whole there were evidences of refined taste—there were growing ferns in tall baskets; some red leaves and autumn berries arranged in old china vases; a beautiful head of Clytie, though it was only in plaster of Paris, on the mantel-piece. The pretty tea service on the round table was only white china, hand-painted; and some more red leaves with dark chrysanthemums were tastefully arranged in a ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... at all events, had in its favor its energy, the peculiar characteristics of the adventurer and the proletaire, and that kindly expression so well rendered by the artist, who had taken pains to mix a supply of ochre with her plaster, thereby giving it almost the swarthy, sun-burned tone of the model. The Arabs, on seeing it, uttered a stifled exclamation: "Bon-Said!" (the father of good-luck). It was the Nabob's sobriquet at Tunis, the label of his fortune, so to speak. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... "You shall have that lying plaster to stick upon your traitorous soul. But, go back." Townsend went downstairs, leaving a bitter word to be wafted up the draught of the staircase. Hartley ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... horses and cattle looked small, but there were some good specimens of sheep—specially the rombonellis and negrettis, whose long fine wool was, however, only to be discovered by first turning aside a thick plaster of mud, beneath which it was concealed. We saw also some curious animals, natives of the country, such as vicunas, llamas, bizcachas, and various kinds of deer, a very mixed lot of poultry and dogs, and two magnificent Persian cats. Another department of the show was allotted to the ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... with a great playhouse at one end, with real windows and furniture in it and all sorts of toboggan slides and swings and kiddy cars and everything to delight the soul of a child. On a wide space between two windows painted on the plaster in soft wonderful coloring blended into the gray tint of the wall, there glowed a life size painting of the Christ surrounded by little children, climbing upon His knees and listening to Him as He smiled ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... believing she liked it, drove to Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and left cards upon Miss Hilda Howe, she was only partially rewarded. Through the plaster gate-posts, badly in want of repair, and bearing, sunk in one of them, a marble slab announcing "Residence with Board," she perceived the squalid attempt the place made at respectability, the servants in dirty ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... Pete, and cut it," I said; "it's many a long day since I've been a Patsy for the ponies. Once they stung me so hard that for months my bank account looked like a porous plaster, so I took the chloroform treatment and now you and your tips to the discards, ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh

... of hammers in every part, as if some new engines of war were constructing. At length, to his astonishment, the walls and roofs of houses began to appear above the bulwarks. In a little while there were above a thousand edifices of wood and plaster erected, covered with tiles taken from the demolished towers of the orchards and bearing the pennons of various commanders and cavaliers, while the common soldiery constructed huts of clay and branches of trees thatched with straw. Thus, to the dismay of the Moors, within four days ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... do everything that anyone can do to keep themselves in shape? I bet right now I can walk as far as you can in the woods or out of the woods. And as for flies and mosquitoes, they won't eat me any worse than they will you, and if worse comes to worst, I can plaster myself with that smelly old dope you carry in that bottle—but I'd almost rather ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx



Words linked to "Plaster" :   adhesive tape, mud, surface, spackle, calcium sulfate, pargeting, mustard plaster, cover, mortar, calcium sulphate, affix, masonry, gesso, pargetry, parget, dress, mixture, grout, sinapism, coat, beplaster, spackling compound, finish coat, gypsum, dressing, roughcast, pargetting, stucco, render-set, medical dressing, finishing coat, medicine, covering material, practice of medicine



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