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More "Spinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was an official intimation that the deceased, in the opinion of the session, sorely needed everything of the kind he could get; and then the silent driblet of Auld Lichts in black stalked off in the direction of Tilliedrum. Women left their spinning-wheels and pirns to follow them with their eyes along the Tenements, and the minister was known to be holding an extra service at the manse. When the little procession reached the boundary-line between the two parishes, they sat down on a dyke ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... Written in March William Wordsworth The Passing of March Robert Burns Wilson Home Thoughts, from Abroad Robert Browning Song, "April, April" William Watson An April Adoration Charles G. D. Roberts Sweet Wild April William Force Stead Spinning in April Josephine Preston Peabody Song: On May Morning John Milton A May Burden Francis Thompson Corinna's Going a-Maying Robert Herrick "Sister, Awake" Unknown May Edward Hovell-Thurlow May Henry ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... required teams do their own share and no more—fifteen miles (or lengths) to a first canto, and five to a second, is as far from right as such a distribution of mile-stones would be to the overworked prads. The great fault of modern poetasters arises from their extreme love of spinning out an infinite deal of nothing. Now, as "brevity is the soul of wit," their productions can be looked upon as little else than phantasmagorial skeletons, ridiculous from their extreme extenuation, and in appearance more peculiarly empty, from the circumstance of their owing their existence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... enjoyed their evenings together. Naomi did not spend the day in idleness either. She had her spinning-wheel and loom to make their garments; she worked also in her garden, raising vegetables, herbs and chickens; and they talked over their day's labor as they enjoyed their simple supper of herb tea, bread and watercresses. Their menu was oft times more tempting, thanks ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... could step from one large boulder to another without touching the ground. Once beyond this, and the road develops into several parallel trails of smooth, hard gravel, that afford as good, or better, wheeling than the finest macadam. While spinning at a highly satisfactory rate of speed along these splendid paths, a small herd of antelopes cross the road some few hundred yards ahead, and pass swiftly southward toward the dasht-i-namek. These are the first antelopes, or, for that matter, the first big game I have encountered ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... toward terra firma instead of the other way, and has an auger fixed in place at the nose. It is about twenty feet long and four feet wide and made out of the strongest metal known to modern science, cryptoplutonite. It won't heat up or break off and it will start spinning around as soon as we cut loose with the ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... promoting the ingenious arts of drawing, engraving, casting, painting, statuary, and sculpture; for the improvement of manufactures and machines, in the various articles of hats, crapes, druggets, mills, marbled-paper, ship-blocks, spinning-wheels, toys, yarn, knitting, and weaving. They likewise allotted sums for the advantage of the British colonies in America, and bestowed premiums on those settlers who should excel in curing cochineal, planting logwood-trees, cultivating olive-trees, producing myrtle-wax, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... cloud-topped head," attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn. The WEAVING of the WINDING-SHEET he borrowed, as he owns, from the Northern Bards, but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the act of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to "Weave the warp and weave the woof," perhaps ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!—"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"— Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you;—and so for the present will ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that made him live with her and Monteverde, acting as a good-natured mediator, a tolerant kindly father. When the famous master took off his mask of fierceness, he was a poor fellow about whom people talked with pity: they compared him with Hercules, dressed as a woman and spinning at the feet of his ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... he thought, spinning round and surveying with composure the warlike posture of Lieutenant Feraud with the unsheathed sword ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Flanders. A more than spring warmth quickened growing things. White tendrils of fluff floated strangely in the air, and spread thousands of soft clinging threads over telephone-wires, tree-tops, and across miles of growing fields—the curious output of myriads of spinning-spiders. There were quaintly restful visits to the front line. The Boche was a mile away at least; and when you were weary of staring through binoculars, trying to spot enemy movement, you could sit and lounge, and hum the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... cottage. Very long black hair, entangled and covered with dust, fell in disorder over her coarse brown dress; the red hood of the Pyrenees covered her head and shoulders. Her eyes were cast down; and she was spinning with a small distaff attached to her waist. The entry of a man did not appear to move her ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... Ranier. Where the two had originally come from no one knew; but they had lived in their little hut for many years. Ranier was a wood-cutter, and depended on his daily labor for the support of himself and mother, while the latter eked out their scanty means by spinning. The son, although poor, was not without learning, for an old monk in a neighboring convent had taught him to read and write, and had given him instructions in arithmetic. Ranier was handsome, active and strong, and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... first few days was not greatly to my liking. The weather moderated at the end of forty-eight hours, and though the waves still wore their night-caps and were too playful to go to bed, they occasioned us but little annoyance and we bowled along over the Atlantic in merry fashion, killing time by spinning yarns, playing poker and taking a turn at the roulette wheel which Fred Carroll had purchased at Nice to remind him of ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... heart is spinning in that Mahometan paradise, and that is what put such force into your fists. Which of the houris is it? The little one with the wistful eyes, who looked so deadly white, and shrieked out when the devilry overturned you? Eh! Monsieur, you are a ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... direct control over property; under the rule of the father, and afterwards of the husband, and even in some cases humbly submissive to their sons. Telemachus thus rebukes his mother: "Go to thy chamber; attend to thy work; turn the spinning wheel; weave the linen; see that thy servants do their tasks. Speech belongs to men, and especially to me, who am the master here." And Penelope allows herself to be silenced and obeys, "bearing ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real or not? Do you remember what ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock, like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I believe ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a terrible shock; he was lying on the terrace, spinning the stone, and watching the little whirling gleams of red light it made on the flags, when a man-at-arms stole upon him, and in wantonness seized the stone, and flung it far into the moat, where it fell with a ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... waving flax, l. 254. Flax is said to have been first discovered on the banks of the Nile, and Isis to have been the inventress of spinning ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... better. These celts like the arrow-heads were always fitted into cleft handles or shafts of wood, and it was probably at a later period that the stone hammer, pierced with a hole, made its appearance. Spinning and weaving in some extremely primitive fashion were evolved, so that the people were not entirely clothed in skins. They cultivated wheat to a small extent and kept herds of goats and horned sheep. The pottery they ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... hear and see enough to keep his philosophy from rusting. To speak the truth, he never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of both old and young.—Labour stood still as he pass'd—the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well,—the spinning-wheel forgot its round,—even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got out of sight; and as his movement was not of the quickest, he had generally time enough upon his hands to make his observations,—to ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... seemed, for Noddy was spinning around the course at fearful speed, his car looking like a ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... believe so. It rests with us to make it as beautiful a pattern as possible, but a pattern it is bound to make. And a terribly inevitable one, each curve leading to the next, as though we were spiders, spinning our web out of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the Raven. "And on he went boldly up to the Princess, who was sitting on a pearl as large as a spinning-wheel. All the ladies of the court, with their attendants and attendants' attendants, and all the cavaliers, with their gentlemen and gentlemen's gentlemen, stood round; and the nearer they stood ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... roses; Saint Clara gleams through her veil, constellated with crosses and golden stars; Saint Catherine of Alexandria leans upon the wheel, the instrument of her execution, as calmly and peacefully as if it were a spinning-wheel; and Saint Agnes holds in her arms a little white lamb, the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... them a good dinner, and when it was over the two elder girls went to their spinning, for in the kitchen stood the big and little wheels, and baskets of wool-rolls, ready to be twisted into yarn for the winter's knitting, and each day brought its stint of work to the daughters, who hoped to be as thrifty ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... attacked. Of course, they could not protect themselves by a counter-fire, but when a man is born in Scotland, and is a direct descendant of oatmeal-eating bandits, he naturally has a keener brain than even the Jews can boast of; consequently, by spinning nose dives and other signs of lack of control the wily Scot gleefully gained the enemy's side of the lines. Here he was unmolested, although Hun aviators must have been astonished to see one of their own machines engaged in the British sport of "hedge-hopping"; i.e., flying close to the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... of dice used some 100 and 150 years ago. In an old cribbage card-box, curiously ornamented, supposed to have been made by an amateur in the reign of Queen Anne, and now in my possession, I found a die with one end fashioned to a point, evidently for the purpose of spinning—similar to the modern teetotum. With the same lot at the sale where it was bought, was a pack of cards made of ivory, about an inch and a half in length and one inch in width—in other respects exactly like the cards ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... have been consulting it when he heard me on the stairs; he had another look at it now; and that gave me my opportunity. With a presence of mind rare enough in me to excuse the boast, I flung myself upon the instrument in the corner and hurled it to the ground with all my might. I was myself sent spinning into the opposite corner at the same instant. But the instrument happened to be a standard of the more elaborate pattern, and I flattered myself that I had put the delicate engine out of action ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... should aye mak' the wark and the hour suit. There's spinning and knitting for the night-time. Wi' soldiers quartered to the right hand and the left hand, and a civil war staring us in the face, it's neither tallow nor wax we'll ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... began to display those qualities for which his family was distinguished—prudence, industry, discreet reserve, with a remarkable ability for utilizing the brains of others. His father, who was made a baronet by Mr. Perceval, became a millionaire by cotton spinning, yet in a generation remarkable for invention, neither he nor one belonging to him originated any of the improvements for preparing or spinning cotton; when one was made, however, its utility soon became apparent to the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... the foot which had first been gripped and was vainly endeavoring to pull the lobster loose when Frank, attracted by the crowd, hurried up. He saw at once what the trouble was, and with one well-directed kick he sent the lobster spinning out into the middle of the street, the suddenness of the ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... the queen's or that of the favourite of the day. Then came the one allotted to his former lady friends, who travelled with him until a favourable opportunity presented itself of sending them to Magdala, where several hundreds were dwelling in seclusion, spinning cotton for their master's shamas and for their own clothes. Behind were several tents for his secretaries, his pages, his personal attendants, and one for the few stores he carried with him. When he made any lengthened stay at a place he had huts erected by his soldiers for himself ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... threads, across and across, without seeming to look at them, and all the time the web is growing into an intricate pattern under his fingers. So his father wove, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. All these crafts run in families. A little farther on is a potter spinning a wheel with his feet, while the soft lump of dull-coloured clay takes shape beneath his clever thumb as it races round. It seems to grow and swell and curve exquisitely as if it were a living thing. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... heart of his palace, perpetually surrounded with a company of women, whose dress and even manners he had adopted, applying himself with them to the spindle and the distaff, neither understanding nor doing any other thing than spinning, eating and drinking, and wallowing in all manner of infamous pleasure. Accordingly, a statue was erected to him, after his death, which represented him in the posture of a dancer, with an inscription upon ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... on him!" a warrior shouted. At this juncture two of the canines had almost nabbed their furry prey by the back. But he was too cunning for them. He dropped instantly and sent both dogs over his head, rolling and spinning, then made another flight at right angles to the first. This gave the Eskimo a chance to cut the triangle. He gained fifty yards, but being heavily handicapped, two unladen dogs passed him. The same trick was repeated by the Jack, and this time he saved himself from instant ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady side of Willard's Hotel—the Senate not in session—he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal experience—rarely if ever repeating himself—and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... he struck vigorously out, and soon had the satisfaction of knowing that he had settled one of his assailants, by the mournful groans he heard. Only one man was now left to deal with, and it did not take long to disarm him. Seeing that he was alone, with his cudgel knocked spinning from his grasp, he started to run away. Douglas, however, sprang after him and managed to seize him by the tail of his coat. To this he held with a bulldog grip while the other struggled frantically to get away. Finding that his efforts were in vain, and that he was in danger of being caught, he ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... Spider, sitting beside him on the moss green divan. "We've had a hard time. Sir Spider lost one of his legs a while ago; but would you believe it—a new one has begun to grow! He feels better and is building a bridge across our brook. I'm just worn out with the Spring cleaning and spinning, and the care of my big family. My eyes ache all the ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work—a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... so kindly to the life there, that Meg and John and Grandpa felt satisfied that they had done well. Mixing with other boys brought out the practical side of him, roused his spirit, and brushed away the pretty cobwebs he was so fond of spinning in that little brain of his. To be sure, he rather shocked his mother when he came home, by banging doors, saying "by George" emphatically, and demanding tall thick boots "that clumped like papa's." But John rejoiced over him, laughed at his explosive remarks, ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... amongst Khasi children as being indigenous and not an importation, but Bivar thinks that the game is of foreign introduction. I am, however, inclined to agree with Yule that peg-top spinning is indigenous, inasmuch as this game could not have been copied from the Sylhetis or the Assamese of the plains, who do not indulge in it. As the British had only recently established themselves in the hills when Yule wrote, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... soft wool of her new toy Lamb. She wheeled it across the floor again, and the sailor watched her. Then, all of a sudden, the door of the playroom was opened with such a bang that it struck the Lamb and sent her spinning across the floor, upside down, into ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope
... important cities, where they were deposited for the service of the state. The foreign trade of the empire was regulated by this minister, who directed likewise all the linen and woollen manufactures, in which the successive operations of spinning, weaving, and dyeing were executed, chiefly by women of a servile condition, for the use of the palace and army. Twenty-six of these institutions are enumerated in the West, where the arts had been more recently ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes. Answering the English nurse that she was quite well, and that she was going to the country tomorrow, Anna sat down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But the child's loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows, recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her sobs, and went away. "Can it be all over? No, it cannot be!" she thought. "He will ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Sweden.—CATHERINE, a young and handsome woman, is sitting at her spinning wheel.—A little Boy and Girl, of six and seven years of age, are seated on ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... busy in their various duties about the ship. The captain was not a person to allow his men to be idle. The carpenter was at his bench, scattering white shavings around him; several were at work with heaps of oakum, spinning yarns. The sailmakers, with canvas spread before them, were plying their needles; others were making mats, or splicing or knotting ropes. The painters, with their pots and brushes, were giving touches to the bulwarks and other parts where the paint had been rubbed off; and ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... compelled even gods and heroes to submit to all sorts of odd tests and means. Jupiter himself took the form of a bull to carry off Europa, and swam across the sea with her upon his back to the island of Crete. Hercules, dressed as a woman, sat spinning meekly at Omphale's feet. Even Aristotle went upon all fours that his mistress might ride on his back. What wonder then that our youthful baron thought that nothing could be too difficult or repulsive in the service of the lovely being at his side! ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... at me. Then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward, still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. "By Jove!" he cried. "I believe—it is! A sort of hot pricking and—yes. That man's moving his pocket-handkerchief! ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... hardly knew such a thing as bread; many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few Villages possessed an oven. A weaving-loom was rare, the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the Crucifix and vessel of Holy-Water under it [and "POLACK! CATHOLIK!" if a drop of gin be added].—The Peasant-Noble [unvoting, inferior kind] was hardly different from the common Peasant: he ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the children of Israel bore on staves from the Promised Land. Of their flavor, we can say, from experience, they were worthy to have grown in Paradise. We then entered a deep dell of the mountain, where little shepherd girls were sitting on the rocks tending their sheep and spinning with their fingers from a distaff, in the same manner, doubtless, as the Roman shepherdesses two thousand years ago. Gnarled, gray olive trees, centuries old, grew upon the bare soil, and a little rill fell in many a tiny cataract down the glen. By a mill, in one of the coolest and wildest nooks ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... to the grey horse, flicking him lightly with the whip. The ill-balanced trap seesawed down the slope, and soon was spinning along the cliff-road, across which the wind blew with such force that Hester caught at ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... block her way. She trembled with the vibration of her screws, and in the stormy heaving of the water there was great danger lest her propeller fans should snap. However, the engineer stood with his hand on the throttle-valve, and stopped the spinning of the screws ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... on the horse, and rode a wearisome long way onward again, and after a very long time she came to a great mountain, where an aged woman was sitting, spinning at a golden spinning-wheel. Of this woman, too, she inquired if she knew the way to the Prince, and where to find the castle which lay east of the sun and west of the moon. But it was only the same thing once again. "Maybe it was you who should have had the Prince," ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe occurred. There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve—just that and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and after that a chorus of shrieks that were ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... inhabitants, and will prove largely beneficial to all who will avail themselves of the advantages it offers." In the course of his address the Mayor said: "It has been my lot now, during my life, which has not been a short one, to aid a great many undertakings in this city—insurance offices, spinning factories, waterworks, literary and scientific institutions, and public charities; but I have never lent my assistance to any undertaking which more entirely commends itself to my judgment than that in which I am this day engaged in commencing" ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... allow yourself," I replied, with some asperity, "to be influenced by that absurdly impossible yarn which Julius was spinning to-day?" ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... in the tranquil evenings of summer, when brightly the sunset Lighted the village street, and gilded the vanes on the chimneys, Matrons and maidens sat in snow-white caps and in kirtles Scarlet and blue and green, with distaffs spinning the golden Flax for the gossiping looms, whose noisy shuttles within doors Mingled their sounds with the whir of the wheels and the songs of the maidens. Solemnly down the street came the parish priest, and the children Paused in their play to kiss the hand he extended to bless ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... the flabby body by the collar, spinning the dignity of the law round face down prone upon the log. "A'll not take my fist t' y' as A wud t' a Man! Ye dastard, drunken, poltroon, coward, whiskey sodden lout an' scum o' filth, an'," each word was emphasized by the thud of the empty whiskey ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the soft music of the spinning purr, When no stiff hair disturbs the glossy fur, The whining wail so piteous and so faint, When through the house Puss moves with long complaint, To that unearthly throttling caterwaul, When feline legions storm the midnight wall, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... Uncle Paul talking in a low tone with his voice getting farther and farther away, or was it that big chafer spinning round and round the room? Now it nearly died out, and then it grew louder again and seemed to double into a duet, just as if the great stag beetle had whisked in at the casement and had joined in the ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... There she sat sad and weeping, and knew not how to help herself. She pulled the wheel this way and that, and twisted and turned it about, but she made a poor hand of it, for she had never even seen a spinning-wheel in ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... hotel in the best of humor. As they crossed the lobby the Governor suddenly slapped his pockets and walked to the cigar stand. A tall man in a gray traveling cap was talking earnestly to the clerk, meanwhile spinning a twenty-dollar gold piece on the show case. The Governor purchased some cigarettes and while waiting for change nodded to the stranger, who absently responded and began tapping the coin with the handle of ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Irish songs, the Black Hole was washed away as by the soft Irish rain, and the bogs stretched golden with furze-blossom and silver with fluffy fairy cotton, and at the doors of the straggling cabins overhung by the cloud-shadowed mountains, blue-cloaked women sat spinning, and her eyes filled with tears as though the peat ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... gray have presented a different conception. In the glare of a million million of suns they have sent the earth spinning like a midge. Beyond the uttermost horizon they have strewn other systems, other worlds; beyond the latter, more. Wherever imagination in its weariness would set a ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... be much better for you to allow us to enter than for me to direct these men to force the door; but we must enter." The woman now threw the door wide open and rushing into the yard with as much alacrity as her enormous proportions would admit, threw her arms out and whirled about like a reversed spinning top shouting for help. She was again assured that no harm was intended her, but that unless she chose to show us the house we should be obliged to go alone. Concluding that wisdom was the better part of valor, she proceeded ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... We are getting off. Except Eros and Plutus, who seem as usual, and the old Fates, who go on spinning as if nothing had happened, none of us expects to last for another ten years. The sacrifices have dwindled down to nothing. Zeus has put down his eagle. Hera has eaten her peacocks. Apollo's lyre is never heard—pawned, no doubt. Bacchus drinks water, and Venus—well, you can imagine how ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... trying to make out what ailed young stupid here, whether he was really ill, or only shamming," said Lawless; "depend upon it, he thinks it was all pretence, and he can't bear anything of that sort; that was why he began spinning him that long yarn about 'meriting his approbation by upright and straightforward conduct,' this morning. I saw what the old boy was aiming at in a minute; there's nothing puts him out ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... if ever any one did. I went away to school in Paris for two years; I wouldn't go to college—how I wish I had! I was the gayest, most thoughtless girl you ever knew until—the thing happened that sent my world spinning upside down. Why, Mr. King, I was so selfish and so thoughtless that I could turn that poor girl away from my door with a careless denial, and never see that she was desperate—that it wanted only one more such turning away to make her do ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... composition is superior to its underlying thought. I shall come back later on to certain faults in Strauss's music; here I only want to consider the overflowing life and feverish joy that set these worlds spinning. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... can imagine To match the subtle dooms that are wrought against them By blind spores of pestilence: seeing that each of us, Lured by dim hopes, flutters in the toils of death On a cold star that is spinning blindly through space ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... rhinoceros as of a poet." "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims, "it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink. I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... again, spread rapidly, and a new era of manufactures was opening. The South—more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class—caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of the scene. The crop ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... spinning the teetotum yesterday and it did not spin well so we made new ones. While the children were painting their tops, Oliver grew very eager when he found he could fill in all the spaces in different colours, but Betty made her colours very insipid. I want them to get the feeling of beautiful colour, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... said Mrs. Ray to her husband, as she was spinning in the kitchen at Shoulthwaite Moss,—"I am thinking," she said, stopping the wheel and running her fingers through the wool, "that Willy is partial to ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... it my sole happiness," says your wife, after the answers of all the rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world of ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... was that the bride was entirely ignorant of how to clean and spin cotton. It was not long before this was found out, for, in the spring, when there was no work in the fields, her father-in-law set all the women of the household to spinning cotton; and told them that they and their husbands should have no new clothes until they had finished their task. The bride, who had been so carefully chosen, tried to learn how to spin by watching the others, ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... a little boy," he said, "I once wanted to stay at home from school. I had, I believe, a little headache, but nothing worth minding. I told my mother that I had a headache, and she kept me, and I helped her at her spinning, which was what I liked best of anything. But in the afternoon the Methodist preacher came in to see my mother, and he asked me what was the matter with me, and my mother answered for me that I had a bad head, and he looked at me; and as my head was quite well by this time, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... to some pretty distant place from Which he could not be expected to return for two or three hours, or in all probability a much longer period, as that gentleman was not, to say the truth, renowned for using great expedition on such occasions, but rather for protracting and spinning out the time to the very utmost limit of possibility. Mr Swiveller out of sight, Miss Sally immediately withdrew. Mr Brass would then set the office-door wide open, hum his old tune with great gaiety ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... for the sun and broad bosom of humanity,—even though the revelation was partial and chaotic—the phenomena and thoughts circulating in the waste spaces. The result of this was not the production of firm convictions, nor the spinning out of a guiding thread to another better life; but doubt entered their consciences and desire filled their breasts—the young eyes veiled with the sadness of the thought which began to ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... lovely day!" said Belle-bouche, in order to divert the conversation. "Aunt and myself thought we'd come down to the quarters and see the sick. I carried mammy Lucy some nice things, and aunt went on to see about some spinning, and I came here to look over this book of songs, which I have just got ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... my time in Ayrshire with my "darling Jean," and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... fro thy seed hemp, the fimble hemp clean, This looketh more yellow, the other more green; Use this one for thy spinning, leave Michael the t'other, For shoe-thread and halter, for rope ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... which the earth rotates is directed. It therefore follows that this axis must be constantly changing its position. The character of the movement of the earth, so far as its rotation is concerned, may be illustrated by a very common toy with which every boy is familiar. When a peg-top is set spinning, it has, of course, a very rapid rotation around its axis; but besides this rotation there is usually another motion, whereby the axis of the peg-top does not remain in a constant direction, but moves in a conical path around the vertical line. The adjoining figure (Fig. 101) gives a view of the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... you say so? I've never been in no countries where squirrels shies nuts and acorns at people. I've always seen 'em in cages spinning round and round." ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... him across a meadow where a flock of sheep was grazing, and as he drew near he saw that the sheep had no shepherd. Near them, however, a beautiful young girl was seated, spinning a ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded hints and menaces wove ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... two spinning maids, Who plied so handily their trades, Those spinning sisters down below Were bunglers when compared with these. No care did this old woman know But giving tasks as she might please. No sooner did the god of day His glorious locks enkindle, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... for great enterprises and beginnings; but it emphatically wasn't. It was a queer, inconclusive, lazy, muddled, reckless, unsatisfactory, rather ludicrous time. It seemed as if the world was suffering from vertigo. I have seen men who have been badly hit spinning round and round madly, like dancing dervishes. That was, I think, what we were all doing for some time after the war—spinning round and round, silly and dazed, without purpose or power. At least the only purpose ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the maiden weep and pray that night after Ermentrude had sunk to sleep. She strained her eyes with home-sick longings to detect lights where she thought Ulm might be; and, as she thought of her uncle and aunt, the poodle and the cat round the stove, the maids spinning and the prentices knitting as her uncle read aloud some grave good book, most probably the legend of the saint of the day, and contrasted it with the rude gruff sounds of revelry that found their way up the turret stairs, she could hardly restrain her sobs from awakening the young lady ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the courts. I was then keeping a hotel, and he was one of my regular customers. Here he met many of his old cronies of his early days at Salem, and they spent the most of the nights in telling stories or spinning long yarns, of which Mr. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... in my hands, I ran briskly across the ledge, and, with a strong kick on the edge of the cliff to give me additional impetus, I went spinning out into space. For an age, as it seemed to me, I sank rapidly; while that horrible feeling possessed me—the like of which people subject to sea-sickness feel as the ship drops away beneath them into the trough ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... said to himself, "and we'll be across what used to be the line, and be spinning over Massachusetts. This certainly beats walking all hollow! Whew!" as the machine lurched forward and took an ugly drop. He jerked the rising-plane lever savagely. "Still the same kind of unreliable air, I see, that we used to have a ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... should be completed, and I'll be back at drafting the second half. What makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out Guy Mannering in three weeks! What a pull of work: heavens, what thews and sinews! And here am I, my head spinning from having only re-written seven not very difficult pages—and not very good when done. Weakling generation. It makes me sick of myself, to make such a fash and bobbery over a rotten end of an old nursery yarn, not worth spitting on when done. Still, there is no doubt ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... George had crossed half the distance and Gloria's shrill scream of warning brought him up short. But before the weapon could be discharged, the other Agronian viciously flung a tentacle and sent it spinning from his ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... news on wall-paper, but we get it somehow. We have our diversions, too. It takes a thousand dollars, Confederate money, to buy a decent calico dress, but sometimes we have the thousand dollars. Besides, we have taken out all the old spinning-wheels and looms and we've begun to make our own cloth. We don't think it best that the women should spend all their time mourning while the men are at the front ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... this slip. Take a Greenfield car. Nice old maid has lived in nice old cottage all her life. Grandfather built it himself about a hundred years ago. Whole family was born in it, and married in it, and died in it, see? It's crammed full of spinning-wheels and mahogany and stuff that'll make your eyes stick out. See? Well, there's no one left now but the nice old maid, all alone. She had a sister who ran away with a scamp some years ago. Nice old maid has never heard ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... of the Jacobins, was safe, so press and pamphlet indulged in wild generalities of debauchery and rapine. It must be confessed that Jefferson fared no better in the Federalist sheets. He was a huge and hideous spider, spinning in a web full of seduced citizens; he meditated a resort to arms, did he lose the election. As to his private vices, they saddled him with an entire harem, and a black one ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Westcote calls "lanificium," "the skill and knowledge of making cloth, under which genus are contained the species of spinning, knitting, weaving, tucking, pressing, dying, carding, combing and such-like," we have records from the twelfth century; though until the reign of Edward IV only friezes and plain coarse cloth were made. In Edward's reign an Italian, "Anthony Bonvise," is reputed to have taught Barnstaple the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... got ready, and a sufficient number of spinning-wheels, looms, and other utensils made use of in the most common manufactures being provided; together with a sufficient stock of raw materials, I proceeded to carry my plan into execution in the manner which will be ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... of persons. He had taken a short cut across the ring just as the owner had begun his correction of the ringmaster. Jumbo shook out his heels again. They caught the owner's sombrero and sent it spinning into ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... habits. A recent writer has said: "Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time.' Well, he may not count it, ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... brakes and stopped short. Varney slid out of the seat and stood waiting in the black inkiness beside the unlighted car. In the sudden stillness they could hear the rattle of the bicycle chain and even the crunch of the hard-blown tires, spinning rapidly over the road. Now the light was perhaps a ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... narrow, gloomy, ascending street are crowds of struggling human shapes; and you see how like herrings in a box are packed the over half a million people of Naples. In front of the houses are the markets in the open air,—fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles,—the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... would satisfy him till he was allowed to enter his father's noble profession, to which he promises to be an ornament, and is now a lieutenant of two years' standing. Among other accomplishments, he is a first-rate hand at spinning a yarn, and often amuses his shipmates with an account of his father's adventures in chase of the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the little Princess had ever heard. The table was set for tea. It was a very plain tea, only white bread and butter, and honey, and milk; but it made the Princess hungry to look at it. In front of the fire stood a straight-backed chair and a little spinning wheel. ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... he was standing, he wished he'd stayed on the nice horizontal sidewalk. His head was spinning dizzily, and his mind was being sucked down into the whirlpool. He held on to the post grimly and tried to ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... early, precisely when Buffalmacco, having up to then been working, would go to lie down; and sitting at her wheel, which by misadventure she had planted opposite to the bed of Buffalmacco, she would spend the whole night spinning her thread; wherefore Buonamico, being able to get scarce a wink of sleep, began to think and think how he could remedy this nuisance. Nor was it long before he noticed that behind a wall of brickwork, that divided his house from Capodoca's, was the hearth of his uncomfortable neighbour, and that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... General Francis Marion," by Mason L. Weems, the graphic account of the general's exploits, by the venerable parson. There was not a story in the book that she did not know, almost as a party concerned, and she would ply her work of flax-spinning while she gave me close and intense attention. At times, when the historian was at fault in his facts—and, to say the truth, that was more frequently the case than comports with veracious history—she would cease the impelling motion of her foot upon the pedal of ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... grouping and grace of their innumerable poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the "leaves of the tall poplar"; and it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... went in and sat down on the new bench. Elisabeth took the little seed-rings out of her apron and strung them on long threads. Reinhard began his tale: "There were once upon a time three spinning- women..." [Footnote: The beginning of one of the best known ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... the Sons of Liberty. One purpose of this organization was to induce people to manufacture their own necessities and thus avoid buying the products of Great Britain. Factories were busy making looms and spinning-wheels; skilled men and women taught the arts of spinning, weaving and tailoring. The slogan "Home Made or Nothing," traveled far ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... them to yield, letting him into a kind of smothered, troubled quietness even more oppressive than that outside. He passed an empty ropewalk, the hemp strewn untidily about, as if the workers had left hurriedly. He peered curiously at idle looms and deserted spinning-wheels—deserted apparently but the instant before he came. It seemed as if the people were fled maliciously just in front, to leave him in this fearfullest of all solitudes. He wondered if he did not ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... whole? Will you not withdraw from it? Will you not gladly part with it to him who gave it? And will you be vexed and discontented with the things established by Zeus, which he, with the Moirae (fates) who were present and spinning the thread of your generation, defined and put in order? Know you not how small a part you are compared with the whole. I mean with respect to the body, for as to intelligence you are not inferior to the gods nor less; for the ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... feet in height; and a section of the apartment would have formed one half of an irregular octagon. In each side of the chamber there was a small door, opening into the space near the eaves of the house, which was used to store old trunks, old boxes, the disused spinning-wheel, and other lumber of this description. Tom had been in the attic before, and he remembered these doors, through one of which he now proposed to ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... gun aimed just where he wanted it, he pressed the lever and a burst of bullets shot out and fairly riddled the red plane. It seemed to stop for an instant in the air, and then, quivering, turned and went down in a nose dive, spinning around. ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... of the instrument was spinning round and round at an almost perpendicular angle in the binnacle with tremendous velocity. The pointer tore round its points like the hands of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Spinning deftly into its place, as if dropped from heaven with a plumb-line, a wreath of artificial flowers landed lightly on his temples, while a woman's laugh, soft and silvery, accompanied with its pleasant music ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... helping each other in a common object, and that all may be considered, with respect to others, intermediates. If, for instance, in the course of the operation, the conveyance becomes important enough to occupy one person, the spinning another, the weaving another, why should the first be considered a parasite more than the other two? The conveyance must be made, must it not? Does not he who performs it devote to it his time and trouble? and by so doing does he not spare that of his colleagues? Do these ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... prove to be, it is pretty generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. The evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality. The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Frigg sat spinning in her house Fensal, the soft wind blowing in at the windows and bringing the merry shouts of the gods at play, an old ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... at his young beginning, You are not here at his aged end; Off he coaxed you from Life's mad spinning, Lest you should see his form extend Shivering, sighing, Slowly dying, And ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... renunciation her strength and her reward, duty a grinning skeleton at her bedside? It grew harder daily. More than a year ago she thought that the worst was over, and since then had known the solace of self-forgetful idealisms, of ascetic striving. It was all illusion, the spinning of a desolate heart. There was no help now, for she knew herself and the world. Foolish, foolish child, who with her own hand had flung away the jewel of existence like a thing of no price! Her lot appeared single ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... of a bell on board the steamer, and the pilot in the pilot house was seen to send his wheel spinning over with frantic haste at the same moment that the headway of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... down the path with an impatient step, and entered the house-place. There sat his aunt spinning, and apparently as well as ever. He could hear his uncle talking to Kester in the neighbouring shippen; all was well in the household. Why was Sylvia standing in the garden in that strange ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 1806, at Valenciennes, daughter of very poor weavers, was employed, from the age of seven years, in a spinning-mill; corrupted early by her life in the work-room, she was a mother at the age of thirteen; having had to testify in the Court of Assizes against Jean-Francois Durut, she made of him a formidable enemy, and fell into ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... rose, as if by galvanism, and ran out of the room, spinning round as he ran, to declare, again and again, that he would not ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was the favorite gathering place of humble New England families and it was there they were best seen and understood; there the spinning wheel hummed while the pot was boiling or the bannock baking; there stockings and boots were dried by the open fire and the latter daily greased. With what pride did I see my first pair standing there shining in their coat ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... cleanliness that could not be excelled. On either side of the table were rude, but substantial benches, and at the ends were chairs which had been in use for several generations. In a corner of the room stood Mrs. Morris's spinning-wheel and behind this was a shelf containing the family Bible, half a dozen books, and a pile of newspapers which had been carefully preserved from time to time, including copies of the "Pennsylvania ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... operations, because they are quite simple and call for no thought, can be accomplished just as well, and even better, by unthinking agents; and so in 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented the first machine, his famous spinning-jenny. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... upon the prosperity of the whale fishery. When it languished their fortunes sunk, never to rise to their earlier heights, though cotton-spinning came to occupy the attention of the people of New Bedford, while Nantucket found a placid prosperity in entertaining summer boarders. And even during the years when whales were plentiful, and their oil still in good demand, there ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... answered splendidly; till one fine morning the tree took it into its head to grow, and it grew and grew until it was so high that I climbed up to Heaven on it. There I looked down, and saw a lady in a white gown spinning sea-foam to make gossamer with. I went to take hold of it, and snap! the thread broke, and I fell into a rat-hole. There I saw your father and my mother spinning; and as your father was clumsy, lo and behold, my mother gave him such a box on ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... curtains, fringe, and tassels made by Angeline's own hand. Snow white curtains also draped the windows; and there was a tidy and cosy air about the little bed room that told you how good a housewife Angeline was. An old-fashioned hand-loom stood in one corner of the big, square room; and a flax and a spinning-wheel had their places in another. A farm-house was not considered well furnished in those days without these useful implements, nor was a housewife considered accomplished who could not card, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... little action on the coracle, and I was almost instantly swept against the bows of the Hispaniola. At the same time the schooner began to turn upon her heel, spinning slowly, end ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... white teeth and brown eyes gleaming. "I was laughing at something else. It suddenly occurred to me, while you were spinning your foolish theory, how flattered Tracey would have been if Flora had confessed to him Saturday night that she had killed Nita because she ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... divisions. First, there is the large public sitting-room or drawing-room of the College, where the elder young ladies are engaged in various elegant employments. Three, at a table to the left, are making a mitre for the Bishop, as may be seen from the model on the table. Some are merely spinning or about to spin. One young lady, sitting rather apart from the others, is doing an elaborate piece of needlework at a tambour-frame near the window; others are making lace or slippers, probably for the new curate; another is struggling ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... ten years, especially in Bombay itself—which has led to vast agglomerations of labour under conditions unfamiliar in India—had given Tilak an opportunity of establishing contact with a class of the population hitherto outside the purview of Indian politics. There are nearly 100 cotton spinning and weaving mills, employing over 100,000 operatives, congregated mostly in the northern suburbs of the city. Huddled together in huge tenements this compact population affords by its density, as ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... dancing dervish, who has been patiently awaiting at the inner gate, now receives a nod of permission from the priest, and, after laying aside an outer garment, waltzes nimbly into the room, and straightway begins spinning round like a ballet-dancer in Italian opera, his arms extended, his long skirt forming a complete circle around him as he revolves, and his eyes fixed with a determined gaze into vacancy. Among the howlers is a negro, who is six feet three at least, not in his socks, but in the finest pair ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... put out his arms to clasp the two in one embrace. But, by a sort of dazzling miracle that sent him staggering, Raoul was suddenly flung back, while an icy blast swept over his face; he saw, not two, but four, eight, twenty Christines spinning round him, laughing at him and fleeing so swiftly that he could not touch one of them. At last, everything stood still again; and he saw himself in the glass. But Christine ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... acquisitiveness. She was thirty-two years old but she looked much younger as she stood there, her lips a little parted in a pleased smile of anticipation. She was leaning a little over the table and her eyes were fixed with humorous intentness upon the spinning wheel. Even amongst that crowd of beautiful women she possessed a certain individual distinction. She not only looked what she was—an Englishwoman of good birth—but there was a certain delicate aloofness about her expression and bearing which gave an added charm to ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the many points in which she was particularly sensible. The consequence was that, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool, and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on among the ladies themselves. And, by the by, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the poor into ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the Spirit has always first spoken and revealed the things of God? Or is it the philosopher, or dry-as-dust theologian, or the popular preacher of smooth things, sitting in his study and among his books, spinning out of his own mind his conceits concerning God's plan and purpose in ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... domestic she displayed her ardour and her chivalrous zeal; at the spinning-wheel and with the needle she challenged all the women in a town, without knowing one ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of them ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... queried Nan Sherwood promptly. "Up in the air, down on the ground or all around?" and she carried out her speech in action, finally spinning about on one foot in a manner to ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... Lopez! Carlotta's chosen officer! And heaped with favors high enough to make A pyramid to faith!... Is this the world, Or some strange fancy spinning ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... were made for the affair, which was on nearly everybody's tongue. The spinning and weaving trade was at that time in a very brisk condition, and peace and plenty appeared to reign triumphant. At last, ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... full of English. Gentlewomen were sitting in the tapestried hall, spinning or working with their needle. We had been known to one or two of them in former times, and while they greeted us word was taken to Madame van Hunker that we were there, and a servant brought us word to ask us to come to her in ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... harem, so that no one could come in without leave. Their workrooms were comfortable places, warmed by stoves, and there Ermentrude (who, being a woman, was allowed to go in) found about a dozen servile women spinning and dyeing cloth and sewing garments. Every week the harassed steward brought them the raw materials for their work and took away what they made. Charlemagne gives his stewards several instructions about the women attached to his manses, and we may be sure that ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... situated on the side of a hill, and consists of one irregularly built street—the habitations in that part called Oxenhope being yet more scattered, and Stanbury still farther distant; the entire chapelry occupying a wide space. The spinning of worsted, and the manufacture of stuffs, are branches which ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... see I wasn't far wrong about Miss de Frey and Courtenay Youghal, was I?" he chirruped, almost before he had seated himself. Francesca was to be spared any further spinning-out of her period of uncertainty. "Yes, it's officially given out," he went on, "and it's to appear in the Morning Post to-morrow. I heard it from Colonel Deel this morning, and he had it direct from Youghal himself. Yes, please, one lump; I'm not ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the dresses were got ready. Fortitude's helmet was constructed of pasteboard and gilt paper; and Nora said it looked just as if it were solid gold. The crown of Ahasuerus, and Alfred's six-foot bow were also made; and a beautiful old brown spinning-wheel was brought from Mrs. Sandford's house for Priscilla. Priscilla's brown dress was put together, and her white vandyke starched. And the various mantles and robes of velvet and silk which were to be used, were in some ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... terrified, bundled the entire dialogue into the cellars of her mind and locked the doors on it. Later,—later,—when one was alone! "Oh, Val, say I may go!" she cried, clasping her hands on Val's arm, so cool and firm amid a spinning world. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... of the crowd, his face flushed, his hair tumbled. With a quick movement he sent the glass and its contents spinning out of ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... my dear," she would say; "that's 'Mary's flower';" or, "Sure it's the 'Blessed Virgin's spinning-wheel,' and ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... either!" he answered, with a laugh. He reached out his hand to pick up his Soldier and put him back in his pocket when, down at the other end of the toy counter, one of the clerks suddenly began spinning a humming top, which showed different colors and played a little tune as ...
— The Story of a Bold Tin Soldier • Laura Lee Hope
... When these evoked the usual enthusiasm he waxed bolder, and shot out some almost original epigrams directed against the Government, working up to a really new gibe about officials who sat like spiders spinning murderous webs in Dublin Castle. The audience were delighted with this, but their joy reached its height when someone shouted: 'You might speak better of the men who tore down the placard on Wednesday.' Mr. O'Rourke ignored the suggestion, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... if the King stood out; it was to avoid decision by confusing and spinning out the matter in hand, or by substituting another as though arising, opportunely out of it, and by which it was turned aside, or by proposing that some explanations should be obtained. The first ideas of the King were thus weakened, and the charge was afterwards ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Ghost at Ystrad Fawr, near Llangwm, that was in the habit of appearing like a turkey with his tail spread out like a spinning wheel. At other times he appeared in the wood, when the trees would seem as if they were on fire, again he would assume the shape of a large ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... with her mind and soul, as she told herself, she thus held him away, she was conscious of the inner wail of loneliness and unconscious that, under the steady resolution, every faculty, every charm she possessed, was spinning and stretching itself out to surround ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... feelings, struggles, and passions of the people, and to Beethoven's sensitive ear they conveyed a deeper meaning than they did to the simple peasants who hummed or carolled them to the whirr of the spinning-wheel, the blows of the forge-hammer, or the speeding of ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... finished?" said she. "Hear, then, my wish. On the day when she reaches her fifteenth birthday, the Princess shall prick her finger with the spindle of a spinning-wheel, and ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... offered a rich field for prehistoric research, Nemours as yet possesses no museum, I do verily believe the first French town of any size I have ever found in France without one at least in embryo. For the cyclist the run from Bourron to Nemours is delightful, on the hottest day in the year spinning along broad well-wooded roads, with lovely perspectives from time ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... drawing, engraving, casting, painting, statuary, and sculpture; for the improvement of manufactures and machines, in the various articles of hats, crapes, druggets, mills, marbled-paper, ship-blocks, spinning-wheels, toys, yarn, knitting, and weaving. They likewise allotted sums for the advantage of the British colonies in America, and bestowed premiums on those settlers who should excel in curing cochineal, planting logwood-trees, cultivating olive-trees, producing myrtle-wax, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... horizon like a spinning copper disk, was as a sign of promise and help. The beauty of the hour stretched into the future. His glance, shifting to the distance, saw the scattered dots of the disappearing buffalo, the shadows sloping across the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... approvingly and proceeded to tuck the rugs well round her. Then he started the engine and soon they were spinning down the drive which ran to the left of Mallow Court gardens towards the village. They flashed through St. Wennys and turned inland along the great white road that swept away in the direction of Trenby Hall, ten miles distant. The kennels ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... in several of the cellars. A young girl trips to her garden over the roofs of these primitive dwellings, and an old woman, tranquilly seated on a ledge of projecting rock, supported solely by the thick straggling roots of the ivy which spreads itself over the disjointed stones, leisurely turns her spinning-wheel regardless of her dangerous position." The picture sketched by the author of La Comdie Humaine, some forty years ago, has scarcely changed at ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... round with the spinning wheel, And a heavy cloud on my eyes I feel. But the worst of all is at my heart's core; For my innocent days ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... minds her dairy, While I go a-hoeing and mowing each morn. Merrily run the reel And the little spinning-wheel While I am singing ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... guess, in a way. But there's a sort of spinning in my head and my stomach if I try to figure any of this out. I just don't get it." He shook his head dubiously. "I feel alive all right, and the food tasted good just now, but how in the world can all the ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... mother was alive" (I fairly winced), "the house was not considered too good for the darkies to sit on the back gallery with their work and make the sacks right under mother's eye—sewing them with good strong thread, too, that was spun for the purpose. I can remember the old spinning-wheel: it used to sit right at that ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... a fearful state of excitement and confusion that morning, but at last everything was ready, barring one or two trifles. Then I suddenly heard a wild yell, and, spinning round, I saw a team tearing off without a driver. The next driver rushed forward to help, with the result that his dogs made off after the others. The two sledges were on ahead, and the two drivers after ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... the fibres of wool by the fingers would be a most tedious operation; in the common spinning-wheel the velocity of the foot is moderate; but, by a very simple contrivance, that of the thread is most rapid. A piece of cat-gut passing round a large wheel, and then round a small spindle, effects this change. The small balls of sewing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... Half-witted went upon his errand, and the time passed till it lacked but a month to Yule, and men sat indoors, for the season was dark and much snow fell. At length came frost, and with it a clear sky, and Gudruda, ceasing from her spinning in the hall, went to the woman's porch, and, looking out, saw that the snow was hard, and a great longing came upon her to breathe the fresh air, for there was still an hour of daylight. So she threw a cloak about her and walked forth, taking the road towards Coldback in the Marsh that is by Ran ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... hewer of wood in Damascus was cutting logs, and his wife sat spinning by his side. "My departed father," she said, "was a better workman than thou. He could chop with both hands: when the right hand was tired, he used the left." "Nay," said he, "no woodcutter does that, he uses his right hand, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... problem, to banish competition, and to put co-operation in its place. For some years the scheme was crowned with glorious success. The settlement grew; the trade flourished; the great firm of Drninger obtained a world-wide reputation; the women were skilled in weaving and spinning; and the whole system worked so well that in 1747 the Saxon Government besought the Count to establish a similar settlement at Barby. At Herrnhut, in a word, if nowhere else, the social problem was solved. There, at least, the aged and ill could live in peace and comfort; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... disappeared for ever. Here the children of the Sun established their residence, and soon entered upon their beneficent mission among the rude inhabitants of the country; Manco Capac teaching the men the arts of agriculture, and Mama Oello 8 initiating her own sex in the mysteries of weaving and spinning. The simple people lent a willing ear to the messengers of Heaven, and, gathering together in considerable numbers, laid the foundations of the city of Cuzco. The same wise and benevolent maxims, which regulated the conduct of the first ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... lingered there when she found her sister in their chamber, sitting at the spinning wheel. She had not left her suffering mother until her eyes closed in slumber, and was now waiting for Eva, to hear whether the entertainment had proved less disagreeable than she feared, and—as she had sent her maid to bed—to help ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the history of the world when work of this kind was all done in private homes. Women and girls worked together at home, spinning, weaving, sewing and dressmaking. A great part of such work is now done in factories. But girls know that they still have mending, sewing, dressmaking and millinery to do. People are seldom well advised if they ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... he was out hunting the Count passed through a forest, and at the door of a lonely cottage he saw a beautiful girl spinning hemp. ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... Robin Hood that that same forester's head was spinning with ale, or else he would never have taken another step. As it was, the arrow whistled within three inches of his head. Then he turned around and quickly drew his own bow, and sent an arrow ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... of some grand fishery, where a monstrous fish, a mile in length, had been taken by some fortunate "Sambo" of the South. The girls gaped with terror and astonishment, the men winking and trying to look grave, while spinning these yarns, which certainly beat all the wonders ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... dinner, and when it was over the two elder girls went to their spinning, for in the kitchen stood the big and little wheels, and baskets of wool-rolls, ready to be twisted into yarn for the winter's knitting, and each day brought its stint of work to the daughters, who hoped to be ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... his recent acquisitions. At length, after a considerable interval, he despatched an embassy to France, announcing his final determination never to ratify a treaty made in contempt of his orders, and so clearly detrimental to his interests. He endeavored, however, to gain further time by spinning out the negotiation, holding up for this purpose the prospect of an ultimate accommodation, and suggesting the re-establishment of his kinsman, the unfortunate Frederic, on the Neapolitan throne, as the best means of effecting it. The artifice, however, was too gross even for the credulous Louis; ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... main line of railway. Pop. (1900) 4900. It has a handsome church with twin spires, and training colleges for schoolmasters and theological candidates. Its industries are flourishing, and embrace paper-making, agricultural machine- works, iron-founding and flax-spinning. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... up a steel helmet on the end of a stick. In an instant it went spinning off and fell at his feet in the trench. He picked it up, pointing grimly to a neat little hole through it ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... earliest days of cotton spinning, the small fibres would stick to the bobbins, and make it necessary to stop and clear the machinery. Although this loss of time reduced the earnings of the operatives, the father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full pay, as his machine never stopped. "How ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... went into the third room. Horrors! the dog there had two eyes, each as large as the Round Tower at Copenhagen, spinning round in ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... feather, properly bound at the lower end of the shaft, gave the arrow a rotary motion as it passed through the air, and insured a greater accuracy. It is a principle that has been adopted by manufacturers of modern rifle guns to impart to the projectile a spinning motion ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... won't think that I'm spinning this out," he said. "It is, after all, in itself only a commonplace story, but I've carried it locked up in my memory for years, and now that I've let it loose, it unwinds itself slowly. This is how the row came about. Lumley one afternoon missed Wingrave and Ruth from the hunting ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with grave suspicion the rapid substitution of machinery for hand-labour in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized. It is reckoned that fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The instruments which ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... piece jangled on the floor. Carew started as if all his nerves had leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a flash. Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Ionia, we still believe Hesiod's maxim, that industry is the guardian of virtue," rejoined Anaxagoras. "Philothea plies her distaff as busily as Lachesis spinning the thread of mortal life." He looked upon his beautiful grandchild, with an expression full of tenderness, as he added, "And she does indeed spin the thread of the old man's life; for her diligent fingers ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... of them were purposely spinning it out, the third was only a happy chorus. Julia was in no hurry to face the questions about the explosive which she feared must come when Johnny's restraining presence was removed. She knew, as soon as she was sure Rawson-Clew's coming was design and not ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... hood of the open fireplace, above which hung two or three old fowling-pieces by way of ornament. The bare whitewashed room, twenty feet long, was lighted only through the panes of greenish glass let into the door and by a single window, framed in roses, near which the grandmother sat turning her spinning-wheel. She wore a coif and a lace frilling in the fashion of the Regency. Her gnarled, earth-stained fingers held the distaff. Flies clustered about her lids without her trying to drive them away. As a child in ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... after we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe occurred. There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve—just that and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and after that a chorus of shrieks that were like the ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... Mr. Dooley in the act of spinning a long, thin spoon in a compound which reeked pleasantly and smelt of the humming water of commerce; and he laughed and ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... on a farm and familiar from my earliest years with the avocations of rural life, spending the early spring-times in the maple-sugar camp, the later weeks in gardening and gathering stove-wood, the summers in picking and spinning wool, and the autumns in drying apples, I found little opportunity, and that only in winter, for books or play. My father was a generous-hearted, impulsive, talented, but uneducated man; my mother was a conscientious, self-sacrificing, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... to make them old Carey plows and was good at makin' the mould board out of hardwood. He make the best Carey plows in that part of the country and he make horseshoes and nails and everything out of iron. And he used to make spinning wheels and parts of looms. He was a very valuable man and he make wheels and the hub and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... other, to see how they looked. But Little Stupid, she just sat herself down beside the stove, and took the transparent apple and set it in the silver saucer, and she laughed softly to herself. And then she began spinning the apple in ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... and, by the time the month is out, one-half should be completed, and I'll be back at drafting the second half. What makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out Guy Mannering in three weeks! What a pull of work: heavens, what thews and sinews! And here am I, my head spinning from having only re-written seven not very difficult pages—and not very good when done. Weakling generation. It makes me sick of myself, to make such a fash and bobbery over a rotten end of an old nursery yarn, not worth spitting on when done. Still, there is no doubt I turn out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... open air in the rain, the wind, and the dew, so as, in a certain degree, to dissolve the plant, rendering the separation of the fibrous and ligneous parts more easy. It can then be cleaned and picked for spinning. But, as the vegetable glue that connects the two parts is very tenacious, and resists for a long time the action of moisture, it is often advisable to steep it in water, and this, in our dry climate, I ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... copper medal with a cross engraven upon it. From that time the little maiden always deemed herself especially consecrated to the service of Heaven, but she still remained at home, daily keeping her father's sheep, and spinning their wool as she sat under the trees watching them, but always with her heart ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... as is the way of her people generally. Her personal neatness was most attractive. She wore gowns made of cloth woven by herself in Norway, a coarse blue stuff, always neat and clean, and often I used to watch her as she sat by the fire spinning at a spinning-wheel brought from her own country; she made such a pretty picture, with her blue gown and fresh white apron, and the nice, clear white muslin bow with which she was in the habit of fastening her linen collar, that ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... again," remarked Mr. Doon pleasantly, seating himself upon the corner of Mr. Tutt's desk and spinning his bowler hat upon the forefinger of his left hand. "The hospitals are empty. The Tombs is as dry as a bone. Everybody's good and every day'll be ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... dragged in many a 'grey one'. From the bottom of the boat Eric picked up one of the hooks and passed it to me; it was of wrought iron, half an inch thick, with a point of cast steel. But the spinning joint was almost chewed through and the hook shaft bitten and gnawed—the 'grey one' had fought ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... from fine, frail strips of cane. It was a work he had learned at Naples long ago. Alvina meanwhile would sew for the child, or spin wool. She became quite clever at drawing the strands of wool from her distaff, rolling them fine and even between her fingers, and keeping her bobbin rapidly spinning away below, dangling at the end of the thread. To tell the truth, she was happy in the quietness with Ciccio, now they had their own pleasant room. She loved his presence. She loved the quality of his silence, so rich and physical. She felt ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... floundered despairingly almost within his reach, a downward dash nearly wrenched the rod from his hands and sent him sprawling on to the thwarts. The sudden lurch of the boat was too much for the ill-tied rope, and to Fisher's horror the noose gave way and sent boat and fisherman spinning down the rapids ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... this word was given by Romulus as the signal for the rape, and so that all those who carried off maidens cried "Talasio." But most authors, among whom is Juba, think that it is used to encourage brides to industry and spinning wool (talasia), as at that time Greek words had not been overpowered by Latin ones. But if this be true, and the Romans at that time really used this word "talasia" for wool-spinning, as we do, we might make another more plausible conjecture about it. When the treaty of peace was arranged ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which profiteth not?' 'They have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Their webs shall not become garments.' That may want a word of explanation. The metaphor is this. You are all like spiders spinning carefully and diligently your web. There is not substance enough in it to make a coat out of. You will never cover yourselves with the product of your own brains or your own efforts. There is no clothing in the spider's webs ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... quickened growing things. White tendrils of fluff floated strangely in the air, and spread thousands of soft clinging threads over telephone-wires, tree-tops, and across miles of growing fields—the curious output of myriads of spinning-spiders. There were quaintly restful visits to the front line. The Boche was a mile away at least; and when you were weary of staring through binoculars, trying to spot enemy movement, you could sit and lounge, and ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... Saint Caecilia advances, crowned with roses; Saint Clara gleams through her veil, constellated with crosses and golden stars; Saint Catherine of Alexandria leans upon the wheel, the instrument of her execution, as calmly and peacefully as if it were a spinning-wheel; and Saint Agnes holds in her arms a little white lamb, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... in the domestic life of all Grecian states, her handmaids were around the noble virgin. Two were engaged on embroidery, one in spinning, a fourth was reading aloud to Cleonice, and that at least was a rare diversion to women, for few had the education of the fair Byzantine. Cleonice herself was half reclined upon a bench inlaid with ivory ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... I cried, and hanging by the rope I felt myself lowered more and more, and that I was slowly spinning round; but as I swung to and fro I caught at something I could dimly see, and found it was the great slippery pipe that went down into the water, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his corduroys. One day, spinning his top on the garden-walk, and seeing the Vicar advance directly towards it, at that exciting moment when it was beginning to 'sleep' magnificently, he shouted out with all the force of his lungs—'Stop! don't knock my top down, now!' From that day 'little Corduroys' had been an especial ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... hotel, thought, intelligent thought, seemed collapsing, and my brain spinning round and ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... of the next five generations were a poor, hard-working race, rising early and toiling late. The men worked in the fields, tending the flocks, planting and gathering the harvest. The women worked in the houses, in the dairies and kitchens, at the spinning-wheel and washtub. The privations and loneliness, which are part of every struggling colony, were augmented here, where the houses did not cluster about the church and burial ground, but were scattered ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... of day Nausicaa went in haste to her father and mother to tell them of her dream. She found them in their splendid hall. Her mother sat with her maidens spinning, and the king stood on the threshold, just going forth to meet his chiefs in council. The princess approached her father and said: "Dearest father, I pray that thou wilt give me two mules and a wagon, that I may go ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... and down sleepily, mechanically, between two ten-pounders marking the limit of their patrol; and an orderly stood at an open door, lazily shifting his eyes from the sentinels to the black guns, which gave out soft, quivering waves of heat, as a wheel, spinning, throws off delicate spray. A hundred yards away the sea spread out, languid and huge. It was under-tinged with all the colours of a morning sunrise over Mount Bobar not far beyond, lifting up its somnolent and massive head into the Eastern sky. "League-long rollers" came in as steady ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... industry work because they have to work—they enter industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for thousands of years—spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking—only to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger part in what was since time began and up to ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... of the world together. "What we have divided we have divided; and if no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my share, leave me alone. Let me play at quoits with cyclonic gales, flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling air from one end of my dismal kingdom to the other: over the Great Banks or along the edges of pack-ice—this one with true aim right into the bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other upon ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... that any woman not conspicuously old and quite conspicuously of a fresh plumpness could be left in any city isolate, save for a cat's company, while the fates were spinning new threads for her, would be to put a severe strain upon credulity. To make that assertion specifically of Madame Jolicoeur, and specifically—of all cities in the world!—of Marseille, would be to strain credulity ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... comprehended the nature of the charge against himself and his family, he felt the more indignant from a strange and unfamiliar consciousness of innocence. Seizing Beck by the nape of the neck, with a dexterous application of hand and foot he sent him spinning into the kennel. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... effect more usual now in a summer cottage than it was then. On the walls were eight or ten water-colour sketches framed in rustic wood; a worn wicker chaise-longue with patchwork cushions, struck a curiously exotic note; two spinning-wheels, a large and a small, flanked the fire and bore every evidence of use, not aestheticism; a silver bowl of unmistakable Queen Anne date, beautifully chased, filled with fiery nasturtiums, stood in strange neighbourliness to a cheap American alarum clock; a lovely, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... The Occurrence, Distribution, Preparation, and Industrial Uses of the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Products used in Spinning and Weaving. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... said, she sat down, or presumed she sat down, on what she believed to be a bench, and there was a benediction. In a moment or two, when the room ceased spinning, she went up to Mrs. Burch, who kissed her affectionately and said, "My dear, how glad I am that we are going to stay with you. Will half past five be too late for us to come? It is three now, and we have to go to the station for our valise ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the good graces of Walther. No other such industrious and skillful groom had appeared at Zillenstein in many a day, and he rapidly acquired dexterity also with the automobiles. None could send them spinning with more certainty along the curving mountain roads. He practiced with diligence because he had a vague premonition that all this knowledge would be of use to ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... length of habit can blunt our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remember her, sitting by the flax-wheel, spinning,—even the pepper and salt homespun dress, the blue and white checked apron, the little shoes with the silver buckles, and ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... were obliged to work hard. While the men were at work in the fields, the women were spinning and weaving. Boys and girls had little time for play. There was always something for them to do. When a boy was sixteen years old, he was expected to do the work of a man. They all learned to shoot, and some of them, when they were only twelve, could ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... her son would not follow his father's business, shut up the shop, sold off the implements of trade, and with the money she received for them, and what she could get by spinning cotton, thought to maintain herself and her son. Alla ad Deen, who was now no longer restrained by the fear of a father, and who cared so little for his mother, that whenever she chid him, he would ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... or played on musical instruments at the state banquets of the court, they accompanied their master to the battle-field or the chase, and probably performed the various inferior domestic duties in the interior of the harem, such as spinning, weaving, making perfumes, and attending to the confectionery and cooking. Each of the king's wives had her own separate suite of apartments and special attendants, and occupied a much higher position than a mere concubine; but only ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... a new era of manufactures was opening. The South—more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class—caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of the scene. The crop rose in value in twenty years from $6,000,000 to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... black and most unfriendly day Grootver had caught her as she passed between The kitchen and the garden. She had run In fear of him, his evil leering eye, And when he came she, bolted in her room, Refused to show, though gave no reason why. The spinning of her future had begun, On quiet nights she heard the whirring ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... twenty-two he again left home. This time he went to the little seaport town of Irvine to learn flax dressing. For on the farm the father and brothers had begun to grow flax, and it was thought well that one of them should know how to prepare it for spinning. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... I would go up with him in an aeroplane, up, up, till we both got quite giddy. In the religion lesson yesterday, when the Herr Prof. came in he laughed like anything and said: "Hullo, Lainer, is the world still spinning round you? The Herr Leutnant has not been able to sleep since." So I suppose he knows him. Still, I'm quite sure that he has not lost his sleep on my account, though very likely he said so. If I only knew what his name is, perhaps Leo or Romeo; yes, Romeo, ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... title of Major, and all his best friends called him Major. Little did I think once that I should be condemned to the disgrace of spending my old age in a garret with crooked curling tongs, broken pitchers, old baize gowns, noseless tea-kettles, old crutches, a foot stove, and, worse than all, a spinning wheel. ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... once, a singular noise fell upon his ear. It was a sort of monotonous purring, like that made by a spinning-machine, or a very large tom-cat; and like the latter, it was prolonged and continuous. The sound was not exactly pleasant to Ivan's ear, for it denoted the proximity of some animal; and, although ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... and yet concealed by preparatory feints whose slowness and apparent prudence seem to show that the antagonists are not intending to fight. This moment, which is followed by a rapid and decisive struggle, is terrible to a connoisseur. At a bad parry from Max the colonel sent the sabre spinning ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... been born in that time of famine and flame, was the happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau. "I am old; yes, I am very old," she would say, looking up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun, "very old—ninety-two last summer. But when one has a roof over one's head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one has lived ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... its energy—a face stamped with the lines and pallor of a dejection almost guilty—with something of the fallen grace and beauty of poor Margaret, as we see her with her forehead leaning on her slender hand, by the stirless spinning-wheel—the image of a strange and ineffaceable sorrow, sat ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... is as much to say as to wander or stray out of the way, which in our English is not receiued, nor these wordes calabrois, thebanois, but rather calabrian, theba [filanding sisters] for the spinning sisters: this man deserues to be endited of pety larceny for pilfring other mens deuices from them & conuerting them to his owne vfe for in deede as I would with euery inuentour which is the very Poet to receaue the prayses ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... and martyrs! Open, earth! And hide my recreant knighthood in thy gulf! Yet, mercy, Madam! for till this strange day Who e'er saw spinning wool, like village-maid, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... those countries; it would be interesting could these early corporation charters and monopoly grants be printed, for they are not usually found in the statutes of the realm. In 1605 stage players are forbidden from swearing on the stage. In 1606 is an elaborate act for the regulation of the spinning, weaving, dyeing, and width of woollen cloth, and the same year is an act for "repressinge the odious and loathsome synne of Drunckennes," imposing a penalty or fine and the stocks. In 1609 an act of Edward IV is revived, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Then he pays a tribute to those who have woven the net he is going to use to capture the monster of the sea. The olona (Boehmeria), a shrub whose bark furnishes the Hawaiians with an excellent fibre, was regarded as a sort of deity. Before spinning its fibres, they made libations, and offered sacrifices of hogs, fowls, etc. Kawelo refers to ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... woman's advice and aid, my mother applied herself to spinning; and it was agreed that I should either drive the plough or be put apprentice, as soon as ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... chair. Andrew was writing somewhat at his desk; Althea had some sewing; and I was having a lesson from Aunt Golding in the right use of the little flax-wheel; for I had taken an extraordinary fancy for spinning, and our aunt encouraged me in it, and took pains to teach me, saying I was an apt scholar. Thus we were busied when Harry came in and sat ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... Christmas and New Year's tales. Heard a good lecture by E. P. Whipple on "Courage." Thought I needed it, being rather tired of living like a spider—spinning ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... rhythmical puffs of steam, which seemed like the very breath of all that labour. And in the work-shops one found a continuous rumbling, a whole army of men in motion, forging, filing, and piercing, amidst the spinning of leather gearing and the trembling of machinery. The day was ending with a final feverish effort to complete some task or other before the bell should ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... wide-awake, day or night, to what was going on in the neighborhood of Calumet K. Half an hour after the work was begun, the picket line up the track signalled that something was coming. There was no sound of bell or whistle, but presently Bannon saw a hand car spinning down the track as fast as six big, sweating men could pump the levers. The section boss had little to say; simply that they were to get out of there and put up that fence again, and the quicker the better. Bannon tried to tell him that the railroad had consented to their putting in the ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... gilds, were suffering from various internal diseases which sapped their vitality. They tended to become exclusive and to direct their power and affluence in hereditary grooves. They steadily raised their entrance fees and qualifications. Struggles between gilds in allied trades, such as spinning, weaving, fulling, and dyeing, often resulted in the reduction of several gilds to a dependent position. The regulation of the processes of manufacture, once designed to keep up the standard of skill, came in time to be a powerful hindrance to technical improvements; and in the method ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
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