United States or United Arab Emirates ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Simultaneous attention may be trained by such games as "Hide-the-thimble" or Jack-straws, and homogeneous attention may be trained by some such action as hammering nails in the upper left hand corners of all the squares on a board.
He could almost see the girl shudder and grow pale at hearing how proud he had been at sixteen of being admitted to friendship with a "swell mobsman" fascinating as any "Raffles" of fiction; how it had amused the fellow to teach him a deft and delicate touch, beginning his lessons with the game of jack-straws, in which he was given prizes if he could separate the whole stack, one straw from another, without disturbing the balance of the pile.
When the men had all withdrawn, he walked confidently under the front of the rollway, glancing with practiced eye at the perpendicular wall of logs over him. Then, as a man pries jack-straws, he clamped his peavey and tugged sharply. At once the rollway flattened and toppled.
A thick-butted log slanted and met the others head-on as they thundered down the bank, tossing them high in the air whence they fell splashing into the river, or crashed backward among the tumbling logs, upending, and hurling them about like jack-straws.
A torrent of oaths broke loose as the words left his lips, and a rush was made for the pile of timber. Men struggled and fought like demons for the end of the great sticks, carrying them by main strength, crossing them over the rails, heaping them one on the other like a pile of huge jack-straws, a dozen men to a length, the mobs on the house-tops and in the windows cheering like mad.
It must all burn up at once as soon as it is detonated, or set off. "To do that you have to have every grain acted on at the same moment, and that could not be done if the powder was in one solid chunk, or closely packed. For that reason they make it in different shapes, so it will lie loose in the firing chamber, just as a lot of jack-straws are piled up.
In fact, some of the new powder looks like jack-straws. Some, as this, for instance, looks like macaroni. Other is in cubes, and some in long strings." As he spoke Tom struck a match and held the flames near the end of one of the "macaroni" sticks. "Caesar's grandmother!" yelled Ned. "Are you crazy, Tom?" as he started to leap for a window. "Don't get excited," spoke Tom, quietly.
There were humming-tops, which reminded me, by their music, of the great spinning-wheel that whirred away in my mother's kitchen when I was a child. There were graces, and battle-doors, and jack-straws for the amusement of the children when it was too cold or stormy to play out of doors. On a table was an array of slippers, which Mary and her mother had wrought for father and the boys.
It was exactly like a heap of giant jack-straws into which some mischievous spirit had tossed a large pebble. At one end a flame sputtered and spread cheerfully. A panting and grimy conductor staggered toward it with a pail of water from the engine. Banneker accosted him. "Any one in " "Get outa my way!" gasped the official. "I'm agent at Manzanita." The conductor set down his pail.
The winter passed, and what a time Chad and Jack had, snaking logs out of the mountains with two, four, six yes, even eight yoke of oxen, when the log was the heart of a monarch oak or poplar snaking them to the chute; watching them roll and whirl and leap like jack-straws from end to end down the steep incline and, with one last shoot in the air, roll, shaking, quivering, into a mighty heap on the bank of Kingdom Come.
Word Of The Day