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More "Spool" Quotes from Famous Books



... a test of visual memory. When played in a parlor, all the players are seated except one, who passes around a tray or a plate, on which are from six to twenty objects, all different. These may include such things as a key, spool of thread, pencil, cracker, piece of cake, ink bottle, napkin ring, small vase, etc. The more uniform the size and color of the objects the more difficult will be the test. The player who carries the tray will pass at ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... Yesterday I inspected your empty room in detail, and inspected your embroidery-frame, with the work still hanging on it. It had been left untouched in its corner. Next, I inspected the work itself, of which there still remained a few remnants, and saw that you had used one of my letters for a spool upon which to wind your thread. Also, on the table I found a scrap of paper which had written on it, "My dearest Makar Alexievitch I hasten to—" that was all. Evidently, someone had interrupted ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... bat or wadding Plaster paris Corn meal Gasoline Potter's or modelling clay Set tube oil colors Glass eyes, assorted Soft wire, assorted Pins Cord Spool cotton, coarse and fine, black and white Wax, varnish, glue, paste Papier mache, or paper for same An assortment of nails, tacks, brads, screws, screw eyes ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... havn't you, doctor? It is a powerful book. It tells about Moses and the Lamb. I'll tell you a story, Helen, about a Lamb that was slain. I've told you a great many, but never one like this. Come nearer, for I can't speak very loud. Take care, the thread is sliding off the spool. Cut it, doctor, cut it; it's winding round my heart so tight! Oh, my God! it ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... went for the thread, and very soon made her appearance at the window with one spool in her arms, and then ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back—oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... this branch is slid along the rule carrying the graduations, a gearing causes the revolution of a wheel, D, which carries figures corresponding to such graduation. At the same time, two feed rollers, E, cause a small portion of the paper tape (which is wound upon a spool, A) to move forward and wind around a receiving spool, B. After the apparatus has been made accurately to embrace the trunk of the tree to be measured, it is removed and a pressure given to the lever, H, which applies the paper ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the "weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but I discover, after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial charge. He consigns to me a standing job. A set of revolving spools is designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who comes cheerfully forward and consents ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined. Go farther: a case of toys: harmless trifles enough, arrests you—cannon a finger long, batteries the size of a lady's spool-stand, but the reduced models of death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare. In another case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... exclaimed Mother, rendering the smile from out over her glasses. "I didn't see you all day yesterday and not the day before, neither. But I put it down to a work-hold on us both, and didn't worry none. And now here you are, with some of the little folks! Here's a empty spool for little Bettie," and she held out the treasure to the toddler, who sidled up to her knee with confidence ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... time, and the girls had almost forgotten their joke in a game of Letters, when "Tingle, tangle!" went the bell, and the basket came in heavily laden. A roll of colored papers was tied outside, and within was a box that rattled, a green and silver horn, a roll of narrow ribbons, a spool of strong thread, some large needles, and a ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... fastened at start with a knot or knot and back stitch and finished with two or three back stitches. The length of thread may be broken or cut from the spool, but should always be cut from the work. Breaking weakens the fastening and biting off soils delicate work with the moisture from the breath, to say nothing of the injury to the teeth. Basting for large work ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson

... right, and lapped to the left, and united, and flowed into one another, and grew longer and broader—became a fiery ribbon that unrolled more and more and speedily wound itself out as if from a spool. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... I take it. She's domestic through and through, with an overwhelming passion for making puddings and darning socks, I hear. Alice says she believes Mrs. Cyril knows every dish and spoon by its Christian name, and that there's never so much as a spool of thread out of order ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... a report here on the damage to the station, sir, if you'd like to listen to it," said Stefens, handing his superior a spool of audiotape. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell

... same stuff to her innermost petticoat. He saw no good in the birch except for the backs of naughty boys. I now know a hundred uses for the birch, unsuspected by him. He had never heard of peg and spool and bobbin mills, nor of the mountain poet who makes his own birch bark books, on whose leaves he inscribes his simple songs—and, envied man, is ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... heart in her sobs. And before her, like an irremovable stain, hung that yellow face with the scant mustache, and the squinting eyes staring at her with malicious pleasure. Resentment and bitterness were winding themselves about her breast like black threads on a spool; resentment and bitterness toward those who tear a son away from his mother because he ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... and craftsmanship in America generally, but added some peculiar forms to the museum's stock, chiefly in the line of pendent ornaments. One of the forms procured, represented by many specimens, was a spool-shaped ear-ring: something like it had been seen heretofore, but its purpose had been a mystery. Several of the ornaments of copper were covered with native silver, which had been hammered out into thin sheets and folded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... spool of wire seemed to her a fruit suddenly born from her words; she had accomplished something, it was perhaps the first real ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... heinous than a casual exhibition of good needlework. Deacon Baxter furnished only the unbleached muslin for his daughters' undergarments; but twelve little tucks laboriously done by hand, elaborate inch-wide edging, crocheted from white spool cotton, and days of bleaching on the grass in the sun, will make a petticoat that can be shown in church ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... of two spools of hard rubber RR, held apart at a distance of 10 centimetres by bolts c and nuts n, likewise of hard rubber. Each spool comprises a tube T of approximately 8 centimetres inside diameter, and 3 millimetres thick, upon which are screwed two flanges FF, 24 centimetres square, the space between the flanges being about 3 centimetres. The secondary, SS, of the best gutta percha-covered wire, has 26 layers, ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla

... I suppose, from the other end; but you should see the mother begin to come in hungry again the second day after her letter came. And when a boy came home successful and prosperous, and his proud mother towed him down Main Street on pretense of getting him to carry a spool of thread home for her, it used to go to my heart to see the wistful looks of her women friends. There is hardly a family in Homeburg of the right age which hasn't a grown-up son off at war somewhere—fighting failure. It's grand when they win; but ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... the Regimental Office, and about ten bungalows for the officers, single-storied brick or rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled. Some of them were unoccupied and were tumbling in ruins. There was nothing else—not even the "general shop" usual in most small cantonments. Not a spool of thread, not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days' journey. Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches of the universal sands surrounded by mud walls. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... doll funeral was in progress, and Nell, moving comfortably about inside the coop, arranged the broken bits of china in a spool-box, tied a sweeping piece of crape on her biggest doll, and allowed her imagination full swing in depicting the grief of the ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... demonstrated the construction of many an old-time cake or pastry; the silent Miss Agnes, who silently accepted assistance in her never-ending process of skeletonizing leaves and arranging them in prim designs upon cardboard, and the garrulous Miss Sabina, who, with a crochet needle, a hair-pin, a spool with four pins driven into it, knitting needles and other shining implements, could fashion, and teach Mary to fashion, weavings and spinnings which might shame the most accomplished spider. Aided by her and by the re-enforced spool above mentioned, ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... store-room and wardrobe. She thought of the home with its bare, clean rooms and its spotless floors. She rose abruptly and went out to the rear of the house, where Tommy was playing with Europena Wiggs. They were absorbed in trying to hitch the duck to a spool-box, and paid little ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... parlor car, dining car, Pullman car, sleeping car, sleeper, dome car; surface car, tram car, trolley car; box car, box wagon; horse car [U.S.]; bullet train, shinkansen [Jap.], cannonball, the Wabash cannonball, lightning express; luggage van; mail, mail car, mail van. shovel, spool, spatula, ladle, hod, hoe; spade, spaddle^, loy^; spud; pitchfork; post hole digger. [powered construction vehicles] tractor, steamshovel, backhoe, fork lift, earth mover, dump truck, bulldozer, grader, caterpillar, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... for pigs' knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and Willie is sitting, with part ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... manufacturer of machines to weave, to spin, to spool, and to wind the silk—was not sufficiently smitten to believe in the innocence of the dyer's wife, and swore a devilish hate against her. But some days afterwards, when he had recovered from his wetting in the dyer's drain he came up to sup with his old comrade. Then the dyer's ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... Drills, Twills, White Corduroys, Fancy Cloakings, Tailors' Trimmings, Ladies' Dress and Cloak Trimmings, Gimp, Fringes, Braids, Buttons, Superior Quality Spool Cotton, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various

... work," Scotty agreed. "There's a new spool of heavy line on the shelf in the closet. Fifty ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... I set; is the babby's well as usual?" with a keen glance at the little fellow, who was happily dragging a pasteboard cart on spool wheels about the floor. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... truest sense a purely extemporaneous speaker. Sincerity, intensity, imagination and humor, he had in preeminent degree, and an English style that has been described as "a long bright river of silver speech which unwound, evenly and endlessly, like a ribbon from a revolving spool that could fill itself as fast as it emptied itself." Thirty-eight volumes of his sermons were issued in his lifetime and are still in increasing demand. Dr. Robertson Nicoll says: "Our children will think more of these sermons than we do; and as I get older ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... flushed. "You don't stir a step with it! I have buttons and a spool of thread—what I do, I finish doing! ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... with young Jack Pollock stringing barbed wire fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest care while the strand of wire unwound behind them. Every once in a while a coil would kink, or buckle back, or strike as swiftly and as viciously as a snake. The sharp barbs caught at their clothing, and tore Bob's hands. Jack Pollock seemed familiar with the idiosyncrasies ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... are your big scissors, and I told the boys you wanted them to go out to Uncle Dan's for greens, they took the buckboard, and I went to Keyser's for the cheese-cloth, and he had only eighteen yards of pink, but he thinks Kelley's have more, and there are the tacks, and they don't keep spool-wire, and the electrician will be here in ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... experience realities that cannot be treated untruthfully. To this end various kinds of hand work and scientific study have been useful. It is impossible for the child to cheat the tools of the workshop or his instruments of precision; it is impossible to make a spool of thread do the work of two or three; or one cannot make the paint go farther by applying the brush faster. It is concrete reality that can teach the imaginative child reality; in the things he learns from books there is no check upon the imagined and the desired—one ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... took out a big coil of something that looked like rubber tubing which was wound on a great wooden spool. ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... to say How idly I would play With my tail or silly spool upon the floor— Till one unlucky day Three children came to stay— After that I wasn't happy ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels

... cotton, and de looms would make de thread and de shickle would make de cloth, as well as ah can recollect we would make little roll uv cotton on de cards an put it on de loom and make thread. De looms was jes so long. Ever time the wheel would say o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o we had a spool uv thread. Ah don' know whar dey got the spools, made em tho ah guess. Ah jes caint tell you how hit wuz hits ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... the things I have mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jew's harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool-cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar—but no dog—the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... Road—which is also the direct road to South Denboro—join, was the mercantile and social center of Denboro. Simeon Eldredge kept the store, and Simeon was also postmaster, as well as the town constable, undertaker, and auctioneer. If you wanted a spool of thread, a coffin, or the latest bit of gossip, you applied at Eldredge's. The gossip you could be morally certain of getting at once; the thread or the coffin you ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... not considhered rayspictable in Tucson anny more thin they wud be in Eysther Bay, but that they are mostly dhrunk men an' th' like iv that. Th' towns, he says, is run be fellows that sell ribbons, milk, yeast, spool thread an' pills an' pull teeth an' argye little foolish law suits, just as th' towns down here are run, an' th' bad men are more afraid iv thim thin they are iv each other. He says there are things doin' ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... I was thinking how I'd dress her for the last spool in the big fire scene. Well, anyway, I'm this Hawaiian princess, and my father, old King Mauna Loa, dies and leaves me twenty-one thousand ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... Cover with a pane of glass or another plate. Keep the cloth moist till the seeds sprout and the young plants have roots two or three inches long. Now have at hand a plate, two pieces of glass, 4 by 6 inches, a piece of white cloth about 4 by 8 inches, a spool of dark thread, and two burnt matches, or small slivers of wood. A shallow tin pan may be used in place of the plate. Lay one pane of glass on the plate, letting one end rest in the bottom of the plate and the other on the opposite edge of the plate. ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... quickly. Beside a window that opened out over a house several stories below stood a sectional bookcase. Into this bookcase, back of the books, in the shadow, he shoved the little box, to which he had already attached a spool of twisted wires. Then he opened the window and dropped the spool out, letting it unwind of its own weight until it fell on the roof far below. He shut the window and rejoined ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve

... expected to. My mother and Jacob call me Lisbeth Longfrock, and I am from Peerout Castle. Mother sent me here with the woolen yarn she has spun for you. She told me to say that she could not come with it before, for she did not get the last spool wound until ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud

... way are of course subject to the drawback of having an unwelded seam, but they do well enough to wind wire upon if very great accuracy of form is not required. If very accurate spools are needed the mandrel is better made of iron or slate and the spool is turned up afterwards. The seam may be strapped inside or at the ends by bits of ebonite acting as bridges, and the seam itself may be caulked with melted ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... and said that the corn and the melon already selected would do for the time. To oblige them, however, he would take up a modest collection. He passed his hat and received a silver twenty-five cent piece, a spool of thread with a needle in it, a one-bladed jack-knife and two candy hearts with mottoes on them—these last being from the girls, who blushed and giggled as they contributed. Then he said good-by, and the Todd family showed them a gate that led into the thick woods. As the friends passed out of ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine

... go t' work an' git mad about it," remonstrated the Countess, dropping her thread in her perturbation at his excitement. The spool rolled under the bed and she was obliged to get down upon her knees and claw it back, and she jarred the bed and set Chip's foot to hurting again ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... and one little feminine needs, I believe our manufacturers can supply them. The Portsmouth Steam Company makes white spool-cotton equal to any in England, and colored spool-cotton, of every shade and variety, such as is not made either in England or France. Pins are well made in America; so are hooks and eyes, and a variety of buttons. Straw ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... her sewing and folded it, quilting her needle back and forth, putting her thimble and spool of cotton inside and slipping it in her work bag. Then she rose and wrapped her shawl about her and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... from his pockets his spool of very fine wire, attached it low down to a slim young pine, carried it across to the edge of the cliff, and attached the other end to a sapling on the edge of the ledge. On this wire he hung his cowbell and hooked the little ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... course we hadn't. And there, in the undeveloped spool lies HIS MAJESTY superimposed on the back of the Bosch piglet we had photographed outside Ypres. Isn't that just the hardest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various

... If the worm was exhausted you could plainly hear the body rattle inside the cocoon. The cocoon is then placed in boiling water until it becomes soft. This, of course, kills the worm. In order to separate the silk a needle is used to pick up the end of the thread which is then wound on to a spool and is ready for weaving. A few of the cocoons were kept until the worms had turned into moths, which soon ate their way out of the cocoons when they were placed on sheets of paper and left to lay their eggs, which are taken away and kept in a cool place until the following Spring, ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling

... wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... curly hair falling over his forehead, Tom Corbett frowned in concentration as he kept the earphones of his study machine clamped tightly to his ears and listened to a recorded lecture on astrophysics as it unreeled from the spinning study spool. As command cadet of the Polaris unit, Tom was required to know more than merely his particular duty as pilot of a rocket ship. He had to be familiar with every phase of space travel, with a working knowledge of the duties ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell

... stopped. He ran back the spool, set for sixty-speed, and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty minutes, a copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for Terra that night. While he was ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... with a number of the riveted splices on the banding. Such a splice occurs for every spool of banding used. In every case where one of these splices has pulled apart, the break was the result of defective riveting, permitting the rivets to pull out. In no case has a rivet been found sheared off, and even one good ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell

... child opportunity to experience realities that cannot be treated untruthfully. To this end various kinds of hand work and scientific study have been useful. It is impossible for the child to cheat the tools of the workshop or his instruments of precision; it is impossible to make a spool of thread do the work of two or three; or one cannot make the paint go farther by applying the brush faster. It is concrete reality that can teach the imaginative child reality; in the things he learns from books there is no check upon the imagined and the ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... surface, it is impossible to see the holes, but on calm days we waded knee-deep in the clear water, stepping carefully and peering intently for the homes of the sea-centipede. Finding one, we cautiously lowered into the hole a spool fitted with ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... I saw at a glance: the box contained a tiny, crude, but workable atomic generator. And I had been right about the wire: there was a great orderly coil of it on one spool, and the other end was attached to an empty spool. The upright of rusty metal was the pole of an electro-magnet, energized by the ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... as I made sure that the light-tight door was closed, and lowered the ruby glass over the orange on Myra's imposing dark-room lamp; she believed in doing things comfortably; no messing about with an old-fashioned "hock-bottle" for her. I took the spool from my pocket and began to develop ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... the inventor styles a bouquetiere, consists of a stationary rod (shown to the right of the figure), upon which slides a spool wound with twine, and the lower part of which is provided with three springs for keeping the twine taut. A horizontal arm at the top supports a guide or pattern whose curve is to be followed, on placing the flowers in position. This arm is removed or turned aside after the binding screw has ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... was thinking how I'd dress her for the last spool in the big fire scene. Well, anyway, I'm this Hawaiian princess, and my father, old King Mauna Loa, dies and leaves me twenty-one thousand ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... may heave the log." So Emily rose, and taking a large spool of crochet-cotton which Miss Percival gave her, held it above her head, turning it slowly, till a tatting shuttle, which was fastened at the end of the thread, fell to the ground. This was supposed to be the "log;" and Octavia, with one or two other girls, pretended to tug with much force ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May

... Uncle Lucky went to the telephone and told the Tailor Bird to bring a spool of thread a mile long and a needle as big as a spear for he had a giant customer for him with holes in his clothes as big as a circus ring. The Tailor Bird said he'd try to, but wouldn't promise unless he could send in a bill as big as a ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory

... who do not play cards pick gold. It is the most general fashion I ever saw, and they all carry their bags containing the necessary tools in their pockets. They even begged sword knots, epaulettes, and galons that they might add more of the precious threads to the spool on which they wound the ravelled bullion, which they sold." To the appreciative collector this seems ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... us, and would dearly like to try the machine herself, but every time she comes near, Olga says: "Be careful, mother, you'll despise it." And when the spool needs filling, and her mother takes the shuttle in her hand a moment, the child is once more afraid it may be "despised." [Footnote: Foragte, literally "despise." The word is evidently to be understood as used in error by the girl herself, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun

... I'll go behind the counter, and play clerk. If any one comes in, I'll go, as sure as the world! and wait on 'em. Won't it be fun? There comes old Aunty Harkness now. I dare say she is after a spool of thread or a paper of needles. I'm going to wait on her. Mr. Flutter won't care—I'll explain when he comes in. What do you want, auntie?" in ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... to the right, and lapped to the left, and united, and flowed into one another, and grew longer and broader—became a fiery ribbon that unrolled more and more and speedily wound itself out as if from a spool. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... ten cents a spool," said the customer, "and I suppose that's what it is here. If it's any more I can stop in the next time I pass. That is, unless you can ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope

... eyes. Polly was hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler, who was furious at the Administration because it did not put all its transportation problems in her husband's hands. She would not have intrusted him with the buying of a spool of thread; but ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... hand on the spool of silk, when Babiche stood on her absurd head, a trick she'd not performed before Felice. Her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... a calico or gingham dress pattern they threw in their profit by giving a spool of thread (two hundred yards), hooks and eyes and lining. In the thread business, however, it was only a few years after that thirty and fifty yard spools took the place of the two hundred yards."—"History of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... on the town-seal his device is found, Grapes, flax, and thread-spool on a three-foil ground With Vinum, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... man working it occasionally calling out the number of feet of blank film left on the spool so that the director might know whether to hasten or retard the action ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr

... for greens, they took the buckboard, and I went to Keyser's for the cheese-cloth, and he had only eighteen yards of pink, but he thinks Kelley's have more, and there are the tacks, and they don't keep spool-wire, and the electrician will ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... Luke. He knows about enough to be clerk in a country store—and I suppose he'll fetch up there some day. You know what that means—selling sugar, and tea, and dried apples to old ladies, and occasionally measuring off a yard of calico, or selling a spool of cotton. If I couldn't do better than that I'd hire ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger

... noon; though—leaves off and rises again. Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well—but I do dread to come across him again; he's bound to set us all crazy, of coarse. Well, there goes old widow Hopkins—it always takes her a week to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn. Maybe Si can come with ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... of this instrument consists of a single cylindrical spool 2, mounted on a cylindrical core. This bobbin lies within a soft iron-punching 3, the form of which is most clearly shown in Fig. 53, and this punching affords a return path to the diaphragm for the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... with a flush of real excitement on her face. In the middle of things the baby choked on a small twist spool and Sidney had to catch him up by the heels and hold him head downward until the trouble was ejected. Then she had to soothe him, and finally write the rest of her letter holding him on one arm and protecting the epistle from the grabs of his sticky little ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... of the oddest stories—odd only because it is like myself. Every character creates it own stories; we are like spools, and each spool fills itself up with a different-coloured thread. The story, such as it is, began one evening in Victoria Street at the end of a long day's work. A letter began it. She wrote asking me to dine with her, and her letter was most welcome, for I had no plans for that evening. I ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... daughter was never asked to go out and buy a spool of thread, much less was she consulted in the household economies. All she noticed was that her clothes were smarter than Cousin Marthe's, who had a real dressmaker, and was subject to fits of jealous sulks. No wonder that when money was poured into her ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... fluctuated and transpired in inflections of voice and picturesque glances. She was always aware of the effect of herself on others, and she forgot a great deal of her disappointment in the pleasure of astonishing Harold. The story unwound itself like spun silk. The principal spool was the Panama scandals.... But around it there were little spools full of various thread, a little of which Mildred unwound from time ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... work with young Jack Pollock stringing barbed wire fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest care while the strand of wire unwound behind them. Every once in a while a coil would kink, or buckle back, or strike as swiftly and as viciously as a snake. The sharp barbs caught at their clothing, and tore Bob's hands. Jack Pollock ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... don't talk that silly stuff! I won't hear it!" Miss Sterling got up hurriedly and went to her work-table, apparently hunting for something in her spool basket. ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd

... had found matches, and weapons, and clothing, the latter of thin material wound as tightly as cotton on a spool; and, as stated, as the fire burned and blazed and crackled, he felt quite comfortable; and, as the storm broke over his cabin, a warm glow of satisfaction circulated ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"

... greeted this was renewed when the tiny animal began making playful passes at a spool on a string which the dignified professor held before it, remarking, "See? Ze ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs

... some secret sin get the mastery over you, binding you hand and foot? It is growing. Every sin grows. When I was speaking to five thousand children in Glasgow some years ago, I took a spool of thread and said to one ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody

... a common corn cob and wind it on as you would on a spool, then, while the wax is warm, I dip it in; you can have the cloth half an inch wide or an inch wide just as you please. My way of making wax is, I take two pounds of rosin, one pound of beeswax and half a pound of tallow. I find that stands ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... the foundation." (Figure 1). There are several methods for this, the following being that preferred and generally used by the writer: Leave a spare end of thread, sufficient for the number of stitches you wish to cast on, lying toward the left, the spool or ball from which the working-thread is drawn being at the right. Lay the thread between the little finger and the third of the left hand; bring the working-thread across the palm of the hand, around the thumb and back ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous

... abruptly and strode back to the scout. Climbing into the craft, he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to the house and left it on the spool of the audioscribe-replay ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... the same way but so fastened that at one end they could be either raised up above the level of the first row or dropped beneath it. Sitting at the tied end her mother would throw a little wooden boat skimming between the two sets of threads, from one side to the other, the boat being laden with a spool of yarn and dragging a thread behind it. When the boat reached the other side, the thread would be drawn tight. Then with the foot in a strap the loose bar would be drawn down, taking one set of threads with it, and ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True

... and its weeping, Through its living and its keeping, Through its follies and its labors, weaving in and out of sight, To the end from the beginning, Through all virtue and all sinning, Reeled from God's great spool of Progress, runs ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen

... lower drawer of one of the deep bureaus, Betty felt as if it might have to come out again next day, but there it stayed, and was abandoned to neglect unless its owner needed the tumbler in its stiff leather box for a picnic, or thought of a particular spool that might be found in the traveling work-bag. But with all the quiet and security of her surroundings, sometimes her thoughts followed papa most wistfully, or she wondered what her friends were doing on the other side of the sea. It was very queer to be obliged to talk about entirely new and ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett

... cents. Tepid and not cold water should be used. In rinsing the mouth a drop or two of listerine added to the water is excellent. Teeth should be brushed at least twice a day—morning and evening. Never use soap on your toothbrush. Get a spool of dental silk—it will cost you eight cents—and draw the thread between your teeth before you retire, so as to remove any substance which might have got into a crevice. And, above all, have your teeth examined carefully by a good dentist ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain

... Californian slang term for 12.5 cents, a coin which to my knowledge does not exist anywhere. A dime, or 10 cents, is the lowest coin I have seen, and copper is not in circulation. An envelope, a penny bottle of ink, a pencil, a spool of thread, cost 10 cents each; postage-stamps cost 2 cents each for inter-island postage, but one must buy five of them, and dimes slip away quickly and imperceptibly. There is a loss on English money, as half-a-crown only passes for a ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... the darkroom winding the infrared film on hundred-foot rolls and placing them in light-tight cans, then he reloaded the camera with a full spool. That done, there was nothing to do but wait and try ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine

... mewing despondently to herself, as if her woes must find a vent. She would not be easy and comfortable. No cushion could allure, no soft beguilements win her to purr, no dainty fare fill out her rusty coat, no warmth or kindness banish the scared look from her sad green eyes, no ball or spool lure her to play, or cause her to wag her mortified thin tail ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... the popular language of those districts. 'On entering a house there, one will find the housewife sitting with her rock (Dan., Rok; Eng., a distaff) and spoele (Dan., Spole; Eng., spool, a small wheel on the spindle); or else she has set both her rock and her garnwindle (Dan., Garnvinde; Eng., reel or yarn-winder) aside, whilst standing by her back-bword (Dan., Bagebord; Eng., baking-board) ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various

... arena for a long day's fight against a thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save work, work, work—walk, walk, walk—watch, forever watch,—the interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool. ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... letters were merely friendly and chatty, telling of money troubles, successes and family affairs. To these he recorded a few friendly remarks on wire spool, telling the same joke to each, and slipped each loop of wire into an envelope to ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye

... gearing causes the revolution of a wheel, D, which carries figures corresponding to such graduation. At the same time, two feed rollers, E, cause a small portion of the paper tape (which is wound upon a spool, A) to move forward and wind around a receiving spool, B. After the apparatus has been made accurately to embrace the trunk of the tree to be measured, it is removed and a pressure given to the lever, H, which applies the paper to the type wheel, D. A ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... lawhounds arrived, he needed a start against the handicap of high-powered cars. He was in high humor as the buckboard was greased, a team of buckskins given a special feed and a rub-down, and various articles gathered for transportation. Among these were a spool of barbed wire and ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... remember that a 300-foot length of common iron telegraph wire has a resistance of 1 ohm. An approximate ohm for rough work in the laboratory may be made by winding 9 feet 5 inches of number 30 copper wire on a spool or arranging it in any ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... as usual," returned the same cheery voice, its owner changing the position of the garment in her lap and reaching for a spool of silk. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter

... guide-books, a bottle of soda mint tablets, a spool of dental floss, a Bath bun, a bit of gray frizz that aunt Celia pins into her steamer cap, a spectacle case, a brandy flask, and a bonbon box, which broke and scattered cloves and cardamom seeds. (I hope he guessed aunt Celia is a dyspeptic, and not intemperate!) ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... I iver heard. I learned a lot of it, and Cap knows the stuff, and I'm goin' to have him get you the book. But, Dannie, he wouldn't drink with us, but he stayed to iducate us up a little. That little spool man, Dannie, iducatin' Jones of the gravel gang, and Bingham of the Standard, and York of the 'lectric railway, and Haines of the timber gang, not to mintion the champeen rat-catcher of ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter

... struggled with spool-thread and tape in a dry- goods store at Ogdensburg, on the St. Lawrence River, State of New York. He Rallied Round the Flag, Boys, and HAILED Columbia every time she passed that way. One day a regiment returning from the war Came Marching Along, bringing ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne

... reproach for me," thought Christie, longing to cry out: "No, no; send the girl away and let me be all in all to you." But she only turned up the lamp and pretended to be looking for a spool, while her heart ached and her eyes ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool .. of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him. Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... she went for the thread, and very soon made her appearance at the window with one spool in her arms, and then ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... open doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of its handles. He passed the ends of the lines over a big spool, which revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead, and, with the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket until it came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the storeroom at the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... If I'll spin the straw once more for you?" "Ah me, I can give not a single thing," She cried, "except my finger-ring." He took the slender toy, And slipped it over his thumb; Then down he sat and whirled the wheel, Hum, and hum-m, and hum-m-m; Round and round with a droning sound, Many a yellow spool he wound, Many a glistening skein he reeled; And still, like bees in a clover-field, The wheel went hum, and hum-m and hum-m-m. Next morning the king came, Almost before sunrise, To the chamber ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates

... naughty kitty, you have got my spool," cried Emily, as she stooped down and caught hold of the thread which puss had entangled about the sofa legs; but kitty was in a playful mood and would not give up the cotton-spool at once, so Emily amused herself playing with the cat and thread for some time ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... Letters, when "Tingle, tangle!" went the bell, and the basket came in heavily laden. A roll of colored papers was tied outside, and within was a box that rattled, a green and silver horn, a roll of narrow ribbons, a spool of strong thread, some large needles, and a note ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... his name from the wooden reel or spool on which thread is wound; "bottom" simply meaning the base or foundation of the reel. The names of his comrades have no specific connection with the trades they ply; but "Starveling" is appropriate by tradition for a tailor—it takes seven tailors ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... after stitch, by hand. Madam told the workmen who she was, and learned that one had been at work six months on his picture; it was a female figure kneeling to a colossal pair of legs, destined to support a warrior, whose upper proportions waited to be drawn out of the spool-baskets. Another had been a year at work on a headless Virgin with a babe in her arms, finished only to the eyes. Sometimes ten, or even twenty years, are expended by one man upon a single piece ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... thar! Confound it! Why didn't ye tell me we were out before? Why did ye wait till the last spool was gone afore sayin' a ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... will do," spoke the papa giant. "I know, I'll get a spool of thread from the lady giant next door, and that will answer for a table for you, Uncle Wiggily, and you can use another toothpick ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis

... of the Mississippi Valley furnishes many examples of this fabric. It is made of twisted cords and threads of sizes similar to those of the other work described, varying from the weight of ordinary spool cotton to that of heavy twine. The mesh is ...
— Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery • William Henry Holmes

... the occasion or what the day, she always carried her knitting with her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove stalls ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... escape not only the clutches of these fellows, whom he now realized were desperate robbers, but to escape a possibly far worse fate. Just as he started to follow out this idea, Slippery stepped around the corner, and after he once more warned the lad not to falter in shooting to kill, he gave Joe a spool of fine copper wire to hold and when the surprised boy wished to know the reason, he showed Joe where he had the other end of the same wire twisted about his wrist, and cautioned him to hold it taut and that every time he gave the wire a sharp pull the boy should answer with the same signal, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only the bare wooden ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... the use of a permanent horse-shoe magnet and the second (Fig. 54) an electro-magnet consisting of an iron rod with a coil or spool magnet at the outer end. In either case the magnet should not be allowed to become heated but should be ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin

... surely he has found the lever, and surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined. Go farther: a case of toys: harmless trifles enough, arrests you—cannon a finger long, batteries the size of a lady's spool-stand, but the reduced models of death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare. In another case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial of pitch, a flask of oil; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... room. On the stand beside the bed was something which she had not noticed before: a little old-fashioned work-box with a picture of a little boy in a pinafore on the top. Beside this work-box lay, as if just laid down by the user, a spool of black silk, a pair of scissors, and a large steel thimble with a hole in the top, after an old style. Louisa stared at these, then at the sleeves of her dress. She moved toward the door. For a moment she thought that this was something ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... gun, an' that people that kill each other are not considhered rayspictable in Tucson anny more thin they wud be in Eysther Bay, but that they are mostly dhrunk men an' th' like iv that. Th' towns, he says, is run be fellows that sell ribbons, milk, yeast, spool thread an' pills an' pull teeth an' argye little foolish law suits, just as th' towns down here are run, an' th' bad men are more afraid iv thim thin they are iv each other. He says there are things ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... said the Major, as Gwyn went on counting and the reel turned steadily on, Joe turning one finger into a brake, and checking the spool so that it would not give out ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn

... a list of articles before you leave home, something like this: Nine yards of merino for gown; three yards of silesia; two spools of cotton, Nos. 30 and 50; one spool of twist; one dozen crochet buttons; a dozen fine napkins and a lunch cloth; five yards of blue ribbon one inch wide; a paper of pins; a bottle of perfumery; five-eighths of a yard of ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various

... because half of each one of the hinges of the wings was missing, it being still fastened to the body of the Gargoyle who had used it. However, the Wizard went once more to his satchel—which seemed to contain a surprising variety of odds and ends—and brought out a spool of strong wire, by means of which they managed to fasten four of the wings to Jim's harness, two near his head and two near his tail. They were a bit wiggley, but secure enough if ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... barn, Thinner man, spool the yarn, Longen man, stir the brew, Gowden man, make a shoe, Littlen man, all ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... the manufacturer of machines to weave, to spin, to spool, and to wind the silk—was not sufficiently smitten to believe in the innocence of the dyer's wife, and swore a devilish hate against her. But some days afterwards, when he had recovered from his wetting in the dyer's drain he came up to sup with his old comrade. Then ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... At first the novelty of working against time, with a room full of grown people, and of seeing the great stacks of unfinished garments change into great stacks of finished ones, was stimulation in itself. She was proud of her cushion full of strong needles and her spool of coarse thread. She was pleased with the nods of approval gentle Mrs. Lavinski gave her work in passing, and of the slight interest with which she was regarded by ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... said Strong grimly. "Wallace and Simms stole an information sound spool from the capsule. On that spool was a detailed description of the energy lock and the adjustable light-key. There were only seven keys in the system up to now. If we don't catch Wallace and Simms, there'll ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... fan a turning movement as it rushes through, imparts to it mechanical power. The shaft set in motion by means of this mechanical power is, in turn, belted to the pulley of a dynamo. This dynamo consists, first, of a shaft on which is placed a spool, wound in a curious way, with many turns of insulated copper wire. This spool revolves freely in an air space surrounded by electric magnets. The spool does not touch these magnets. It is so nicely balanced that the weight of a finger will turn it. Yet, when it is revolved by water-power at a predetermined ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson

... beater-in and of similar end shape is seen held in the hand of a woman on a wall painting at El Bersheh—see Fig. 11, top right-hand corner. We have in another illustration, Fig. 7, an article which appears to be a spool, which I think confirms the view that E is not the shuttle but the beater-in. In all the illustrations, too, the pose of the hands of the women bearing on this stick is indicative of a downward pressure and ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth

... the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side, Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... legs were thrown high, he was tossed aside like a thing of paper, but blind, half stunned, he scrambled back to his post. By this time the whole structure of the derrick was rocking to the mad gyrations of the bull wheel; the giant spool was spinning with a speed that threatened to send it flying, like the fragments of a bursting bomb, but the youth understood dimly the danger of stopping it too suddenly—to fetch up that plunging weight at the cable end might snap the line, collapse the ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal—when one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly normal—when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal—when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal—when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... good to us Niggers. Us warn't beat much. De onliest Nigger I 'member dey whupped wuz Cicero. He wuz a bad boy. My Marster never did whup me but onct. Mist'ess sont me up town to fetch her a spool of thread. I got to playin' marbles an' 'fore I knowed it, it wuz dinner time. When I got home, Mist'ess wuz mad sno' 'nough. Marster cotch me an' wore me out, but Mist'ess never touched me. I seed Niggers ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... bungalows for the officers, single-storied brick or rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled. Some of them were unoccupied and were tumbling in ruins. There was nothing else—not even the "general shop" usual in most small cantonments. Not a spool of thread, not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days' journey. Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... Gladys, his grateful little heart. He would have worn us all out, showing the gift and celebrating the generosity of the giver. How flattered he was, always, to be considered! He never seemed in the least to care for the value of the thing. He would cherish an empty spool from a friend's hand. It was wonderful how he loved to be loved. I feel sure, I know, that coat was taken from him; ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... cloth moist till the seeds sprout and the young plants have roots two or three inches long. Now have at hand a plate, two pieces of glass, 4 by 6 inches, a piece of white cloth about 4 by 8 inches, a spool of dark thread, and two burnt matches, or small slivers of wood. A shallow tin pan may be used in place of the plate. Lay one pane of glass on the plate, letting one end rest in the bottom of the plate and the other on the opposite ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... winding, It chances to tangle, then, as perchance you may know, through the skein This way and that still the spool we keep passing till it is finally clear all again: So to untangle the War and its errors, ambassadors out on all sides we will send This way and that, here, there and round about—soon you will find that the War has ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... woman gave her a golden spinning-wheel, consoled her and said, "All is not yet fulfilled, tarry until the time of the full moon, then take the spinning-wheel, seat thyself on the shore, and spin the spool full, and when thou hast done that, place the spinning-wheel near the water, and thou wilt see what will happen." The woman obeyed all she said exactly; as soon as the full moon showed itself, she carried the golden spinning-wheel ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... the pivot I do not kno. We did in some cases bore a hole thru and simply stick the spring thru but this put most of the action right at the bend in the wire and it broke quickly. So in other cases we fitted a light grooved spool or pulley and wound the spring around this and so avoided a sharp bend. If this was used it has been lost with the spring. A couple generations of boys playing in ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile

... the rib in position on the lines of glue. Hold the shaft under your left arm while with the left thumb, forefinger, and middle finger steady the feathers as they are respectively put in place. With one end of a piece of cotton basting thread in your teeth and the spool in your right hand, start binding the ribs down to the arrow shaft. After a few turns proceed up the shaftment, adjusting the feathers in position as you rotate the arrow. Let your basting thread slip between the ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... the old chest which held her completed work, frowning prettily over a note-book in her lap. She was very methodical, and, in some inscrutable way, things had become mixed. She kept track of every yard of lace and linen and every spool of thread, for, it was evident, she must know the exact cost of the material and the amount of time spent on a garment before it could be ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... to play. She's the meanest girl. I wouldn't have told about her. I hope No. 24 won't take the spool out of the camera, because there are three undeveloped snaps of the Villa Camellia on it, and I shall be wild if I lose them. He couldn't be so heartless. If I only knew Italian better I'd ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... rav'lin's. Here is some rav'lin's I use. I pull that out of tobacco sacks, flour sacks, anything, when I don't have the money to buy a spool of thread. I sew right on just as good with the rav'lin's as if it was thread. Tobacco sacks make the best rav'lin's. I got two bags full of tobacco sacks that I ain't unraveled yet. There is a ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back—oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... He attached a detonator to one of the flasks, and while the other two were placing the explosive in position he fastened two wires to the apparatus with steady but hurrying fingers; then at full speed he ran with the spool from which the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... which God has heard and answered our prayers, but fearing you will take less pleasure in reading we will forbear, only saying that God has been petitioned for corn for our horse, and the prayer answered in a marvelous way before the day was over. We have asked God for a spool of thread, and our prayer has been answered at once. One time wife was on her knees asking God for soap, when there was a rap at the door, and upon opening it a lady presented her with a bar of soap. Almost daily the Lord is petitioned for flour, meat, sugar, or clothes, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... large department store! Perfectly normal—when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal—when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal—when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... the least like an actor. Anybody could see by his tread and his air that he's never been on the stage. He's more like a travelling salesman. The next thing he'll do will be to pull out of that bag some samples of spool thread or patent thimbles." ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton

... watching us, and would dearly like to try the machine herself, but every time she comes near, Olga says: "Be careful, mother, you'll despise it." And when the spool needs filling, and her mother takes the shuttle in her hand a moment, the child is once more afraid it may be "despised." [Footnote: Foragte, literally "despise." The word is evidently to be understood ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun

... to perform his duties as well as hitherto, to take him into the firm, on his coming of age. Mrs. Salsify now began to regard Dick with different eyes, as what prudent mother would not? She sent Mary Madeline to the store of Edson & Co., whenever she was in want of a spool of cotton or yard of tape; but the young clerk had grown so vain with his elevation, that he looked very loftily down upon her, bowed in the most distant manner, and never exchanged more words with her than were necessary in the buying and selling of an article. So Mary Madeline told her mother, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... he could be of any service, when he was aware that Mr. Minford had hired a woman, who lived on the floor below, to do all their household work, marketing, cooking, and general errands. He knew that Pet, on these occasions, asked him to go for a spool of thread, or a paper of needles, or a package of candy, merely to gratify him with the idea that he was making himself useful. When he came into the room tidily dressed, and highly polished as to his boots, he blushed even redder than he used to. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... was exhausted you could plainly hear the body rattle inside the cocoon. The cocoon is then placed in boiling water until it becomes soft. This, of course, kills the worm. In order to separate the silk a needle is used to pick up the end of the thread which is then wound on to a spool and is ready for weaving. A few of the cocoons were kept until the worms had turned into moths, which soon ate their way out of the cocoons when they were placed on sheets of paper and left to lay their eggs, which are taken away and kept in a cool place until ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling

... of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... in wild glee races the reel round, paying or dealing out and down the turns of the skein or coil right to the earth floor, the ground, where it lies in a heap, as it were, or rather is all wound off on to another winch, reel, bobbin or spool in Fancy's eye, by the moment the bird touches earth and so is ready for a fresh unwinding at the next flight. Crisp means almost ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... shan't make any promises; if I need a spool of thread and can save a walk, I shall go over there to get it," ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... before she returned, successful. The machine which she had had in mind proved to be an oak box, perhaps eighteen inches long, by half the width, and a foot deep. On its face it bore a little dial. Inside there appeared a fine wire on a spool which unwound gradually by clockwork, and, after passing through a peculiar small arrangement, was wound up on another spool. Flexible silk-covered copper wires ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve

... moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she rose from the complicated difficulty, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... and I told the boys you wanted them to go out to Uncle Dan's for greens, they took the buckboard, and I went to Keyser's for the cheese-cloth, and he had only eighteen yards of pink, but he thinks Kelley's have more, and there are the tacks, and they don't keep spool-wire, and the electrician will be here ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... Saturday night, the Sabbath being just departed, ghost stories were particularly in favor. After two or three of the creepy legends we began to move closer together under the lamp. At the end of an hour or so we started and screamed if a spool fell, or a window rattled. At bedtime nobody was willing to make the round of doors and windows, and we were afraid to bring a ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... who left the needle, The spool and rock, and made them fortune-tellers; They wrought their magic spells with ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri

... see you!" exclaimed Mother, rendering the smile from out over her glasses. "I didn't see you all day yesterday and not the day before, neither. But I put it down to a work-hold on us both, and didn't worry none. And now here you are, with some of the little folks! Here's a empty spool for little Bettie," and she held out the treasure to the toddler, who sidled up to her knee with confidence to grasp ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... apron material which has been cut out in the previous lesson, each pupil should provide her own spool of thread (number sixty white thread will probably answer for all the work), a piece of cardboard 5 inches wide for a gauge, and pins to use in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario

... again, see if the governor belt is all right, and if it is, it would be well for you to stop and see if a wheel is not loose. It might be either the little belt wheel or one of the little cog wheels. If you find these are all right, examine the spool on the crank shaft from which the governor is run and you will probably find it loose. If the engine has been run for any length of time, you will always find the trouble in one of these places, but if it is a new one the governor valve might fit a little tight in the valve chamber and ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard

... Saint Damasius' day last past, and the tale I have to tell concerns her. They called her the night-spinster, by reason that she ofttimes would sit at her wheel till late into the night to earn money which she was paid at the rate of three farthings the spool. But it was not out of greed that the old body was so ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... shown at D. A metal contact called a brush is fixed on either side of the wheel. It costs about $7.00 and the motor to drive it is extra. The choke coil is wound up of about 250 turns of No. 30 Brown and Sharpe gauge cotton covered magnet wire on a spool which has a diameter of 2 inches and a length of ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins

... Ian crushed him in his arms, raised him, crammed him into a chair, seized a pliant rope and bound him therewith, winding him and the chair round and round in his haste—for there was no time to tie knots—until he resembled a gigantic spool of ravelled thread. Not a moment too soon! There was a snap outside; the rope was gone! A grind, a slide, and then a lurch, as of a ship ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne

... The creature was as lithe as a cat, and as active as a monkey, and the confinement of sewing was her abomination; so she broke her needles, threw them slyly out of the window, or down in chinks of the walls; she tangled, broke, and dirtied her thread, or, with a sly movement, would throw a spool away altogether. Her motions were almost as quick as those of a practised conjurer, and her command of her face quite as great; and though Miss Ophelia could not help feeling that so many accidents could not possibly ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... three feet of water. When the wind ruffles the surface, it is impossible to see the holes, but on calm days we waded knee-deep in the clear water, stepping carefully and peering intently for the homes of the sea-centipede. Finding one, we cautiously lowered into the hole a spool fitted with ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... to work with young Jack Pollock stringing barbed wire fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest care while the strand of wire unwound behind them. Every once in a while a coil would kink, or buckle back, or strike as swiftly and as viciously as a snake. The sharp barbs caught at their clothing, and tore Bob's hands. Jack Pollock seemed familiar ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... hev," the other agreed complacently. "From a spool of thread to a pitchfork, and from a baby rattle to wax funeral wreaths, there ain't nothin' the folk hereabout hev use for that I don't carry. The big ottermobile order trucks don't hurt my business none; I ben workin' up my trade around here ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... for Susan D.'s sewing, the child came most obediently and affectionately; but her thimble was nowhere to be found, and she had mislaid her spool, and, finally, when everything was found, she had not sat still ten minutes, when she was "so thirsty; and must go and get a glass of ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards

... not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the "weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but I discover, after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial charge. He consigns to me a standing job. A set of revolving spools is designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who comes cheerfully forward ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... stepped on the piece of road that had already unrolled. The Cowardly Lion, looking very anxious, followed. No sooner had they done so than the road gave a terrific leap forward that stretched the three flat upon their backs and started unwinding from its spool at a terrifying speed. As it unrolled, tall trees snapped erect on each side and began laughing derisively at the three travelers ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... th' other without carryin' a gun, an' that people that kill each other are not considhered rayspictable in Tucson anny more thin they wud be in Eysther Bay, but that they are mostly dhrunk men an' th' like iv that. Th' towns, he says, is run be fellows that sell ribbons, milk, yeast, spool thread an' pills an' pull teeth an' argye little foolish law suits, just as th' towns down here are run, an' th' bad men are more afraid iv thim thin they are iv each other. He says there are things doin' out ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread, which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over the wet cobblestones. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... ohm, and some idea of the value of an ohm can be obtained if we remember that a 300-foot length of common iron telegraph wire has a resistance of 1 ohm. An approximate ohm for rough work in the laboratory may be made by winding 9 feet 5 inches of number 30 copper wire on a spool or arranging it ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... back to the scout. Climbing into the craft, he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to the house and left it on the spool of the audioscribe-replay machine near ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... that it was used as a combination store-room and wardrobe. She thought of the home with its bare, clean rooms and its spotless floors. She rose abruptly and went out to the rear of the house, where Tommy was playing with Europena Wiggs. They were absorbed in trying to hitch the duck to a spool-box, and ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side, Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... good needlework. Deacon Baxter furnished only the unbleached muslin for his daughters' undergarments; but twelve little tucks laboriously done by hand, elaborate inch-wide edging, crocheted from white spool cotton, and days of bleaching on the grass in the sun, will make a petticoat that can be shown in ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... fort for a keg of liquor. It can be guessed how readily the Nor'westers complied; but Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked, to pour out most of the whisky on the earth floor. Then taking slips of paper from his notebook, he cut them in strips the width of a spool. On these he wrote cipher and mysterious instructions, which only his men could understand, giving full information of the Nor'westers' movements, bidding his people hold their own, and ordering them to send messages down to the new Hudson's Bay ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... earlier rotating hook the tension depended upon the friction developed between the spool and the hook. This tension, therefore, varied in proportion to the speed of the latter, and could never be constant. This was quite apart from the frictional resistance offered to the upper thread in passing over the cavity of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various

... minutes, there was nothing heard after that in Bel and Elise's corner, but the regular busy click of the machines, as the tucks ran evenly through. Miss Tonker was hovering in the neighborhood. But presently, as she moved off, and Elise had a spool to change, Bel ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... maintained their perfectly innocent friendship, and, like kittens playing with a spool, invested it with all the appearances of ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... butcher," interrupted Isabella, "because he brings you meat to eat; and Mr. Spool, because he keeps the thread store. Thank you for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... He snapped on a spool of light music and stretched back, completely exhausted. I don't ever want to see or taste a dinosaur steak again, he ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg

... heave the log." So Emily rose, and taking a large spool of crochet-cotton which Miss Percival gave her, held it above her head, turning it slowly, till a tatting shuttle, which was fastened at the end of the thread, fell to the ground. This was supposed to be the "log;" and Octavia, ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May

... page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a 'burst page', because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... almost forgotten their joke in a game of Letters, when "Tingle, tangle!" went the bell, and the basket came in heavily laden. A roll of colored papers was tied outside, and within was a box that rattled, a green and silver horn, a roll of narrow ribbons, a spool of strong thread, some large needles, and a note ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... the Tidy cow, For fear that she go dry; And you must feed the little pigs That are within the sty; And you must mind the speckled hen, For fear she lay away; And you must reel the spool of yarn, That ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... single-storied brick or rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled. Some of them were unoccupied and were tumbling in ruins. There was nothing else—not even the "general shop" usual in most small cantonments. Not a spool of thread, not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days' journey. Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... could be either raised up above the level of the first row or dropped beneath it. Sitting at the tied end her mother would throw a little wooden boat skimming between the two sets of threads, from one side to the other, the boat being laden with a spool of yarn and dragging a thread behind it. When the boat reached the other side, the thread would be drawn tight. Then with the foot in a strap the loose bar would be drawn down, taking one set of threads with it, and there ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True

... A spool of adhesive plaster was perhaps one of the most useful things included, and there were pins and ligatures, and a small pocket lantern which Zaidos at least had ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske

... occasion or what the day, she always carried her knitting with her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... bar fixed into the cylindrical wooden rollers, round which the threads are rolled. There is then a vertical arrangement for moving the long horizontal sets of threads alternately up and down by means of pedals, a cross thread being passed between them with a spool, and beaten home each time with the large comb suspended in a vertical position. The threads are kept in position by two additional combs which represent the width of the cloth, and in which each horizontal thread is kept ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... that—never gets noon; though—leaves off and rises again. Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well—but I do dread to come across him again; he's bound to set us all crazy, of coarse. Well, there goes old widow Hopkins—it always takes her a week to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn. Maybe Si can come with the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... to realize that the woman was in a hurry to get rid of her and she hastened away, relieved yet puzzled at the whole affair. She rode down into the village mechanically and bought a spool of silk and the coffee strainer which had been her legitimate errand to the village, and turning back had scarcely passed the last house before she saw the Chief's car coming toward her, and Mark, his face white and haggard, looking ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... her hand on the spool of silk, when Babiche stood on her absurd head, a trick she'd not performed before Felice. Her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... The spool was as big around as David's body, and the stuff that looked like rubber tubing looked all twisty, as if there were two pieces ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... group, strangely enough, was likely to be spotted of vest and a little frayed as to collar. You saw them going on errands for their daughters-in-law. A loaf of bread. Spool of white No. 100. They took their small grandchildren to the duck pond and between the two toddlers hand in hand—the old and infirm and the infantile and infirm—it was hard to ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... I don't mean the kind that won't take a knot at the end; what I want is the kind that won't tangle and snarl, even if a child's fingers are tired. There, that's it!" and she tucked a smiling little spool into Sara's apron pocket. ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker

... being still fastened to the body of the Gargoyle who had used it. However, the Wizard went once more to his satchel—which seemed to contain a surprising variety of odds and ends—and brought out a spool of strong wire, by means of which they managed to fasten four of the wings to Jim's harness, two near his head and two near his tail. They were a bit wiggley, but secure enough if only the ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... pal had missed, then he realized what Scotty had done. The spear shaft was attached to a long wire leader, and the leader to a safety line coiled around a spool just ahead of the pistol grip. Scotty had deliberately fired ahead of the propeller, knowing that the wire leader would be caught and would wrap ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... enough to be clerk in a country store—and I suppose he'll fetch up there some day. You know what that means—selling sugar, and tea, and dried apples to old ladies, and occasionally measuring off a yard of calico, or selling a spool of cotton. If I couldn't do better than that I'd hire out as a ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger

... she with a snort, yankin' some more pieces out of the bundle and slippin' a fresh spool ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... steadily, the man working it occasionally calling out the number of feet of blank film left on the spool so that the director might know whether to hasten or retard the action of ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr

... river to see the new orange grove, and the children were left alone save for old Uncle Pomp who was hoeing in the truck patch, something happened that made quite a scare. Hetty went into mamma's room for a spool of white thread, and when she came out there was a frightened ...
— Dew Drops Vol. 37. No. 17, April 26, 1914 • Various

... shorten the long hours of the night. * * * To the households scattered along his route he is the never-failing bearer of letters, and newspapers, and all sorts of commodities, from a sack of flour to a spool of cotton. His interest in their individual needs is universal, and the memory he displays is simply phenomenal. He has traveled up and down among them for many years, and calls each one by his or her given name, and in return is treated ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... he murmured. "Something valuable, I would think." He picked up a round drum and opened it. A spool fell to the floor, unwinding a black ribbon. He examined it, holding it ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick

... is sent by his mother for pigs' knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and Willie is sitting, ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... take heed that in thy work Naught unbeautiful may lurk. Ah, how little signifies Unto thee what fortunes rise, What others fall! Thou still shall rule, Still shalt twirl the colored spool. Though thy yearning woman's eyes Burn with glorious agonies, Pitying the waste and woe, And the heroes falling low In the war around thee, here, Yet the least, quick-trembling tear 'Twixt thy lids shall dearer be Than life, to friend ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... testamenti. Will testamento. Will-o'-the-wisp erarlumo. Willing, to be voli. Willingly volonte. Willow saliko. Willy-nilly vole-nevole. Wily ruza. Win gajni. Wince ektremi. Winch turnilo. Wind (air) vento. Wind (coil) vindi. Wind (twist) tordi. Wind (on spool) bobenumi. Wind up (watch, etc.) strecxi. Winding sheet morttuko, mortkitelo. Windlass turnilo. Window fenestro. Window blind rulkurteno. Windpipe trahxeo. Windy venta. Wine vino. Wine ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... Though nothing now was left of it but some charred wood, the place was still home to them. As Fetuao moved forlornly about, picking up a few trifles that had been dropped or thrown away by the invaders—a comb, a spool of thread, a flatiron, a book or two with the covers scorched off—she lifted up a grimy rag and tossed it, with a little gesture of disdain, at her husband's feet. He spread it out and saw that it was the consul's flag, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... kitty, you have got my spool," cried Emily, as she stooped down and caught hold of the thread which puss had entangled about the sofa legs; but kitty was in a playful mood and would not give up the cotton-spool at once, so Emily amused herself playing with the cat and thread for some time longer. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... pockets his spool of very fine wire, attached it low down to a slim young pine, carried it across to the edge of the cliff, and attached the other end to a sapling on the edge of the ledge. On this wire he hung his cowbell and hooked ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... is a small snap-shot camera loaded with a hundred and fifty films; and here is the electrical attachment which connects with the clock so as to take a photograph every ten minutes from eight in the morning to six at night. We arranged that the magnet should turn the spool of film after ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews

... wheels go round, and steam is well-digested fuel and a place to put it. With this equipment a man can put "GO" into his business, strength into his literature, virility into his brush; without it he may succeed in selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems for the multitude and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of high degree; in real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output will take a ...
— The Man In The High-Water Boots - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith

... winding thread, and it is tangled, we pass the spool across and through the skein, now this way, now that way; even so, to finish off the War, we shall send embassies hither and thither ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... questions, she went for the thread, and very soon made her appearance at the window with one spool in her arms, and then she went ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... Put a spool over the nail which was your fulcrum in the first two experiments. (Take the stick off the nail first, of course.) Use this spool as a pulley. Put a string over it and fasten one end of your string to the pail (Fig. 32). Lift the pail by pulling down on the other end of the string. Notice ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... bow and arrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out of shynph-gut. Now they use tensilon because it won't break as easily or get wet and stretch. So they have to turn the tensilon into shynph-gut. They used to do that by drawing a picture of a shynph on the spool, and then the traders began labeling the spools with pictures of shynph. I think my father was one of the ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper

... youthful affair, this Carey flitting. Light forms darted up and down the stairs and past the windows, appearing now at the back, now at the front of the house, with a picture, or a postage stamp, or a dish, or a penwiper, or a pillow, or a basket, or a spool. The chorus of "Where shall we put this, Muddy?" "Where will this go?" "May we throw this away?" would have distracted a less patient parent. When Gilbert returned from school at four, the air was filled with sounds of hammering and sawing and filing, screwing and ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the door opened softly, and the rector or one of the servants looked in to see "Jinny" or "Miss Jinny dressed for the party," and when such interruptions occurred, Mrs. Pendleton, who sat on an ottoman at the dressmaker's right hand and held a spool of thread and a pair of scissors in her lap, would say sternly, "Don't move, Jinny, stand straight or Miss Willy won't get the bows right." At these warning words, Virginia's thin shoulders would spring back and the filmy ruffles stir ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... each child takes or is given a string from the chandelier and proceeds to wind it around an empty spool or piece of pasteboard, until a prize is reached. The strings must not be broken. An extra prize may be awarded to the child who first ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain

... very far out," said the Major, as Gwyn went on counting and the reel turned steadily on, Joe turning one finger into a brake, and checking the spool so that it would not give out the ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn

... cold hen is nervous is nervous with a towel with a spool with real beads. It is mostly an extra sole nearly all that shaved, shaved with an old mountain, more than that bees more than that dinner and a bunch of likes that is to say the hearts of ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein

... of necessaries, save corn and bacon, became desperate. Salt and wheat bread were rare luxuries. In 1864 a suit of jean cost $600, a spool of cotton $30, a pound of bacon $15. It should, of course, be borne in mind that these high prices in part represented the depreciation of Confederate paper money. Drastic drafting and the arming of negroes could avail little for lack of accoutrements and food. Thus Lee's capitulation at ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... true. "Every time the dum fool goes out takin' orders," said Eliphalet, "he stays so long that I begin to think he's turned into a permanent fixture. Takes an order for a quarter pound of tea and a spool of cotton and then hangs 'round and talks steady for half an hour. Permanent fixture! Permanent gas fixture, that's what ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... waiting until the lawhounds arrived, he needed a start against the handicap of high-powered cars. He was in high humor as the buckboard was greased, a team of buckskins given a special feed and a rub-down, and various articles gathered for transportation. Among these were a spool of barbed wire and ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... oddest stories—odd only because it is like myself. Every character creates it own stories; we are like spools, and each spool fills itself up with a different-coloured thread. The story, such as it is, began one evening in Victoria Street at the end of a long day's work. A letter began it. She wrote asking me to dine with her, and ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... the devil holds the patent and demands a royalty. So there is nothing really strange in the statement that Piggy Pennington took from his Sunday clothes, beneath a pocketful of Rewards of Merit for regular attendance at Sunday-school—all dated before the Christmas-tree—a spool with notched wheels, a lead pencil, and a bit of fishline. The line wound round the spool. Piggy put the pencil through the hole in the spool, and held the notched rims of the spool against the window pane by pressing on the pencil axle. He gave ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White

... old chest which held her completed work, frowning prettily over a note-book in her lap. She was very methodical, and, in some inscrutable way, things had become mixed. She kept track of every yard of lace and linen and every spool of thread, for, it was evident, she must know the exact cost of the material and the amount of time spent on a garment before it could be ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... "Wallace and Simms stole an information sound spool from the capsule. On that spool was a detailed description of the energy lock and the adjustable light-key. There were only seven keys in the system up to now. If we don't catch Wallace and Simms, there'll ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... I guess I'll have to," she stammered, stooping to pick up a spool of cotton which had rolled to the floor. A sudden heart-throb stretched the seams of her flat alpaca bosom, and a pulse leapt to life in each of ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... awkward among the men, and particularly the old, the lame, and the infirm, were put to the carding of wool. Old women, whose sight was too weak to spin, or whose hands trembled with palsy, were made to spool yarn for the weavers; and young children, who were too weak to labour, were placed upon seats erected for that purpose round the rooms ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford

... a doll's dress in the play-room," lisped Tiny, "and she had a nice, new spool of white cotton. I didn't go in, Mammy, truly I didn't. Teenty and I were ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard

... as she spoke, she made her wheel go faster than before; and I gazed with admiration at her deft fingering of the wool, from which the thread flowed in a continuous line, as if it had been something plastic, towards the revolving spool. ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... straw once more for you?" "Ah me, I can give not a single thing," She cried, "except my finger-ring." He took the slender toy, And slipped it over his thumb; Then down he sat and whirled the wheel, Hum, and hum-m, and hum-m-m; Round and round with a droning sound, Many a yellow spool he wound, Many a glistening skein he reeled; And still, like bees in a clover-field, The wheel went hum, and hum-m and hum-m-m. Next morning the king came, Almost before sunrise, To the chamber where the maiden was, And could scarce believe ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates

... a Californian slang term for 12.5 cents, a coin which to my knowledge does not exist anywhere. A dime, or 10 cents, is the lowest coin I have seen, and copper is not in circulation. An envelope, a penny bottle of ink, a pencil, a spool of thread, cost 10 cents each; postage-stamps cost 2 cents each for inter-island postage, but one must buy five of them, and dimes slip away quickly and imperceptibly. There is a loss on English money, as half-a-crown only passes for a half-dollar, sixpence for a dime, and so forth; indeed, the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... thick end of the rib in position on the lines of glue. Hold the shaft under your left arm while with the left thumb, forefinger, and middle finger steady the feathers as they are respectively put in place. With one end of a piece of cotton basting thread in your teeth and the spool in your right hand, start binding the ribs down to the arrow shaft. After a few turns proceed up the shaftment, adjusting the feathers in position as you rotate the arrow. Let your basting thread slip between the bristles of the feather about half an inch apart. When ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... is harmless. Druggists and surgical supply stores can furnish Scouts with this soap. Being non-poisonous, good for a gargle as well as for external use, it is superior to many other antiseptic washes. A spool of surgeons' adhesive tape, say three-quarter inch wide, a roll of sterilized absorbent cotton, and a roll of sterilized gauze will of course be included in the Scouts' ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin

... Fine tow Cotton bat or wadding Plaster paris Corn meal Gasoline Potter's or modelling clay Set tube oil colors Glass eyes, assorted Soft wire, assorted Pins Cord Spool cotton, coarse and fine, black and white Wax, varnish, glue, paste Papier mache, or paper for same An assortment of nails, tacks, brads, screws, screw eyes ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... Michael," observed Barbican; "but there is a slight and unfortunately a fatal defect in your project. The Earth, by its rotation, would have wrapped our wire around herself, like thread around a spool, and dragged us back almost with ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... to find a grapnel. We bought a small one, but it was strong enough. We talked the matter over a great deal, and went to the fort several times, making examinations, and measuring the height of the wall, from the top, with a spool of cotton. ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton

... two permanent horseshoe magnets, fixed parallel with each other and an inch apart. A very thin spool or bobbin of insulated wire is suspended, like the pendulum of a clock, between these permanent magnets, in such a manner that the bobbin hangs just in front of the four poles. A counterpoise is fixed at the top of the pendulum bar, which permits the adjusting of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... 12 inches long, was used to copy farm records. The user wrote on paper with an indelible pencil. The original paper and copy papers were placed between two water-soaked linen leaves and all was rolled up on a wooden spool. Then the spool was inserted in the tube and left for a few minutes until the penciled ink stained through the wet papers and thus made copies. This specimen was used on a farm in Virginia. Gift of Mrs. Arthur Z. Gardiner, ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker

... road rushes toward you, as if a great spool under your wheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer; details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into the purple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... the trot an old nurse gives a child in an ordinary, four-legged, impracticable seat. All the better for that; the rockers were not in the way; and all Aunt Blin had wanted of it as a sewing chair, was to tip conveniently, as she might wish to bend and reach, to pick up scissors or spool, or draw to herself any of those surroundings of part, pattern, or material, which are sure, at the moment one wants them to be on the ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... a box of laboratory weights of platinum, aluminium, and brass, they and the brass hinges all having been photographed from a closed box, without any indication of the box. Also a photograph of a coil of fine wire, wound on a wooden spool, the wire having been photographed, and the wood omitted. "The rays," he continued, "passed through all the metals tested, with a facility varying, roughly speaking, with the density of the metal. These phenomena I have discussed carefully ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... t' work an' git mad about it," remonstrated the Countess, dropping her thread in her perturbation at his excitement. The spool rolled under the bed and she was obliged to get down upon her knees and claw it back, and she jarred the bed and set Chip's foot to hurting again ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... by hand. Madam told the workmen who she was, and learned that one had been at work six months on his picture; it was a female figure kneeling to a colossal pair of legs, destined to support a warrior, whose upper proportions waited to be drawn out of the spool-baskets. Another had been a year at work on a headless Virgin with a babe in her arms, finished only to the eyes. Sometimes ten, or even twenty years, are expended by one man upon a single piece of tapestry; but the patience of the workmen is not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... Bob, returning the smile. "In fact it is a very simple device—nothing more than a dozen or so twists of copper wire reeled about a wooden frame exactly as strands of thread might be wound round a spool. One end of the inductance is connected permanently with the ground and from the other end two movable wires go out, one of which can be connected with the spark gap and the other with the antenna that goes into the air and catches the sound ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett

... opportunity to experience realities that cannot be treated untruthfully. To this end various kinds of hand work and scientific study have been useful. It is impossible for the child to cheat the tools of the workshop or his instruments of precision; it is impossible to make a spool of thread do the work of two or three; or one cannot make the paint go farther by applying the brush faster. It is concrete reality that can teach the imaginative child reality; in the things he learns from ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... An enormous spool on wheels, which in the darkness seemed a mile high, was rolled silently from somewhere or other, the wheels staked and bound to the ground, and braces were erected against it. Very little sound was made and there were no ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... abruptly, and began hunting for her spool of thread which had rolled off into the grass. When she found it she stitched away in silence as if she had ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... going to run across the street for a minute to ask Mrs. Wibblewobble to lend me a spool of thread. It is so chilly out that I don't want to take you along. So will you be afraid to stay here alone, ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis

... shoulder under your shirt," Fay explained, "and you tuck the pellet in your ear. We might work up bone conduction on a commercial model. Inside is an ultra-slow fine-wire recorder holding a spool that runs for a week. The clock lets you go to any place on the 7-day wire and record a message. The buttons give you variable speed in going there, so you don't waste too much time making a setting. There's a knack ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... owned by the affiliated Bell companies. Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place. As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched into one sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... set; is the babby's well as usual?" with a keen glance at the little fellow, who was happily dragging a pasteboard cart on spool wheels about the floor. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... the rule carrying the graduations, a gearing causes the revolution of a wheel, D, which carries figures corresponding to such graduation. At the same time, two feed rollers, E, cause a small portion of the paper tape (which is wound upon a spool, A) to move forward and wind around a receiving spool, B. After the apparatus has been made accurately to embrace the trunk of the tree to be measured, it is removed and a pressure given to the lever, H, which applies the paper to the type wheel, D. A special button permits, in addition, of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... deemed he was made for better things than for cotton-picking or plantation work, and handed him over to their surveyor, who needed a man to help him. I used often to meet him after this, tripping at his master's heels with the theodolite, or scampering about with tapes and chains like a kitten with a spool of thread. He did not look then as though he were destined to die of a broken heart, though that was his end not so many months afterward. The plantation manager told me that Arick and a New Ireland boy went crazy with home-sickness, and died in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... observe the spot from which she would emerge, assuming that this, like the window-sill and my easel, was a mere way-station on her homeward travels. But she failed to appear, while I busied my wits in trying to recall which particular item in the collection had a hole in it. Yes, there was a spool among other odds and ends in a Japanese boat-basket. That must be it! But on examination the paper still covered both ends, and I was again at a loss. What, then, can be the attraction on my table? My wondering curiosity was immediately satisfied, for as I ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... lobbying for essentials to bother telling tall tales. So, comparatively few people are really familiar with star ships and the ins and outs of paraspace. Ask a starman, you won't have any trouble recognizing one, even in mufti; or, better yet, get a spool labeled: "THE CONQUEST OF PARASPACE: A History of the Origins and Early Application of Star Drive." It's old, but good, and it was written especially ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker

... was heliographing ironic messages with her eyes. Polly was hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler, who was furious at the Administration because it did not put all its transportation problems in her husband's hands. She would not have intrusted him with the buying of a spool of thread; ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... road to South Denboro—join, was the mercantile and social center of Denboro. Simeon Eldredge kept the store, and Simeon was also postmaster, as well as the town constable, undertaker, and auctioneer. If you wanted a spool of thread, a coffin, or the latest bit of gossip, you applied at Eldredge's. The gossip you could be morally certain of getting at once; the thread or the coffin you might have ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... buy dhrinks f'r th' crowd,' they'd be less casu'lties fr'm bullets, though they might be enough people kilt in th' r-rush to even it up. But whin I read about these social affairs in Kentucky, I sometimes wish some spool cotton salesman fr'm Matsachoosets, who'd be sure to get kilt whin th' shootin' begun, wud go down there with a baseball bat an' begin tappin' th' gallant gintlemen on th' head befure breakfast an' in silf definse. I'll bet ye he'd have thim jumpin' through thransoms in less ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne

... contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... off God knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings' worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot, or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour of a ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Bible—I had to see them all. Lastly she took out a sheet of paper, pressed it down on a French writing-board, examined the point of the pencil, and wrote her autograph, "God is love and truth. S. N. Bridgman." And then from her needle-case and spool-box produced a cambric needle and fine cotton, and showed me how to thread a needle, which was done by holding the eye against the tip of her tongue, the exquisite nicety of touch in it guiding her to pass the ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe

... be a beater-in and of similar end shape is seen held in the hand of a woman on a wall painting at El Bersheh—see Fig. 11, top right-hand corner. We have in another illustration, Fig. 7, an article which appears to be a spool, which I think confirms the view that E is not the shuttle but the beater-in. In all the illustrations, too, the pose of the hands of the women bearing on this stick is indicative of a downward pressure and not ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth

... an' 'tain't," said Aunt Ri. "I don't s'pose I'm much of a jedge; fur I can't remember when I fust learned it. I know I set in the loom to weave when my feet couldn't reach the floor; an' I don't remember nothin' about fust learnin' to spool 'n' warp. I've tried to teach lots of folks; an' sum learns quick, an' some don't never learn; it's jest 's 't strikes 'em. I should think, naow, thet you wuz one o' the kind could turn yer hands to anythin'. When we get settled in San Bernardino, if yer'll come down thar, I'll teach yer ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... medicines and bandages. Scamper and Uncle Squeaky hauled the cart with its four stout spool wheels. ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard

... hadn't. And there, in the undeveloped spool lies HIS MAJESTY superimposed on the back of the Bosch piglet we had photographed outside Ypres. Isn't that just ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various

... from the floor of her room, where Phronsie and she had thrown themselves, the piece-box of ribbons between them, "here comes Clem up the drive; now I 'most know she wants me to help her on that sofa-pillow," and she twitched a square of yellow silk into a tighter tangle. "How in the world did that spool get in here?" she ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney

... produced a spool of the slender, tough wire that is sometimes used to nip the buds of expensive roses, to prevent them ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... besides the things I have mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jew's harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool-cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... to escape a possibly far worse fate. Just as he started to follow out this idea, Slippery stepped around the corner, and after he once more warned the lad not to falter in shooting to kill, he gave Joe a spool of fine copper wire to hold and when the surprised boy wished to know the reason, he showed Joe where he had the other end of the same wire twisted about his wrist, and cautioned him to hold it taut and that every time he gave ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... Sabbath being just departed, ghost stories were particularly in favor. After two or three of the creepy legends we began to move closer together under the lamp. At the end of an hour or so we started and screamed if a spool fell, or a window rattled. At bedtime nobody was willing to make the round of doors and windows, and we were afraid to bring a ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... all. I mean that he babbled. Literally. Here: I've got a sample recording in my files." He got up from his chair and went to the tall gray filing cabinet that hid in a far corner of the pine-paneled room. From a drawer he extracted a spool of common audio tape, and returned ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett

... grimly. "Wallace and Simms stole an information sound spool from the capsule. On that spool was a detailed description of the energy lock and the adjustable light-key. There were only seven keys in the system up to now. If we don't catch Wallace and ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... drawers is amazing. So great is their delicacy of touch that they can make a thousand yards of silver thread out of a silver dollar; and if you will give one of them a sovereign, in a few moments he will reel off a spool of gold wire as fine as No. 80 cotton, and he does it with the simplest, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... out," said the Major, as Gwyn went on counting and the reel turned steadily on, Joe turning one finger into a brake, and checking the spool so that it would not give out the line ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn

... the boys' entrance. Mike had a deck-chair in one hand and a book in the other. Psmith—for even the greatest minds will sometimes unbend—was playing diabolo. That is to say, he was trying without success to raise the spool from the ground. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... Don Carlos's Ranch," or whatever the book was, there was kindling to be split, or an armful of wood to be brought in, or a pitcher of water from the well, or "run over to Mrs. Boggs's and ask her if she won't please lend me her fluting-iron," or "run down to Galbraith's and get me a spool of white thread, Number 60, and hurry right back, because then I want you to go over to Serepta Downey's and take her that polonaise pattern she asked me to cut out for her," or—there was always ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... man, build the barn, Thinner man, spool the yarn, Longen man, stir the brew, Gowden man, make a shoe, Littlen man, all ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... fastened that at one end they could be either raised up above the level of the first row or dropped beneath it. Sitting at the tied end her mother would throw a little wooden boat skimming between the two sets of threads, from one side to the other, the boat being laden with a spool of yarn and dragging a thread behind it. When the boat reached the other side, the thread would be drawn tight. Then with the foot in a strap the loose bar would be drawn down, taking one set of threads with it, and there would be the boat's thread caught as in a trap. Then ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True

... with keen eyes that a careworn look had become the habitual expression of the sweet girlish face, and she sat wishing with all her heart that she were something herself besides a poorly paid little music teacher with the wolf lurking at her own door. As she wound the basting threads on a spool she planned the rose-coloured future Judith should have if it were only in her ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston

... unrolled. The Cowardly Lion, looking very anxious, followed. No sooner had they done so than the road gave a terrific leap forward that stretched the three flat upon their backs and started unwinding from its spool at a terrifying speed. As it unrolled, tall trees snapped erect on each side and began laughing derisively at the three travelers ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... inspected your empty room in detail, and inspected your embroidery-frame, with the work still hanging on it. It had been left untouched in its corner. Next, I inspected the work itself, of which there still remained a few remnants, and saw that you had used one of my letters for a spool upon which to wind your thread. Also, on the table I found a scrap of paper which had written on it, "My dearest Makar Alexievitch I hasten to—" that was all. Evidently, someone had interrupted you at an interesting point. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... speaking-telephone was invented. But it took a long time to find the simplest and best way to make it. At last, however, Mr. Bell's telephone was perfected in the form illustrated below. Fig. 1 shows the inner structure of the instrument. A is the spool carrying the coil of wire; B, the magnet; C, the diaphragm; E, the case; F, F, the wires leading from the coil, and connecting at the end of the handle with the ground and line wires. Fig. 2 shows how a telephone looks on ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... department store! Perfectly normal—when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal—when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal—when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... the smiling company, I took from my pocket a spool of strong silk twist, and proceeded to fasten the psychic's wrists. Each arm was tied separately in such wise that she was unable to bring her hands together, and could not raise her wrists an inch from the chair. Next, with the aid of Mrs. Cameron, I looped a long piece of tape about ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... necessaries, save corn and bacon, became desperate. Salt and wheat bread were rare luxuries. In 1864 a suit of jean cost $600, a spool of cotton $30, a pound of bacon $15. It should, of course, be borne in mind that these high prices in part represented the depreciation of Confederate paper money. Drastic drafting and the arming of negroes could avail little for lack of accoutrements and food. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... clerk in a country store—and I suppose he'll fetch up there some day. You know what that means—selling sugar, and tea, and dried apples to old ladies, and occasionally measuring off a yard of calico, or selling a spool of cotton. If I couldn't do better than that I'd hire out as a ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger

... material which has been cut out in the previous lesson, each pupil should provide her own spool of thread (number sixty white thread will probably answer for all the work), a piece of cardboard 5 inches wide for a gauge, and pins to use in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario

... spade, pick and shovel, an ax, a hatchet, two large pails, a barn lantern, a can of kerosene, a dozen candles, a cocoa box filled with matches, a pair of scissors, needles, buttons, pins and safety pins, a spool of white and another of black cotton, fishing tackle, a roll of heavy twine, a coil of rope, and a set of dominoes and checkers. But most important of all was a chest of tools belonging to Reddy. These were all collected when Uncle Ed ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... rises again. Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well—but I do dread to come across him again; he's bound to set us all crazy, of coarse. Well, there goes old widow Hopkins—it always takes her a week to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn. Maybe Si can come ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... we are winding thread, and it is tangled, we pass the spool across and through the skein, now this way, now that way; even so, to finish off the War, we shall send embassies hither and thither and everywhere, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... prayer-books and guide-books, a bottle of soda mint tablets, a spool of dental floss, a Bath bun, a bit of gray frizz that aunt Celia pins into her steamer cap, a spectacle case, a brandy flask, and a bonbon box, which broke and scattered cloves and cardamom seeds. (I hope he guessed ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... there. Bell was one of those six-foot, low-voiced products, formed from a union of the West and the South. I liked him. To look at him you would think he should be robbing stage coaches or juggling gold mines with both hands; but he would sell you a paper of tacks or a spool of thread, with ten times more patience and courtesy than any saleslady in a city ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... "That's nonsense. He's not in the least like an actor. Anybody could see by his tread and his air that he's never been on the stage. He's more like a travelling salesman. The next thing he'll do will be to pull out of that bag some samples of spool thread ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton

... sort of chance, or mischance, get into a young lady's work-basket, was there in rare confusion. Jessie's love of order was not very large. Her temper was often sorely tried by the trouble which her careless habit caused her when seeking a pair of scissors, or a spool of cotton. It was so to-day. She plunged her hand deep into the basket, in search of the colored worsteds required for her uncle's slippers. After feeling round awhile, she drew forth a tangled mess, which she placed ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester

... no intention of waiting until the lawhounds arrived, he needed a start against the handicap of high-powered cars. He was in high humor as the buckboard was greased, a team of buckskins given a special feed and a rub-down, and various articles gathered for transportation. Among these were a spool of barbed wire and a ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... well advanced; thread, cordage, and even ropes of considerable weight were made with a degree of uniformity and refinement that surprises us. The finest threads with which I am acquainted are perhaps not as fine as our no. 10 ordinary spool cotton thread, but we are not justified in assuming that more refined work was not done. What we have is only that which happened to be preserved through burial with the dead or by impression on the plastic surface of ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes

... closes the shutter at just the proper moment. The same machinery feeds down a fresh section of the ribbon-like film into position and coils the exposed portion in a dark box, just as the film of a kodak is rolled off one spool and, after exposure, is wound up on another. The film used in the biograph when taking the Suburban was two and three-fourth inches wide and several hundred feet long; about forty exposures were made per second, and for each exposure the film had to come to a dead stop before ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... said. "Loaded with a four-hour spool. No matter how long this thing lasts, I'll have a record of it, if I want ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper

... of laughter which greeted this was renewed when the tiny animal began making playful passes at a spool on a string which the dignified professor held before it, remarking, "See? Ze ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs

... the corset-stitchers who have to pay day by day out of their time and labor the total enhancement of price due to the tax. Women who earn their own living probably earn on an average seventy-five cents per day of ten hours. Twenty-four minutes' work ought to buy a spool of thread at the retail price, if the American work-woman were allowed to exchange her labor for thread on the best terms that the art and commerce of today would allow; but after she has done twenty-four minutes' work for the thread she is forced by the laws of her country ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... and disclosing a bit of it was nothing more heinous than a casual exhibition of good needlework. Deacon Baxter furnished only the unbleached muslin for his daughters' undergarments; but twelve little tucks laboriously done by hand, elaborate inch-wide edging, crocheted from white spool cotton, and days of bleaching on the grass in the sun, will make a petticoat that can be shown in church ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... had come prepared. He attached a detonator to one of the flasks, and while the other two were placing the explosive in position he fastened two wires to the apparatus with steady but hurrying fingers; then at full speed he ran with the spool from which the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... declared the nurse with violent partizanship. "Look at the way he sneaked home, and left the other young man to get a doctor and help move Sheeley to the hospital. Yes, sir, it's time for your medicine, just wait 'till I finish this spool and I'll go down ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... and my easel, was a mere way-station on her homeward travels. But she failed to appear, while I busied my wits in trying to recall which particular item in the collection had a hole in it. Yes, there was a spool among other odds and ends in a Japanese boat-basket. That must be it! But on examination the paper still covered both ends, and I was again at a loss. What, then, can be the attraction on my table? My wondering curiosity ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... invention relates to improvements in sewing machines, and consists in certain improvements in mechanism for forming the loop, and for conveying the binding thread through the same, in a manner to prevent the contact of the binding thread spool, or its carrier, with the thread of the needle, and thereby to avoid wearing the same, and to produce more easily operating parts; also, a secure, permanent, and reliable arrangement of apparatus, and calculated also to be more ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... quarters of pork went into the brine-tub; from a beam in the shed there hung the side of a fat heifer-the other half sold to people in Honfleur-which the cold would keep fresh till spring; sacks of flour were piled in a corner of the house, and Tit'Be, provided with a spool of brass wire, set himself to making ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon

... Yarn is wound on bobbins on the ring or mule spinning frame. These bobbins are transferred to a machine called a spooler where the yarn is re-wound on a spool preparatory to ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... a whole spool of cotton," said Mary. And, so saying, she held up in her hand the spool, to the thread of which she ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott

... novelty of working against time, with a room full of grown people, and of seeing the great stacks of unfinished garments change into great stacks of finished ones, was stimulation in itself. She was proud of her cushion full of strong needles and her spool of coarse thread. She was pleased with the nods of approval gentle Mrs. Lavinski gave her work in passing, and of the slight interest with which she was ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... dollars and forty cents in two weeks, but was denied permission to take them in when done, though urgently needing her pay, being told that she would be making too much money. Another made vests with ten button-holes and three pockets for fifteen cents, furnishing her own cotton at twenty cents a spool. A third, whose husband was then in the army, found the price of infantry-pantaloons reduced from forty-two to twenty-seven cents,—reduced by the Government itself,—but she made eight pair a week, took care of five children, and was always on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... her wrist bag and opened it, but discovered only some money, a handkerchief, a spool of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... covered his entire face. Through its round eye plates he looked at the others who crowded about him. Grotesque, almost ludicrous—twenty men, armed with clumsy sub-machine guns; the others would follow later. A searchlight was on a tripod at the center, and a spool of ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... by sawing off the end of a large spool and sticking a match or small stick through the hole in the centre. Four concentric circles are drawn upon a sheet of paper which should be about twelve inches square. Inside of the smallest circle, which should have a diameter of 2 inches, the number 20 ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper

... through, imparts to it mechanical power. The shaft set in motion by means of this mechanical power is, in turn, belted to the pulley of a dynamo. This dynamo consists, first, of a shaft on which is placed a spool, wound in a curious way, with many turns of insulated copper wire. This spool revolves freely in an air space surrounded by electric magnets. The spool does not touch these magnets. It is so nicely balanced that the weight of a finger will turn ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson

... mother for pigs' knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and Willie is sitting, with part of his trousers torn away by ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... flitting. Light forms darted up and down the stairs and past the windows, appearing now at the back, now at the front of the house, with a picture, or a postage stamp, or a dish, or a penwiper, or a pillow, or a basket, or a spool. The chorus of "Where shall we put this, Muddy?" "Where will this go?" "May we throw this away?" would have distracted a less patient parent. When Gilbert returned from school at four, the air was filled with sounds of hammering and ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... grateful little heart. He would have worn us all out, showing the gift and celebrating the generosity of the giver. How flattered he was, always, to be considered! He never seemed in the least to care for the value of the thing. He would cherish an empty spool from a friend's hand. It was wonderful how he loved to be loved. I feel sure, I know, that coat was taken from him; ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... go out to Uncle Dan's for greens, they took the buckboard, and I went to Keyser's for the cheese-cloth, and he had only eighteen yards of pink, but he thinks Kelley's have more, and there are the tacks, and they don't keep spool-wire, and the electrician will be here in ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... at 'Cooerdinates Division!'" Beardsley laughed, making a minor joke of it. "Now here," he touched a spool labelled in red, "is your Basic Invariant. Carmack—Amos T. Murdered man. Found bludgeoned in library of his home, night of April 4. Age 56, held all outstanding patents on ECAIAC, worth millions, and"—he ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse

... tram car, trolley car; box car, box wagon; horse car [U.S.]; bullet train, shinkansen [Jap.], cannonball, the Wabash cannonball, lightning express; luggage van; mail, mail car, mail van. shovel, spool, spatula, ladle, hod, hoe; spade, spaddle^, loy^; spud; pitchfork; post hole digger. [powered construction vehicles] tractor, steamshovel, backhoe, fork lift, earth mover, dump truck, bulldozer, grader, caterpillar, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Here is some rav'lin's I use. I pull that out of tobacco sacks, flour sacks, anything, when I don't have the money to buy a spool of thread. I sew right on just as good with the rav'lin's as if it was thread. Tobacco sacks make the best rav'lin's. I got two bags full of tobacco sacks that I ain't unraveled yet. There is a man down town who saves them for me. When a man pulls out a sack he ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... tongues stuck up, gigantic, joyously bright, and lapped to the right, and lapped to the left, and united, and flowed into one another, and grew longer and broader—became a fiery ribbon that unrolled more and more and speedily wound itself out as if from a spool. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... crochet needle into her spool. "I usually dip my smelts in bread crumbs. Have you ever tried them ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... and strode back to the scout. Climbing into the craft, he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to the house and left it on the spool of the audioscribe-replay ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... car. Even Madaline forgot her own timidity, and seeing a switch button for what she thought to be lights, she crossed to the corner and quickly pressed a tiny button. As she did so she felt something like a wire with a spool attached, and almost unconsciously she gave the spool a yank. Instantly a flood of light of marvelous brilliancy engulfed ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis

... fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest care while the strand of wire unwound behind them. Every once in a while a coil would kink, or buckle back, or strike as swiftly and as viciously as a snake. The sharp barbs caught at their clothing, and tore Bob's hands. Jack Pollock seemed familiar with the idiosyncrasies of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... [Nat], can you give us a declamation?" and Nat was never known to refuse. He always had one at his tongue's end, which would roll off, at his bidding, as easily as thread unwinds from a spool. ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... could be of any service, when he was aware that Mr. Minford had hired a woman, who lived on the floor below, to do all their household work, marketing, cooking, and general errands. He knew that Pet, on these occasions, asked him to go for a spool of thread, or a paper of needles, or a package of candy, merely to gratify him with the idea that he was making himself useful. When he came into the room tidily dressed, and highly polished as to his boots, he blushed even redder than he used to. It was not the acquisition of a little money by ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... headache (to adopt a suggestion of GILBERT's), When too freely you've dined, or too heavily wined, or munched too many walnuts or filberts; When your brain is a maze, and creation a haze, then each queer social craze—there are many!— Gets your wits in a spool, and there isn't a fool for your thoughts would ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various

... giggled Delia. Gypsy, all in a flutter at having her name read right out in school, and divided between her horror lest the kitten she had tied to a spool of thread at recess, had been discovered, and an awful suspicion that Mr. Jonathan Jones saw her run across his plowed field after chestnuts, went slowly ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side, Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied and ill-behaved ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... Benton rose on a stump and semaphored with his arms. The engineer whistled answer and stood to his levers; the main line began to spool slowly in on the drum. Another signal, and he shut off. Another signal, after a brief wait, and the drum rolled faster, the line tautened like a fiddle-string, and the ponderous machine vibrated with the strain ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... with spool-thread and tape in a dry- goods store at Ogdensburg, on the St. Lawrence River, State of New York. He Rallied Round the Flag, Boys, and HAILED Columbia every time she passed that way. One day a regiment returning from the war Came Marching Along, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne

... in the darkroom winding the infrared film on hundred-foot rolls and placing them in light-tight cans, then he reloaded the camera with a full spool. That done, there was nothing to do but wait and try ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine

... Isabella, "because he brings you meat to eat; and Mr. Spool, because he keeps the thread store. Thank you for putting me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... concerns her. They called her the night-spinster, by reason that she ofttimes would sit at her wheel till late into the night to earn money which she was paid at the rate of three farthings the spool. But it was not out of greed that the old body was so ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... morning, their house had stood. Though nothing now was left of it but some charred wood, the place was still home to them. As Fetuao moved forlornly about, picking up a few trifles that had been dropped or thrown away by the invaders—a comb, a spool of thread, a flatiron, a book or two with the covers scorched off—she lifted up a grimy rag and tossed it, with a little gesture of disdain, at her husband's feet. He spread it out and saw that it was the consul's flag, the flag he had flown above his house with such confidence in its ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... where everything was sold, from a nail or a spool of 'slack' to a keg of spirits or an almanac: sold for money when it could be had, for flour or wool or potash when it couldn't; likewise a post-office, whither a stage came once a week with an odd passenger, or an odd dozen ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... newcomer said, her eyes glued on Max Kirschner. "I was just passin' by on my way to the depot and I remembered that I needed a spool ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass

... long you can keep them. Let me count two hearts, four red fishes, three barley-sugar horses, nine almonds, and a dozen chocolate drops. Do you agree to that?" asked sly Mrs. Jo, popping the sweeties into her little spool-bag. ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... scientific management. Nothing in the factory was ever where anyone could find it. It almost drove me crazy. What was my joy then when one day the boss told me to put the spools in order. There was a mess of every-colored spool, mixed with every other color, tangled ends, dust, buttons, loose snappers, more dust, beads, more spools, more dust. A certain color was wanted by a stitcher. There was nothing to do but paw. The spool, like as not, would be so dusty it would take ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... sewing and folded it, quilting her needle back and forth, putting her thimble and spool of cotton inside and slipping it in her work bag. Then she rose and wrapped her shawl about her and tied on ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... returned the same cheery voice, its owner changing the position of the garment in her lap and reaching for a spool of silk. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter

... around the room. On the stand beside the bed was something which she had not noticed before: a little old-fashioned work-box with a picture of a little boy in a pinafore on the top. Beside this work-box lay, as if just laid down by the user, a spool of black silk, a pair of scissors, and a large steel thimble with a hole in the top, after an old style. Louisa stared at these, then at the sleeves of her dress. She moved toward the door. For a moment she thought that this was something legitimate about which she might demand ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... make any promises; if I need a spool of thread and can save a walk, I shall go over there to get it," ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... pretty regular, I suppose, from the other end; but you should see the mother begin to come in hungry again the second day after her letter came. And when a boy came home successful and prosperous, and his proud mother towed him down Main Street on pretense of getting him to carry a spool of thread home for her, it used to go to my heart to see the wistful looks of her women friends. There is hardly a family in Homeburg of the right age which hasn't a grown-up son off at war somewhere—fighting failure. It's grand when they win; ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... other who is so small in the flanks was Michael Scott,[2] who verily knew the game of magical deceptions. See Guido Bonatti,[3] see Asdente,[4] who now would wish he had attended to his leather and his thread, but late repents. See the forlorn women who left the needle, the spool, and the spindle, and became fortune-tellers; they wrought spells with herb and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... permanent horseshoe magnets, fixed parallel with each other and an inch apart. A very thin spool or bobbin of insulated wire is suspended, like the pendulum of a clock, between these permanent magnets, in such a manner that the bobbin hangs just in front of the four poles. A counterpoise is fixed at the top of the pendulum bar, which permits ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... say How idly I would play With my tail or silly spool upon the floor— Till one unlucky day Three children came to stay— After that I wasn't happy ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels

... launch across the river to see the new orange grove, and the children were left alone save for old Uncle Pomp who was hoeing in the truck patch, something happened that made quite a scare. Hetty went into mamma's room for a spool of white thread, and when she came out there was a frightened ...
— Dew Drops Vol. 37. No. 17, April 26, 1914 • Various

... carrying the graduations, a gearing causes the revolution of a wheel, D, which carries figures corresponding to such graduation. At the same time, two feed rollers, E, cause a small portion of the paper tape (which is wound upon a spool, A) to move forward and wind around a receiving spool, B. After the apparatus has been made accurately to embrace the trunk of the tree to be measured, it is removed and a pressure given to the lever, H, which applies the paper to the type wheel, D. A special button permits, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of its handles. He passed the ends of the lines over a big spool, which revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead, and, with the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket until it came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the storeroom at the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... "The Home" the matron had given her a little needle-book containing a spool of thread and thimble for a good-by present. These now came into good play. She used the lamp shears to ...
— The Potato Child and Others • Mrs. Charles J. Woodbury

... it can be warped. The spooler is a simple machine, but one that requires constant attendance. In the spooler, bobbins are placed upon holders or spindles, and the thread is passed over a series of guides to the spool, up above. The spool revolves at a high rate of speed, and the thread is wound evenly upon it. The operator must watch for broken threads, retie them, replace the empty bobbins by full ones and see that the empty ones are gathered up uninjured. She—the operator is usually ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous

... or rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled. Some of them were unoccupied and were tumbling in ruins. There was nothing else—not even the "general shop" usual in most small cantonments. Not a spool of thread, not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days' journey. Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches of the universal sands surrounded by mud walls. No flowers, no trees, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... thought his pal had missed, then he realized what Scotty had done. The spear shaft was attached to a long wire leader, and the leader to a safety line coiled around a spool just ahead of the pistol grip. Scotty had deliberately fired ahead of the propeller, knowing that the wire leader would be caught and ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... not like to refuse this request, although at home he was not allowed to enter his mother's kitchen; so the giant carried him in and placed him on a high shelf, where Fiddlecumdoo seated himself on a spool of thread and began to ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum

... laughing and its weeping, Through its living and its keeping, Through its follies and its labors, weaving in and out of sight, To the end from the beginning, Through all virtue and all sinning, Reeled from God's great spool of Progress, runs the golden ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen

... the merchants sold a calico or gingham dress pattern they threw in their profit by giving a spool of thread (two hundred yards), hooks and eyes and lining. In the thread business, however, it was only a few years after that thirty and fifty yard spools took the place of the two hundred yards."—"History of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... 53) shows the use of a permanent horse-shoe magnet and the second (Fig. 54) an electro-magnet consisting of an iron rod with a coil or spool magnet at the outer end. In either case the magnet should not be allowed to become heated ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin

... public square in the middle of the village you will see a big roundhouse. If you take the top off the roundhouse you will see a big spool with a long string winding ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg

... pottery of the Mississippi Valley furnishes many examples of this fabric. It is made of twisted cords and threads of sizes similar to those of the other work described, varying from the weight of ordinary spool cotton to that of heavy twine. The ...
— Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery • William Henry Holmes

... corkscrew, a box of matches, a paper-covered copy of a book entitled "Mary, the Beautiful Mill-Hand," a bottle of embrocation, a spool of cotton, two pencil-stubs, and other useful and entertaining objects. It contained, in fact, almost everything except a paint-splashed shoe, and Baxter gazed at the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... minutes after she had helped Duncan unpack, Hetty had to run downtown to buy a spool ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... forgotten their joke in a game of Letters, when "Tingle, tangle!" went the bell, and the basket came in heavily laden. A roll of colored papers was tied outside, and within was a box that rattled, a green and silver horn, a roll of narrow ribbons, a spool of strong thread, some large needles, and ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... stands watching us, and would dearly like to try the machine herself, but every time she comes near, Olga says: "Be careful, mother, you'll despise it." And when the spool needs filling, and her mother takes the shuttle in her hand a moment, the child is once more afraid it may be "despised." [Footnote: Foragte, literally "despise." The word is evidently to be understood as used in error by the girl herself, in place of some equivalent ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun

... off abruptly, and began hunting for her spool of thread which had rolled off into the grass. When she found it she stitched away in silence as if she ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back—oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... the man working it occasionally calling out the number of feet of blank film left on the spool so that the director might know whether to hasten or retard the action of ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr

... little shawl of dingy brick-dust hue about her shoulders. No matter what the occasion or what the day, she always carried her knitting with her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... inches long, was used to copy farm records. The user wrote on paper with an indelible pencil. The original paper and copy papers were placed between two water-soaked linen leaves and all was rolled up on a wooden spool. Then the spool was inserted in the tube and left for a few minutes until the penciled ink stained through the wet papers and thus made copies. This specimen was used on a farm in Virginia. Gift of Mrs. Arthur ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker

... evenings she spun and wove down in their cabin. Aunt Arrie added "an' I did love to hear that old spinnin' wheel. It made a low kind of a whirring sound that made me sleepy." She said her mother, with all the other negro women on the place, had "a task of spinnin' a spool at night", and they spun and wove on rainy days too. "Ma made our clothes an' we had pretty dresses too. She dyed some blue and brown striped. We growed the indigo she used fer the blue, right dar on the plantation, and she used bark and leaves to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... Then he remembered, and picked up one of the reels at random. "There's a clamp here just the right size to hold one of these," he explained, fitting the ribbon into place and threading its free end into a loop on a spool which looked as though made for it. But his excitement had passed; he now cautiously set a small anvil between himself and the apparatus, and then, with the aid of a long stick, he ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... rendering the smile from out over her glasses. "I didn't see you all day yesterday and not the day before, neither. But I put it down to a work-hold on us both, and didn't worry none. And now here you are, with some of the little folks! Here's a empty spool for little Bettie," and she held out the treasure to the toddler, who sidled up to her knee with confidence to ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... are winding, It chances to tangle, then, as perchance you may know, through the skein This way and that still the spool we keep passing till it is finally clear all again: So to untangle the War and its errors, ambassadors out on all sides we will send This way and that, here, there and round about—soon you will find that the ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... heard and answered our prayers, but fearing you will take less pleasure in reading we will forbear, only saying that God has been petitioned for corn for our horse, and the prayer answered in a marvelous way before the day was over. We have asked God for a spool of thread, and our prayer has been answered at once. One time wife was on her knees asking God for soap, when there was a rap at the door, and upon opening it a lady presented her with a bar of soap. Almost daily ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... home with its bare, clean rooms and its spotless floors. She rose abruptly and went out to the rear of the house, where Tommy was playing with Europena Wiggs. They were absorbed in trying to hitch the duck to a spool-box, and paid ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... write, with a flush of real excitement on her face. In the middle of things the baby choked on a small twist spool and Sidney had to catch him up by the heels and hold him head downward until the trouble was ejected. Then she had to soothe him, and finally write the rest of her letter holding him on one arm and protecting the epistle from the grabs of his ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... begin at once, for time pressed. The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... within reasonable limits." He showed photographs of a box of laboratory weights of platinum, aluminum, and brass, they and the brass hinges all having been photographed from a closed box, without any indication of the box. Also a photograph of a coil of fine wire, wound on a wooden spool, the wire having been photographed, and the wood omitted. "The rays," he continued, "passed through all the metals tested, with a facility varying, roughly speaking, with the density of the metal. These phenomena I have discussed carefully ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... casements with instinctive longing for the outdoor air which could not of course enter through the glass; or plodded their monotonous rounds to tend the frames and see that the thread was running properly to each spool, and that the spools ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke









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