"Boring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and was waiting in the empty room when he returned. He lost no time in getting to work, and it seemed to me as I watched him curiously in silence that he was repeating what he had already done at the Travis headquarters. He was boring into the wall, only this time he did it much more carefully, and it was evident that if he intended putting anything into this cavity it must be pretty large. The hole was square, and as I bent over I could see that he had cut through the plaster and laths ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... by chance a companion in a coach with Charles Lamb, kept boring him to death with questions, in the jargon of agriculturists, about crops. At length he put a poser—"And pray, sir, how are turnips this year?" "Why that, sir," stammered out Lamb, "will depend upon the boiled ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... had good occupation for several mornings in examining the improvements which had been effected by Sir Pitt's genius and economy. And as they walked or rode, and looked at them, they could talk without too much boring each other. And Pitt took care to tell Rawdon what a heavy outlay of money these improvements had occasioned, and that a man of landed and funded property was often very hard pressed for twenty pounds. "There ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... my idea!" exclaimed Mr. Pertell. "We'll have a film of boring for oil. That will fit in well with my big drama. Get the company together, Pop," he said to the property man. "And, Russ, get ready to film the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... on ahead of them through the dark woods, but now he stopped and looked back and Billie could almost feel his eyes boring into her. ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... moisture and moisture creates decay by inviting fibrous and threadlike cousins of the toadstool to grow on the damp wood and work their way into its substance. The bark also shelters all sorts of boring insects and the boring insects make holes through the logs which admit the rain and in the end cause decay, so that the first thing to remember is to peel the logs of which you propose to build the cabin. There is now, or was lately, a log cabin on Hempstead Plains, L. I., near ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... themselves, and their own private interests, for the public good." The words, vague enough in themselves, are memorable as having christened by anticipation the measure for which Cromwell, as he uttered them, was boring the way. For, after one or two more had spoken in the same general strain, Mr. Zouch Tate, member for Northampton, did the duty assigned him, and opened the bag which contained the cat. He made a distinct motion, which, when it had ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... an old-rose sea. For a little while longer the trio on the bridge could discern a diminishing black speck off to the southeast. The Wanderer was boring along a point north of east, Manila way. The speck soon lost its blackness and became violet, and then magically the streaked horizon rose up behind the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... was, she didn't show it. I'm pretty well convinced she hasn't enough sense to be pleased at anything. However, she has invited me to dinner with her tonight. I imagine she'll be as boring as usual, but she made such a point of it, ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... her ankle-bones together and her foil arched over her head, the hilt in one hand and the button in the other—the old general opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye boring straight into hers—and all of a sudden she would give a spring forward, and back again; and there she was, with the foil arched over her head as before. La Hire had been hit, but all that the spectator saw of it was a something ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... we have said, about or somewhat under the middle size. In his gait he was very ungainly. When walking, he drove forward as if his head was butting or boring its way through a palpable atmosphere, keeping his person, from the waist up, so far in advance that the a posteriori portion seemed as if it had been detached from the other, and was engaged in a ceaseless but ineffectual struggle to regain ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... if you don't—don't lemme hear you makin' any cracks about it 'round this store so't she'll hear ye," growled Cap'n Amazon, boring into the very soul of the flustered Joab with his ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... a lovely afternoon; after which there was a lull in the conversation. I was filled with a horrid fear that I was boring her. I had probably arrived at the very moment when she was most interested in her book. She must, I thought, even now be regarding me as a nuisance, and was probably rehearsing bitter things to say to the servant for not having had ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... of this, the simplification it brought into the relations of the party, was immense. From this point of view Mr. Wilkins was simply ideal; he was unique and precious. Whenever she thought of him, and was perhaps inclined to dwell on the aspects of him that were a little boring, she remembered this and murmured, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... number of sealing and walrus boats laid up in ice between Roaring Water Portage and Seal Cove. Most of these had men living on board, who passed the days in loafing, in setting traps for wolves, or in boring holes through the ice for fishing. Many of them spent a great portion of their time in the little house at the bend of the river, where Oily Dave dispensed bad whisky and played poker with his customers from ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... said Walter Scott's great-aunt to him after a short inspection, "and if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel." The nemesis of the pornographer: he can't avoid boring you to tears. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... while Jesse watched, working his fly to where he saw a heavy fish moving. An instant and he struck, the reel screeching as the fish made its run. This time the fish did not jump, but played deep, boring and surging, but at last John conquered it and Jesse slipped the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... come, if you possibly can," supplemented Mr. Dollond, coming forward in burlesque obedience. "We are boring each other horribly—I can answer for myself—and it would be ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... make a lamentable chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them, by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing straws and stalks of leaves and twigs into it; and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... get some things. He will come right to the desk. Please send him up at once. It is very important. (JARVIS takes out knife and begins boring hole in trunk from inside out. This hole should be already cut and covered with a label.) What are you doing ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... secrets. The point is, that particular slave takes care not to run errands nowadays without informing me. There is not much that Marcia does that I don't know about." Livius' eyes suggested gimlets boring holes into Pertinax's face. Not a change of the other's expression escaped him. Pertinax covered his mouth with his hand, pretending to yawn. He slapped his thighs to suggest that his involuntary shudder was due to having sat too long. But he did not deceive Livius. "It is known to me," said ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... sheaves. The winds howled; they fell upon the field, wallowed, dug into the earth, snatched up clods, and made an opening for a third wind, which tore itself from the field like a pillar of black earth, and rose and whirled like a moving pyramid, boring into the ground with its brow and from its feet sprinkling sand in the eyes of the stars; it broadened at every step and opened out at the summit, and with its immense trumpet it proclaimed the storm. At last with all this chaos of water and dust, of straw, leaves, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... upon her brothers playing in the sand. They had scooped it up in their wooden shoes and poured it into a heap in the middle of the road and then wetted it; and now they were boring all sorts of holes in it and tunnels and passages and making it into a rats'-castle. She let them be, gathered up her little skirts, so as not to dirty them, and passed ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... a century ago—Gloria!" About the same time we find him taking interest in the projects of a deserving person, named Holwell, a coal-master in Staffordshire, and assisting him to take out a patent for boring wooden pipes; "he being a person," says Telford, "little known, and not having capital, interest, or connections, to ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... happened to be in the club. It occurred to me that poor Nevill was diabetic, and that Charley Crossman had been boring everybody about his gout. I buttonholed them both, and laid my unfortunate predicament before them. I said I'd pay all the expenses. In fact, the more they could make it cost the better I'd ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... creature who was the occasion of it all. If he had known—if he could have conceived, beside whom he was sitting, and to whom the story was told!—I suffered with courage, like an Indian at the stake, while they are rending his fibres and boring his eyes, and while he smiles applause at each well-imagined contrivance of his torturers. It was too much for me at last, Jeanie—I fainted; and my agony was imputed partly to the heat of the place, and partly ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "WHOOSH!" he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. Her right hand, fingers tightly bunched, was already boring savagely into a selected spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... there was to be seen. I nevah make a single note; my memory's marvellous. Left the Park at twelve and took a taxi to inquire after Lord Harrogate, Charlie Sievewright, and old Lady Dorcas Newnham. I'm not boring you? ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... appears to us perfectly unnecessary. The Peruvians, however, think otherwise; and they hang on it a weighty ring, the thickness of which is proportioned by the rank of their husbands. The custom of boring it, as our ladies do their ears, is very common in several nations. Through the perforation are hung various materials; such as green crystal, gold, stones, a single and sometimes a great number of gold rings.[65] This is rather troublesome ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... occupied—with no such search as the rector's, hardly even with what could be called thought, but with something that must either soon cause the keenest thought, or at length a spiritual callosity: somewhere in her was a motion, a something turned and twisted, ceased and began again, boring like an auger; or was it a creature that tried to sleep, but ever and anon started awake, and with fretful claws pulled at its nest in the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Calf relaxed for a moment into something like a half-smile of pride. "Heap fight!" he repeated simply, his eyes fixed on the vast form of the babbling giant. He dropped his blanket fully back from his body and stood with his eyes boring forward at his foe, his arms crossed arrogantly over his naked, ridging trunk, proud, confident, superb, a dull-hued statue whose outlines none who witnessed ever ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... on its own inspiration, if it ceases to prolong its boring directly it recognizes that the outer coating, auscultated from time to time, is sufficiently thin, what will it do under the conditions of the present test? Feeling itself at the requisite distance from the surface, ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... working of metal. He goes already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like illustration. In describing artistic wood-work he distinguishes various stages of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, whirled round with a string; he mentions the names of two artists, the one of an actual workman, the other of a craft turned into a proper name—stray relics, accidentally preserved, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... female attendants. The captain of the pirates had wounded, and severely beaten Monsieur de Fontanges, who had resisted the "enlevement" of his wife; and, after having cut away all the standing rigging, and nearly chopped through the masts with axes, they had finished their work by boring holes in the counter of the vessel; so that, had not Newton been able to come up with her, they must all have ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in a well-earned sleep. But once during the entire morning the Indian stirred; he did not seem to awake as other boys do, but more like a rabbit. His eyes opened without drowsiness; he shot to his knees, sweeping the river bank with a glance like the boring of a gimlet. Larry, looking at him, knew that nothing—-nothing, bird, beast or man—could escape that penetrating scrutiny. Then, without comment, the boy curled down among his ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... articles, and what old Baskerville said and what Mrs. Ruffler thought: matters of superficial concern to his fellow-guest, who wondered, before they had sight of Miriam, if she talked with her "walking-gentleman" about them by the hour, deep in them and finding them not vulgar and boring but the natural air of her life and the essence of her profession. Of course she did—she naturally would; it was all in the day's work and he might feel sure she wouldn't turn up her nose at the shop. He had to remind ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... investigated the parasites existing in hogs, affirms that in western pork, eight animals out of every one hundred are affected by that muscle-boring pest so dangerous to those who have eaten the infected meat, and so well known to all students as the Trichina spiralis. The distinguished writer Letheby says of this parasite: "As found in the human subject (after death) it is usually in the encysted state, when ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... the slaves of habit. The King's attachment to you is like that he bears to your apartment, your furniture. You have formed yourself to his manners and habits; you know how to listen and reply to his stories; he is under no constraint with you; he has no fear of boring you. How do you think he could have resolution to uproot all this in a day, to form a new establishment, and to make a public exhibition of himself by so striking a change in his arrangements?" The young lady became pregnant; the reports current among the people, and even those at Court, alarmed ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... good tent, the most important thing for the camper is a good bed. It is even more important than good food because if we sleep well, hunger will furnish the sauce for our grub, but if we spend the night trying to dodge some root or rock that is boring into our back and that we hardly felt when we turned in but which grew to an enormous size in our imagination before morning, we will be half sick and soon get enough of being an Indian. A canvas cot makes the best camp bed if it can be taken along ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... gentle creatures could be horribly disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration of a love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better. I'm afraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring." ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... gain a faint idea of the "skippers," "stingers," "soothsayers," "walking sticks or specters," "saw flies and slugs," "boring caterpillars," "horn-tailed wood wasps," etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.—a never-ending list. The average absolute loss of the farmers of this country from such pests is fully one ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... and troughs were overhauled, spiles were made, and when all was ready the large kettles and casks were put in the sleigh, and all hands set out for the bush. Tapping the tree was the first thing in order. This was done either by boring the tree with an auger, and inserting a spile about a foot long to carry off the sap, or with a gouge-shaped tool about two inches wide, which was driven into the tree, under an inclined scar made ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... you must tell us this story by day, at night such things are rather boring," said the Chatterbox intervening and winking at the others. "What we have to think of now, Amalia, is what is to be ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... had to sit in a small room, listening to the complaints and most inconvenient cross-questionings of an extremely pragmatical supporter, who would have been an affliction to any man from the intensity and tenacity of his powers of boring. As I looked at poor Parnell, with that deprecatory smile of his which so often lit up the flint-like hardness, the terrible resolution of his face—as varied in its lights and shadows as a lake under an April sky—I thought of the contrast there was between the small annoyances, the squalid ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... been boring a hole in one of the water kegs, and as Spider held a tin cup he tilted the keg to pour a draft of the precious fluid. A thin stream of blackish, dry particles filtered slowly through the tiny aperture into the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a child with a new toy," Miss Mason went on. "She brought them all up to my room to show me when they came home, and we both tried them on ... and you've no idea how sweet she looked," she added with enthusiasm. "Of course, I suppose this is boring you horribly," she ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies "spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis, rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly, on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one praying," and paralyses the great grey ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... with the besiegers, except what the navy had in front of the city; but wooden ones were made by taking logs of the toughest wood that could be found, boring them out for six or twelve pound shells and binding them with strong iron bands. These answered as cochorns, and shells were successfully thrown from them into ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the lawyer's boring glances. He returned Smatt's stare, and experienced more keenly than usual his sense of dislike for the man. Smatt's face was in keeping with his voice, which was rusty. It was bleak and lantern-jawed, with a gash for a mouth, and a great ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... you and your novel, and all the annoyance and anxiety you have given him. Much may be done by asking him for "introductions" to an editor or publisher. These gentry don't want introductions, they want good books, and very seldom get them. If you behave thus, the man whom you are boring will write to ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... one hour of boring, and another five days to pull out the drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it in the severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been melted completely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electric furnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... are the basket weavers, but in some towns, especially of Ilocos Norte, the women are skilled in this industry (Plate LXVII). The materials used are rattan, which may be gathered at any time, or bamboo, which is cut only during the dry season and under the waning moon. It is firmly believed that boring insects will not injure bamboo cut at this time, and it is known that the dry period stalks ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... absence of articulation. Every aspect of the phenomenon had been freely discussed there and endless ingenuity lavished on the question of how exactly it was that so much of what the world would in another case have called complete stupidity could be kept by a mere wonderful face from boring one to death. It was Mrs. Brook who, in this relation as in many others, had arrived at the supreme expression of the law, had thrown off, happily enough, to whomever it might have concerned: "My dear thing, it all comes back, as everything always does, simply to personal pluck. It's only ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... his gouty shoes, his thunderbolt hand wrapped in flannel. Perhaps as we see him now, issuing with dark looks from the royal closet, angry scenes have been passing between him and his august master. He has been boring that old monarch for hours with prodigious long speeches, full of eloquence, voluble with the noblest phrases upon the commonest topics; but, it must be confessed, utterly repulsive to the little shrewd ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... should have preferred "something lingering, with boiling oil in it," but at last we decided on the brilliant suggestion of SHABRACK, who was of the party, that we should endeavour by some means or other to bring the two bores, as it were, face to face in a kind of boring-competition in the smoking-room that very night, to engage them in warfare against one another and ourselves to sit by and watch them mutually extinguishing one another; a result that, we were certain, could not fail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... obtainable, and trust to the hounds coming back after running a ring. Given the right sort of horse, however—short-backed, thoroughbred if possible, and with good enough manners to descend a steep place without boring and tearing his rider's arms almost out of their sockets—many a fine run may be seen in this wild district. Much of the arable land has gone back to grass, so that it is quite a fair scenting country; and the foxes are stronger and more straight-necked than in more civilised parts. ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... myself with a boarding-pike to serve as a pole, I dropped into the fore-chains and thence stepped on to the ice, and very slowly and carefully walked round the schooner, examining her closely, and boring into the snow upon her side with my pike wherever I suspected a hole or indent. I could find nothing wrong with her in this way, though what a thaw might reveal I could not know. Her rudder hung frozen upon its pintles, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... were on Sandy, and the erstwhile married man felt their contempt boring into his very soul. He was held silent, in spite of his anger against the broad-shouldered Toby, and was possessed of a feeling that somehow his second effort had been no more successful than his first. And forthwith the impression ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... long—it seemed to him that he could smell the odor of hemp, of the smoke of fire—the colorless and biting smell of burning. Now he whirled about in the room like a top, touching the walls, tapping them nervously with his fingers from time to time, taking aim, boring the ceiling with his gaze, filing the prison bars. By his restlessness, he had tired out the soldiers who watched him through the little window, and who, several times, in despair, had threatened to shoot. Tsiganok would retort, coarsely and derisively, and the quarrel would end peacefully ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... a cannon much heat is generated: the longer the boring lasts, the more heat is produced. He argues that since heat without limit may be thus produced by motion, heat must ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... their nerves were irritated by a strong electric current. Lying on his back, he rolled his head from side to side, like a man tortured on the rack, while his reddening eyes kept their sight fixed upon a blank point of the ceiling. The pain in his temples was as that of a red-hot screw boring its way through his brain, and while his white teeth ground audibly upon each other his quick-coming breath blew a scarcely perceptible foam from his strained and ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... shorter form of grace invented by a wise Rabbi for these difficult occasions, yet so far as was visible it was only the Jewish guests—comically distinguished by serviettes shamefacedly dabbed on their heads—who fidgeted under the pious torrent. These were no doubt fearful of boring the Christians whose precious society the Jew enjoyed on a parlous tenure. In the host's son Julius a superadded intellectual impatience was traceable. He had brought back from Oxford a contempt for his father's creed which ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "No more mad than you. See what he's after? No! You don't remember, either, how mighty hard it was to wedge in the holdfasts for the chain guys stiffening the front of the dam, or how the keys work loose? There wouldn't be much of the boring machines or dam framing left if the chains pulled those wedges out. Catch ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... has thoroughly well bored them—especially if they have paid any money for hearing him. My great namesake said, "Surely the pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat," and great as the pleasure both of cheating and boring undoubtedly is, I believe he was right. So I remember a poem which came out some thirty years ago in Punch, about a young lady who went forth in quest to "Some burden make or burden bear, but which she did not greatly care, oh Miserie." So, again, all the holy ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... conspicuous virtues cannot with him be rent asunder, so as to make it hard or doubtful whether he gain the highest wisdom. For as the thousand rays of yonder sun must drown the darkness of the world, or as the boring wood must kindle fire, or as the earth deep-dug gives water, so he who perseveres in the 'right means,' by seeking thus, will find. The world without instruction, poisoned by lust and hate and ignorance; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring. The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules. The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as a dead herbarium ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... don't see why we should not all be friends again. I always liked the boy. He can talk well about scientific things without boring you. Ask him ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... me by putting her hand between our bellies to prevent my penetrating too far. It was not the stretching, nor the plugging, it was the boring too deeply which hurt the ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... it. Jim Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you like this!" ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... watched the one-pounder at work against the enemy's brick-bound lines. Each time, as ammunition is becoming precious, the gun was more carefully sighted and fired, and each time, with a little crash, the baby shell shot through the barricades, boring a ragged hole six or eight inches in diameter. Two or three times this might always be accomplished with everything on the Chinese side silent as death. The cunning enemy! Then suddenly, as the gun was ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... home to England, at sixteen, an adept in the female mystery of needlework. Not only owing to the Saturday's discipline of clothes mending by all the classes—while l'Abbe Millot's history (of blessed, boring memory) was being read aloud, to prevent 'vain babblings,' and ensure wholesome mental occupation the while—was I an expert patcher and mender, darner and piecer (darning and marking were my specialities), ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... diameter vertical boring-mill was the first machine used in making these experiments, and large locomotive tires, made out of hard steel of uniform quality, were day after day cut up into chips in gradually learning how to make, shape, and use the cutting tools so that they ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... I would like to quote, but for fear of boring my readers I will end with the following, ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... observed that he, along with the rest of us, picked out the dried fruit and almond dumplings, leaving the nourishing gravy for the servants outside, above all for the slaughtering and mourning women, who by their boring operations had established the most legitimate ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... of falling. All motion seemed to lie in the uprushing vapors, dense and warm and pale violet in hue. A vast and rhythmic spiraling had possessed the Pauillac. As you have seen a falling leaf turn in air, so the plane circled, boring with terrific speed down, down, down through the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... "Bar," flanked on either side, to make the matter explicit even to the unlearned, by pictorial representations of glasses of foaming beer. She hadn't time to deliberate over her choice. The watchman's eyes were boring into her back. If she chose wrong, or if she visibly hesitated, she knew she'd hear a voice ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... making a railway upon so treacherous a material as Chat Moss, which was declared to be an immense mass of pulp, and nothing else. "It actually," said Mr. Harrison, "rises in height, from the rain swelling it like a sponge, and sinks again in dry weather; and if a boring instrument is put into it, it sinks immediately by its own weight. The making of an embankment out of this pulpy, wet moss, is no very easy task. Who but Mr. Stephenson would have thought of entering into Chat Moss, carrying it out almost ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... every boy must, and they have a great festival at their entrance into the monastery. Girls do not enter nunneries, but they, too, have a great feast in their honour. They have their ears bored. It is a festival for a girl of great importance, this ear-boring, and, according to the wealth of the parents, it is accompanied by pwes ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... boring you, Betty dear? What is it Miss Porter always says, 'Create your atmosphere first, before you begin your story.' That's what I'm doing and you'll just have to be patient while I create a little longer. I simply must tell you about the ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... topic and I will be done boring you. Is it not passing strange that, with their eternal prattling about roads to Truth, these bigoted people missed what we now so clearly perceive to be the great highway—that of Consistency? Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... close quarters these flashes were blindingly bright, and flung up showers of red sparks. In the intervals of a few seconds between flashes, if one stood with one's eyes fixed on the guns, the stars seemed blotted out in an utterly black darkness. A long bombardment is one of the most boring things in the world by reason of its intense monotony, and because in a queer half-unconscious way it begins, after many hours, very slightly to fray the nerves. Listening and watching in the small hours, and from time to time directing, I found ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... fully as much for his own sake as for that of his wife. This fact could hardly be inferred from his Diary, and indeed he was wholly unconscious of it himself, because he never realised his natural charm, and indeed was unduly afraid of boring people by his presence. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... out upon the world, and are now endeavoring to revenge themselves upon the sex who have slighted them. The second, having been dethroned from their empire over the hearts of their husbands, for reasons which may easily be imagined, go vagabondizing over the country, boring unfortunate audiences with long essays lacking point or meaning, and amusing only from the impudence displayed by the speakers in putting them forth in a civilized country. They violate the rules of decency and taste by attiring ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... peculiarity of which is the production of machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded out elsewhere, are deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the very enemy which supersedes them. Machinery for planing and boring, cutting screws, wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out of employment a multitude of men who formerly found regular work at good wages; and whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Malachi went out into the woods, taking with him the coppers and all the trays on the sledge: during that day he was busy boring the trees and fitting the reed-pipes to the holes. Strawberry and John accompanied him, and by sunset their ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... asked. For threats can sometimes gain a request which soft-dealing cannot compass. Hadding was conquered by this man in an affair by land; but in the midst of his flight he came on his enemy's fleet, and made it unseaworthy by boring the sides; then he got a skiff and steered it out to sea. Toste thought he was slain, but though he sought long among the indiscriminate heaps of dead, could not find him, and came back to his fleet; when he saw from afar off a light boat tossing ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... workers, and they were thus enabled to extend their excavations close to the surface without the defenders having an idea of their proximity. The distance that they were from the inner face was ascertained by boring through at night-time with spears. By the end of the third day the excavations had been carried so far that there was but a foot or so of earth remaining, this being kept from moving, on pressure from ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... is long and straight, with numerous pits for the attachment of the ligament which serves to open the shell. Some of the Inocerami attain a length of two or three feet, and fragments of the shell are often found perforated by boring Sponges. Another extraordinary family of Bivalves, which is exclusively confined to the Cretaceous rocks, is that of the Hippuritidoe. All the members of this group (fig. 199) were attached to foreign objects, and lived associated in beds, like Oysters. The two valves ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... this neighbourhood. I have almost been induced to think this noise serves as a decoy to the male mole-cricket, this being occasionally found in the craw of these birds when shot. Those who may not be acquainted with the cry of the bird or the insect, may imagine the noise of an auger boring oak, or any hard wood, continued, and not broken off, as is the noise of the auger, from the constant changing of the hands. The eggs of the fern owl have frequently been brought me by boys: they are only two in number, greyish white, clouded and blotched with deeper shades of the same colour; the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... tired trio had slept for about two hours, while the reader has been receiving information second-hand about their past and future, when a scratching, scraping, boring noise on the outside of their bark roof temporarily disturbed their slumbers. Dol called out noisily, and, as was the way of that youngster on sundry occasions, talked some gibberish in his sleep. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... frosting. Philip had pitched the new tent so that in one corner there was a slender manzanita-tree which had been cropped for some purpose or other. He had nailed a cross-piece on this, so that it resembled the letter T, and was now laboriously boring holes and fitting in pegs, that Elsie might have a sort of ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... massive bats or stanchions of iron. These bats, for the fixture of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in depth. There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring and excavating the holes that the writer's hopes of getting the beacon erected this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it was now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me most," he continued. "You know what I thought of Bob, don't you? And I didn't thank them for boring a hole in my leg; it wasn't any kindness of theirs that it didn't land higher—they weren't shooting at me for fun. And I'd have killed them both with a clear conscience, if I could. I tried hard enough. But it was different then; ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... be used for blasting out the holes for the reception of the stumps, and so the steel rock-drills were unpacked and boring commenced. This was easier than it appeared, because the rock was much traversed by cracks. By the end of the day a good deal of damage had been done to the rock, at the expense of a few sore fingers and wrists caused by the sledge-hammers missing the drills. The work was tedious, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... here of the Government have been boring me for more money.[1] As I have the brigade to maintain, and the campaign is apparently now to open, and as I have already spent 30,000 dollars in three months upon them in one way or another, and more especially as their public loan has succeeded, so that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... boring me to death, mamma, until just a few minutes ago. I shall tell Carolyn that ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... individual tastes were simple, and apart from the expensive equipment that was indispensable for their hunting trips, and which was Aubrey's choosing, not hers, she was not extravagant. The long list of figures that had been so boring during the tedious hours that she had spent with the lawyer, grudging every second of the glorious September morning that she had had to waste in the library when she was longing to be out of doors, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... There he sits behind me now, stuffing—as I live!—a third go of buttered teacake. And no one in the whole world knows—except his housekeeper and me—-that he weighs practically nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he will waylay me. He will ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Between you and me, the Chief knows his public. And the public knows its papers. The last thing it wants from us is consistency, which is always boring. Besides (still more confidentially), the public doesn't take us quite so seriously as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... pit or cave, the ordinary atmospheric influences find such easy access, that the temperature cannot be expected to follow the law observed when perforations of small bore are made in the earth, as in the case of the preliminary boring before commencing to dig a well;[216] but the two glacieres mentioned above are so completely protected in their lowest parts, that they may be treated as if they were isolated from external influence of all ordinary ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... Corporation contract connected with the sewers. Finding himself embarassed with the flow of water from the many springs about Park Street and Digbeth, he leased a small plot of land and formed a bore-hole, or artesian well, to check the percolation into his sewerage works. After boring about 400 feet he reached a main spring in the red sandstone formation which gives a constant flow of the purest water, winter and summer, of over 70,000 gals. per day, at the uniform temperature of 50 deg. The bore is only 4in. diameter, and is doubly tubed the whole depth, the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... had never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game in the jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... was also got over. He chanced to have a small pocket pistol: it was single-barrelled, the barrel being about six inches in length, without any thimbles, beading, or ramrod attached to it. What Karl intended to do, then, was to heat this barrel red-hot, and make a boring-iron of it. And this was exactly what he did do; and after heating it some hundreds of times, and applying it as often to the sides of the different ladders, he at last succeeded in burning out as many holes as there were rounds ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... were plying their tools;—some chiseling noses; some trenching for mouths; and others, with heated flints, boring for ears: a hole drilled straight through the occiput, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... view-halloa! and started off. They were bound to come too, and I should have died of laughing to see those old liars bumping along and running foul of one another if I hadn't been too busy. I had the claimants one on each side of me, and by judiciously boring either quad. when it seemed inclined to draw ahead, I kept 'em fairly level. When they had had as much as I thought good for them, I pulled up, and several old codgers went over their nags' heads, of course. But all I said was that as ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... was young Mr. Bear, boring a hole in the wind, and behind him two boys, coming strong, but not in his class for speed. Our quarry gained one block in three. We just rounded a barn in time to see him jump into a wood shed ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Master is away in Jericho. But when Nicodemus called a few weeks afterwards Joseph was constrained to tell his foreman to tell Nicodemus that he would see him. The truth was, Joseph was glad of an interruption, for his business was boring him more than it did usually, but he liked to pretend to himself that he could not ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... Stevenson and to the landing-master, who removed to the further part of the rock, where he kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel. While the artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting and kneeling postures, excavating the rock, or boring with the tools, and while their numerous hammers, and the sound of the smith's anvil continued, the situation of things did not appear so awful. In this state of suspense, with almost certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon those who were at work on the lower parts of the sites ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... churl, composed of thankless earth, The fatal byword of all years to come, Boring a little auger-hole, in fear Peeped; but his eyes, before they had their will, Were shrivelled into darkness in his head, And drop: before him. So the Powers who wait On noble deeds cancelled a sense misused; And ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Dr. May at the entrance of the town, very tired, and saying he had been a long tramp, all over the place, and Mrs. Hoxton had been boring him with her fancies. As he took Richard's arm he gave the long heavy sigh that always fell so ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... was overcome with unendurable sadness as she listened to the simple sketch. It blended strangely with her past, into which her recollections kept boring deeper and deeper. ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... were sixty sail of the fleet in sight that afternoon—and I knew that, barring a possible few that had got fish and were driving for the New York market, all the others were like ourselves, under lower sails and boring into it, with extra lookout forward, the skipper at the wheel or on the quarter and all ears and eyes for the surf and lights inshore when we should ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... determined to change the conversation. He was fairly well informed of the affairs in the little Kingdom on whose throne young Victor Emmanuel sat, but this man evidently knew the philosophy of its history as well as the facts. A question or two with his keen eye boring through him might ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... to depend for subsistence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or dying trees, and it is, perhaps, needless to say that the injury these birds do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk of the tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring larvae, but to extract the worm which has already begun his mining labors. Hence these birds are not found where the forester removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... that in boring a cannon much heat is generated: the longer the boring lasts, the more heat is produced. He argues that since heat without limit may be thus produced by motion, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Francisco. So, in the morning, we parted company, Hanover heading south, fifty pounds of horse-meat strapped to his saddle, while I, similarly loaded, headed north. Little Hanover pulled through all right, and to the end of his life he will persist, I know, in boring everybody with the narrative of ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of human culture—by violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... safety, and on the part of the men with a carelessness she could not understand. For after they had passed there was a spot between her shoulder-blades that seemed to tingle in expectation of a possible bullet boring its way through. But she would have died rather than let them know how ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... themselves from rendering any financial assistance to the Scheme. Is it not worthy at least of being tried as an experiment? Tens of thousands of pounds are yearly spent in "trying" for minerals, boring for coals, sinking for water, and I believe there are those who think it worth while, at an expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds, to experiment in order to test the possibility of making a tunnel under the sea between ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... was always studying up these things with his inventions—and that was his opinion. No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had "located" one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady visitor was, and hoped she had not ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... once upon a time was treated by boring a hole into the horn with a small gimlet and pouring Turpentine into the opening. This treatment is useless and harmful. It produces inflammation of the frontal sinuses of the head and chances are death of the animal will follow as ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... sunshine, or conversing with Antony. Antony either conversed with the Duchessa, or sat in his deck chair, smoking and thinking about her. There was certainly a distinct sameness about the young man's occupation, which, however, he found not in the smallest degree boring. On the contrary, it was all-absorbing and fascinating. The very hours of the day were timed by the Duchessa's movements, rather than by the mere minute portions of steel attached to the face ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... vigour, but still with the maggot of curiosity boring in my brain. It worked there all day, and for many subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were honeycombed with its ramifications. Then "this will not do", I thought, but still the tunnelling ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the Middle Ages already shows it to be foreign to the Latin mind, the mediaeval disintegration being the result of the triumph of Germanic individualism over the political mentality of the Romans. The barbarians, boring from within and hacking from without, pulled down the great political structure raised by Latin genius and put nothing in its place. Anarchy lasted eight centuries during which time only one institution survived and that a ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... am I? I spend my life making more money than I can spend, do I? I push my way against all decency into the company of my betters, boring them and myself for no earthly reason, do I? I live on crackers and milk because Ive spent my nervous energy piling up the means to buy an endless supply of steaks and chops my doctor forbids me to eat? I starve my employees half to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and racket; go to her broadest limits, else the confession would be inadequate. Then ... if he survived the shock ... why then, perhaps, she'd insist on going on with this double life...! He had risen in his seat. No, no, he must not go away, she could not risk the juggler boring him. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Amongst us you will not meet with any of those episodes with which your adventurous existence has so familiarized you; our Chimborazo is Mortmartre, our Himalaya is Mount Valerien, our Great Desert is the plain of Grenelle, where they are now boring an artesian well to water the caravans. We have plenty of thieves, though not so many as is said; but these thieves stand in far more dread of a policeman than a lord. France is so prosaic, and Paris so civilized a city, that you will not ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... as all was quiet in the guard-house he had set to work, listening anxiously in the direction of the corridor during the pauses of his boring and levering. The wall was only the length of a brick thick, and after the first stone had been broken out bit by bit, it cost but little labour to widen the hole enough to let a ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... become more successful. I could look forward to increased financial security, to a measure of fame, to all that is said to make life worth living. And as I saw it, then, the whole prospect of that easy future, appeared to me as hopelessly boring, worthless, futile. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... wonder what I was after. I was after Ambition in those days. Funny thing, but I thought I was going to be a great painter once. Queer what one can trick oneself into believing—so I might have been if I hadn't come to this beastly town. Hope I'm not boring you...." ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... are very good. In fact, one of the men was very enthusiastic and he was willing to put up five thousand dollars toward boring a well in one ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... we had no insipid Casino, where people only gather for show, where they talk in whispers, where they dance stupidly, where they succeed in thoroughly boring one another, we sought some other way of passing our evenings pleasantly. Now, just guess what came into the head of one of our husbandry? Nothing less than to go and dance each night in one of the farmhouses ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... into a producing oil well, where the gas came to the surface with sufficient force to upset small boats. Many of the oil wells are spouters for a long time after they are first bored, and when they cease to spout they can frequently be made to renew their activity by deeper boring. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... he was astonished at their laughing at what seemed to him the most ordinary occurrences. This was owing to their utter ignorance of matters commonly known to us. He tells us one day when the sailors were boring a hole to put a vent peg into a cask, the fermentation caused the porter to spirt out upon them. One of them tried in vain to stop it with his hand, but it flew through his fingers. Meanwhile a native who stood by burst into a fit of immoderate laughter. The sailor, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... POLYGONAL HOLES.—J.C. Broadley, Franklin, N.J.—This invention relates to a new implement for boring polygonal, oval, star-shaped, or holes of other suitable form, in metal, wood, or other material. The invention consists chiefly in arranging the pattern, which regulates the shape of the hole to be bored, on the upper part of the drill shank, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... apply for a divorce: that was smart of him. We were shunned, ignored. To some women it might not have mattered; but she had been used to being sought, courted, feted. She made no complaint—did worse: made desperate effort to appear cheerful, to pretend that our humdrum life was not boring her to death. I watched her growing more listless, more depressed; grew angry with her, angrier with myself. There was no bond between us except our passion; that was real enough—'grand,' I believe, is the approved literary adjective. It is good enough for what nature ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... making a stand for my cutter before she was stolen, and that I had had a gimlet to bore holes in the wood. To my joy I found that I had fixed a cork on the end of it and had thrust it into my pocket. There it was. I might, by boring a hole in the cask, reach the water. How anxiously I clutched the gimlet. How fearful I was that in attempting to bore a hole I might break it. Feeling as far as I could judge for the centre of the cask, I began boring a hole, using ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... racing along every nerve of his body. With body half-merging from a clump of bushes in which she must have lain hidden stood a sleek and beautiful lioness. Her yellow-green eyes were round and staring, boring straight into the eyes of the boy. Not ten paces separated them. Twenty paces behind the lioness stood the great ape, bellowing instructions to the boy and hurling taunts at the lioness in an evident effort ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... It was, in fact, no more and no less interesting than if it had been their children. Most sorts of love were rather dull, to the spectator. Pamela and Frances were all right; decent people, not sloppy, not gushing, but fine and direct and keen, though rather boring when they began to talk to each other about some silly old thing that had happened in their last year at Oxford, or their first year, or on some reading party. Some people re-live their lives like this; others pass on their way, leaving the past ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... thieves count four modes of housebreaking, (1)picking out burnt bricks; (2) cutting through unbaked bricks; (3) wetting a mud wall and (4) boring through a wooden wall (Vikram ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to tell him that she must have time, and he is gone home. I am glad he should have a little suspense—he seemed to make so certain of her. Did he think he was making love all the time he was boring me with his gas in the dormitories? I hope she will serve ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that neither but mistrysted wi' bogles in the hame-coming, an' then to hae to flyte wi' a wheen women that hae been doing naething a' the live-lang day, but whirling a bit stick, wi' a thread trailing at it, or boring at a clout." ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... dear Bluebell, haven't we just agreed the fewer people who know it the better? You say you left a letter telling him you were to be married, and it is no further business of his. Besides, he is a suspicious old nuisance, and would very likely come boring down here; and then I should be sure to quarrel with him. Come along, put on your hat, and ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... to have a human thought in it. The coils and turns upon this leaf, like many other markings of nature, form a designless design, the idea of which is not traceable back to a mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, much like boring a tunnel between the two surfaces of a sheet of paper. If you take a needle you can insert the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the bore is straight, so that the needle ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... go—I can't look at them! And then the crowd would stare so! Oh, Raymond, the crowd is the worst of all! Hundreds of eyes boring one through and ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means of a system of her own, to know better than to cry or to make any protesting noise when she was left alone in her ugly small nursery. Andrews' idea of her duties did not involve boring herself to death by sitting in a room on the top floor when livelier entertainment awaited her in the basement where the cook was a woman of wide experience, the housemaid a young person who had lived in gay country houses, and the footman at once a young man of spirit ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... engaged in boring brass cannon in the arsenal at Munich, he was struck with the degree of heat which the brass gun acquired, and with the still more intense heat which the metallic chips, which were thrown off, possessed. Of the phenomena he ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... that Mr Robertson of Brighton claims priority of discovery touching the boring power of Pholades. His statements are founded on daily observation of the creatures at work for three months. 'The Pholas dactylus' he says, 'makes its hole by grating the chalk with its rasp-like valves, licking it up, when pulverised, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... the other animals of the heap; and first, for those long white razors. They, as well as the grey scimitars, are Solens, Razor-fish (Solen siliqua and S. ensis), burrowers in the sand by that foot which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping from the Torquay boys, whom you will see boring for them with a long iron screw, on the sands at low tide. They are very good to eat, these razor-fish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions upon all ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... might lose little or no time in doing it, he collected all the gunpowder and crowbars, spades and pickaxes, that could be found for miles about him, and set to it, working as if it was with inch of candle. For half a day there was nothing but boring and splitting, and driving of iron wedges, and blowing up pieces of rocks as big as little houses, until, by hard, labor, they made a passage for themselves sufficient to carry them over. They then set off again, full speed; and great advantage they had over the ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... up at the first sign of daylight, for they wanted to go to the steel works, some miles away, in time to see the cannon taken out of the mould, and preparations made for boring the rifle channels. They found the manager, anxiously waiting ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... the Shamrock Hotel, and then in rather squalid lodgings (for cash was not plentiful), Lola was taken back to her husband's relatives. They lived in a dull Irish village on the edge of a peat bog, where the young bride found existence very boring. Then, too, when the glamour of the elopement had dimmed, it was obvious that her action in running away from Bath had been precipitate. Thomas, for all his luxuriant whiskers and dash, was, she reflected sadly, "nothing but the outside shell of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of this hostile criticism is really that of empathic un-satisfactoriness, which escapes verbal detection but is revealed by the finger following, as we say (and that is itself an instance of empathy) the movement, the development of, boring ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... only twelve parets of about two hundred men each, but it is capable of extension. Likewise are found in this district some very rich specimens of copper ore; it has not as yet been wrought, gold being deemed a much more productive article. The sultan wishes, however, he had some boring utensils and an experienced miner, to enable him to decide whether it would be worth working under the peculiar circumstances above mentioned. Numbers of Chinese are settled in this district, and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... an interval of silence and, though I did not look up, I knew that she was regarding me steadfastly. I could feel her eyes boring into my head ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... know," observed Erle, carelessly, as he sauntered back to the fire-place, "that I have been here ten days, and must begin to think of my return? If there be one thing I hate, it is to outstay my welcome. I should be afraid of boring you both if I stayed much longer. Well, what now?" ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... their zeal to learn his will, they had used the same means to get up to them that those did who hung them there. Even Caligula, wretch as he was, would have shuddered at cutting their legs off, to prevent their climbing to them; or, if they had got there, at boring their eyes out, to prevent their reading them. Our slaveholders virtually do both; for they prohibit their slaves acquiring that knowledge of letters which would enable them to read the laws; and if, by stealth, they get it in spite of them, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... had cared to snub Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, I, who am a fighting champion of theirs, would never have run the risk of boring it by a further chronicle of their travels. But from a careful survey of my mail, I may say that the present volume of their doings and undoings is a direct result of the friendships they formed in "As Seen by Me," and has almost ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... me about them, too," said Mrs. Hunt. "He liked them because he said he never succeeded in boring them!" ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... dives inside. Hissing softly, "162" comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic Winter nose-cap (worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow, and ice) to the inset of her three built out propeller-shafts is some two hundred and forty feet. Her extreme diameter, carried well forward, is thirty-seven. Contrast this with the nine hundred by ninety-five of any crack liner, and you will realize the power ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... pain is described as lancinating, cutting, tearing, burning, boring and pressing. Patients use different words in describing the attacks, and there is probably a difference in the character of the pain, though in a severe paroxysm one is scarcely able to make a very nice distinction. We ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... The work of boring was to commence on the following morning, and the camp was made close to the water hole beneath some tall gum trees. Rycroft, who was well used to camping, prepared supper for the two. The foreman's camp was about ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... Mulhausen?' Yes, I said. 'Well,' said he, 'it's not land, it's the top of the biggest coal mine in Wales, steam coal, and Mulhausen is going to work it himself. He was offered two hundred and fifty thousand for the land last week, they have been boring there for the last half year,' that's what he told me, and I verified it this morning. Of course Mulhausen spotted the land for what it was worth, and laid his trap for ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... some allegorical fantasy—these people who had built this place had been a race who knew the secrets of life so intimately they could manipulate the unborn child into shapes intended to give it powers and physical attributes fitting it for amphibious life, for the underground boring life of a mole, for the tending of flocks in the goat-legged men—the whole gamut of these monstrous diversions from the normal human seemed to me designed—purposely—to build a race which, like ants, has a shape fitted ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... you will excuse me for boring on like this," Miss Lavish concluded. "It is so tempting to talk to really sympathetic people. Of course, this is the barest outline. There will be a deal of local colouring, descriptions of Florence and the neighbourhood, and I shall also introduce some humorous characters. And let me give ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... looking very fit after three months in Switzerland, of course, but I think Tony found it a bit boring compared with Monte Carlo. They came straight on to Montricheux from Mentone, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn't talk of that—though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my chaperon, I'm not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is constant companionship, bright talk, excitement. She has come away ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... his cards sternly, his keen eyes boring through the man. "Where is she now?" he asked, quietly; and all the men in the room looked up uneasily. There was that tone and accent again that made the Boy alien from them. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill |
