In all his ways of sitting and standing, and eating and drinking - of brooding about, in a high-shouldered reluctant style - of taking out his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it on his legs and cutting his food - of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they were clumsy pannikins - of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then swallowing it - in these ways and a thousand other small nameless instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be.
When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own - a game that I never saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by sticking his jack-knife into the table - when he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read to him - "Foreign language, dear boy!" While I complied, he, not comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take notice of my proficiency.
Provis, who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an instant I saw his jack-knife shining in his hand.
Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly putting up his jack-knife, and groping in another pocket for something else.
No possible way for him to digest that
jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system.
He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
Felicity had made some very nice sandwiches of ham which we all appreciated except Dan, who declared he didn't like things minced up and dug out of the basket a chunk of boiled pork which he proceeded to saw up with a
jack-knife and devour with gusto.
Not a few times, when a new student has been led into the temptation of marring the looks of some building by leadpencil marks or by the cuts of a
jack-knife, I have heard an old student remind him: "Don't do that.
“It may be best to go, lad, after all; for, if the shot hangs under the skin, my hand is getting too old to be cutting into human flesh, as I once used to, Though some thirty years agone, in the old war, when I was out under Sir William, I travelled seventy miles alone in the howling wilderness, with a rifle bullet in my thigh, and then cut it out with my own
jack-knife. Old Indian John knows the time well.
I can't help imagining that perhaps just as we get to the middle, they'll crumple up like a
jack-knife and nip us.
While travelling with his wife, King saw a tractor trailer loaded with 8,000 gallons of fuel abruptly
jack-knife to avoid hitting a swerving car, roll several times down the road, and burst into flames.
But his service
jack-knife and other items went in the July 14 raid at Prestatyn, North Wales.
