Word: tocsin
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Dates: during 1910-1919
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...minds the seven o'clock bell which peals from the enpola of Harvard Hall, they could not have better formulated their definitions. For no apparent reason, the students in the Yard are daily inflicted with five minutes of sleep destroying agony. When inquiries are made concerning this nerve-shattering tocsin, the reply is invariable: that the bell has always been rung at seven, and probably will always be rung at seven, until its vibrations will have shaken down the very pillars which support...
...what we shall do. It was Paul Jones's cry from the deck of the Bonhomme Richard, magnified by steam and a million trumpets of brass--"We've just begun to fight!" Wild, discordant, terrible it was--it is, for it will ring in my ears henceforth--our tocsin! the tocsin of a hundred million people speaking one wrath and one purpose. It was, it is, our answer to the great gun in the woods of St. Gobain, shelling the churches on Good Friday. It stoops to no further mockery of argument or negotiation, yet says as definitely as human...
...patriotic citizens who still cherish the traditions of the Revolution, are admirable. These men remember the time, well sung by poets, when a man's house was his castle, a flintlock over the mantelpiece his artillery, and his neighbors and himself the defending army. At the call of the tocsin from every home would emerge the embattled citizens, and foreign soldiers would melt before their aroused wrath like the milky way before the sun. For the sake of truth, which is always a prosaic busybody, we must admit that occasionally the embattled citizens failed to defend their castles with...
That epoch is within the memory of the oldest cadet--although it is now passed away by three weeks and more of secular eternities--when nine o'clock was the dawning hour of the day, and the sun, the student, and the voice of the tocsin to the first class arose simultaneously and at once. He was a hero who attended nine o'clock classes thrice a week. He was a demi-god who managed to get his breakfast beforehand. Most men never knew that the dawn bestirs itself more than three hours before noon. Only botanists and late wassalers...