Transom Stern

Famous quotes containing the words transom and/or stern:

    Wags try to invent new stories to tell about the legislature, and end by telling the old one about the senator who explained his unaccustomed possession of a large roll of bills by saying that someone pushed it over the transom while he slept. The expression “It came over the transom,” to explain any unusual good fortune, is part of local folklore.
    —For the State of Montana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    His eloquence was of every kind, and he excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory way. But his invectives were terrible, and uttered with such energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and countenance, that he intimidated those who were the most willing and the best able to encounter him. Their arms fell out of their hands, and they shrunk under the ascendant which his genius gained over theirs.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)