In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.

Stopper N. stopper, stopple; plug, cork, bung, spike, spill, stopcock, tap; rammer^; ram, ramrod; piston; stop-gap; wadding, stuffing, padding, stopping, dossil^, pledget^, tompion^, tourniquet. cover &c 223; valve, vent peg, spigot, slide valve.

When the Ballantynes open shop you must take care to have them supplied with food for such a stop-gap sort of criticism.

Scott replied in the most friendly manner, gave him much good advice, spoke of the work as "grand and powerful, the characters being sketched with masterly enthusiasm"; and, what was practically better, sent him £50 as a token of his esteem and sympathy, and as a temporary stop-gap until better times came round.

They would have been of no use, except in the way of stop-gaps, like the babies, in cheap prints, that the Russian traveller in the sleigh throws to the wolves to occupy their attention while he urges on his mad career, a pistol in each hand and the reins in his mouth.

Then the poisonous gases might not be creeping back upon us through our enforced economies, our makeshifts and stop-gaps of outside legislation.

Out of the country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth.

At Caddagat I was as much out of the full flood of life for which I craved as at Possum Gully, but here there were sufficient pleasant little ripples on the stream of existence to act as a stop-gap for the present.

Many have let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of provisional stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible of execution, but having no literal cogency or value now.

The vicar wanted a governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for my work.

That rheumatism of his, with these Wisconsin winters" "But Californiawe could go to California" "That's only a stop-gap.

Salaries are bound to remain low, while women are forced to consider their profession in the light of a stop-gap until marriage, and not as a life-work.

If you don't take to politics in the end, I think you should let them put you in now, if only as a stop-gap, or we shall get some one whom it may not be easy to get rid of.

I was not brought up for it, and may be a mere stop-gap, but it is every man's duty to come to the front when he is called for, and do his utmost for his country in Parliament, I suppose, as much as in action.