"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... [Briskly returning.] The Drone is here! In the bright light overhead, what a stylish figure ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... equilibrium; the tide stands poised; the holiday spirit is unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the wood thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of his song between his scolding and upbraiding, as you approach the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... wooded nook on my right stands the little brown mill, with its huge wheel, and wide blue pond, and foamy waterfall. On that day I heard its drone, and saw the geese bathing, and throwing up the bright sparkling drops with their wings, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Jerry. Jerry would have to find a tent somewhere, and inasmuch as there were none to be had here at Linderman, he would probably have to return to Dyea. That would delay him seriously— enough, perhaps, so that the jaws of winter would close down upon him. Through the drone of pattering drops there came the faint sound of a cough. Mr. Linton sat up in bed. "Pneumonia!" he exclaimed. Well, Jerry was getting exactly what he deserved. He had called him, Tom, an "old fool," a "dam' old ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... hae room to grumble! Hadst thou taen aff some drowsy bummle, [drone] Wha can do nought but fyke an' fumble, [fuss] 'Twad been nae plea; [grievance] But he was gleg as ony wumble, [lively, auger] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... the hall. It was a case of live and let live. He let us eat and we let him talk. With the physics prof, who was known as "Madge the Scientist," our indulgence went still further. We took no disturbing peanuts there and we let him drone his hour away without an interruption, except perhaps an occasional snore. We were so good to him, I think, because of his sense of humor. He used to stop talking now and then and with a quizzical hopeless smile ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... lot of our restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,—change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,—trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... small fire on this cheerless hearth the fortunes of the state were discussed and directed, benefices disposed of, court appointments debated, and reputations made and unmade in tones that suggested the low drone of a group of canons intoning the psalter in an empty cathedral. The Marchioness, who appeared as eager as the others to win Odo to her party, received him with every mark of consideration and pressed him to ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... course he couldn't get away from his thoughts, but what a pleasant place this was, with the scent of sassafras and winter green all around him, and the meadow lark high in the air somewhere. There were bees in the wild honeysuckle not far away. He could hear their lazy drone. It would be nice to be a bee and fly, fly away from everything. Did bees care about things? Did they have troubles, and love folks and lose 'em? When a bee died did the other bees care? Aw Gee! Mark in—j—No! He wouldn't say it! Mark ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... will be over with him; the changing multitude will cease to have any confidence in him; and when you see that, your majesty may turn your back to him, dismiss him from his post, turn out his meddling partizans, and restore things to quiet; the bee will have lost his sting, and become an idle drone ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... astray. Through the vast forest a deathlike silence reigned; and this silence was not made up of an infinity of tiny sounds, like the silence of a summer day when the crickets whirr in the treetops and the bees drone in the clover-blossoms. No; this silence was dead, chilling, terrible. The huge pine-trees now and then dropped a load of snow on the heads of the bold intruders, and it fell with a thud, followed by a noiseless, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... are thoughte to be very nere as bigge as England and Ireland, wee reade not of past twoo or three places well fortified, as Sancto Domingo in Hispaniola, and Havana in Cuba. I may therefore conclude this matter with comparinge the Spaniardes unto a drone, or an emptie vessell, which when it is smitten upon yeldeth a greate and terrible sound, and that afarr of; but come nere and looke into them, there ys nothinge in them; or rather like unto the asse which wrapte himselfe in a lyons skynne, and marched farr of to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... squirrel as usual feigns business of importance among the butternuts, but this is pure priggishness. When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering and climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes. From somewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine among the hay—its whurr-oo and the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... too far off, and there is no school. But the clergyman is not fit to be heard, he is such a drone in the pulpit; and it is a sweet employment to train one's own children, who thus avoid contamination by not ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle that rest ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... rose up, all of a sudden, and started in to cure me of being a drone. The medicine you used was strong; it did the business pretty thoroughly. You've no kick coming at the result. I'm going to ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a small brown- haired boy, with ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... of the train conversation, no longer drowned by the motion, rose and fell in a kind of drone, out of which occasional scraps of talk from the nearer carriages were more distinctly audible, until there came a general lull as each party gave way to the temptation of listening to the other—for the dullest talk has ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... minute, and sometimes more. Silently one stenographer, tiptoeing in, replaced another, who as silently departed; and from the adjoining room, the subdued, nervous, rapid click, click, click of the typewriting machine invaded, without disturbing, her consciousness. Towards three o'clock the low drone of the rotaries in the cellar made itself felt rather than heard; the early edition for the country was being run off. Time was flying—danced away by nimble feet in the West End, worked away by nimble fingers in Fleet Street (well-named thoroughfare); ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... shamed, dishonored, quelled, To what can I be useful? wherein serve My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed? But to sit idle on the household hearth, A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... The drone of the engine having died away down the avenue, I presently found myself alone, but as I crossed the hall in the direction of the library, intending to walk out upon the southern lawns, I saw Val Beverley coming toward me from Madame ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... a drone if he were your son," replied Mrs. Brauner. She knew that if any one else had dared thus to attack their boy, his father would have been growling and snapping like an ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... last thing I had imagined, however, was that the men would concern themselves about details that, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least, have for centuries been firmly relegated to the partner of the second part. How many American women drive their husbands to the club by their incessant drone about the iniquities of servants and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for Mr. Williams had gone off with her father ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... yellow marigolds and calceolaria. The house is divided from the road by palings richly covered by Virginia creepers, and as they approach Philip pauses to lean on the wicket gate and view the peaceful homestead silently. The drone of bees and busy presence of insect toil is soothing and melodious. He takes Eleanor's hand and kisses it in the full glare of the mid-day sun under the heavily laden fruit trees. Then they pass by the brilliant flower-beds to the rustic porch, through ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... darkness—and our drive, together. . . . You are quite right not to talk to me; I won't, either. . . . Only I'll drone on and on from time to time—so that you won't forget that I am ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... education to bother about etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... you!" said the mother, sharply. "You tall, lazy, good-for-nothing drone! Here I've been up since five o'clock, slavin' for you and your ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Parsimonious Emmet, provident Of future, in small room large heart enclos'd, Pattern of just equalitie perhaps Hereafter, join'd in her popular Tribes Of Commonaltie: swarming next appeer'd The Femal Bee that feeds her Husband Drone 490 Deliciously, and builds her waxen Cells With Honey stor'd: the rest are numberless, And thou thir Natures know'st, and gav'st them Names, Needlest to thee repeated; nor unknown The Serpent suttl'st Beast of all the field, Of huge extent somtimes, with ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of the saloon was partitioned off into a "Ladies' Room," whose door opened on the alkali flat behind. From thence came the monotonous drone of a murmured conversation. Cassidy tried ineffectually to follow it, but the droning of the voices and the steady hum of the flies around the beer lees on the bar made him sleepy. Outside it was stiflingly hot. Over on the grade the horses were choking and snorting in the dust, while ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... from the linnets' bills, And thro' the sunny flowers the bee-wings drone, And white bells of convolvulus on hills Of quiet May make silent ringing, blown Hither and thither by the wind of showers, And somewhere all the wandering birds have flown; And the brown breath of Autumn chills ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... industry in the open air. In one place thousands of loaves of black bread were being shifted from wagon to wagon. In another they were piling a yard high with mountains of grain. The air was full of the drone of a great mill, humming away at full speed, while the Belgian fields were yielding up their golden harvests to the invaders. Apples in great clusters hung down around the necks of horses tethered in the orchards. ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... as she thought how different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier smell, while without all was gloomy, dark, and drear. No wonder, then, that when ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... reached his room, he sat for a long time before his open window, and stared at the myriads and myriads of lights. From the streets far below came a subdued, ceaseless drone, as if the huge city stirred uneasily in her sleep—perhaps because she dreamed of the girls she prostituted and the men she starved. And it was like that everywhere. If the great cities gave, they also took, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... and Daddy Longlegs set forth to find Betsy Butterfly. And behind them followed a crowd of their neighbors. Even lazy Buster Bumblebee joined the procession. Though he was a drone, and never worked, he was always ready to exert himself for the ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... hurt, and Casey would laugh at him. Aye, Casey would have laughed! .... They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth of ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... judge, from the experience of the dame, How hard a task it is to quench her flame; And who falls short of furnishing a course Up to his brawny predecessor's force, With utmost rage from her embraces thrown, Remains convicted as an empty drone. Thus often, to his shame, a pert beginner Proves in the end a miserable sinner. As for our youngster, I am apt to doubt him, With all the vigour of his youth about him; But he, more sanguine, trusts in one and twenty, And impudently ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... poor in themselves, and are not assisted by the surrounding phraseology. We have seen how in the Republic, and in the earlier dialogues, figures of speech such as 'the wave,' 'the drone,' 'the chase,' 'the bride,' appear and reappear at intervals. Notes are struck which are repeated from time to time, as in a strain of music. There is none of this subtle art in the Laws. The illustrations, such as the two kinds of doctors, 'the three kinds ...
— Laws • Plato
... evenings had I witnessed the tents begin to glow and the campfires kindle until the valley became hooped about as if by a million giant fireflies. Five nights had I strayed, like a lost soul, through an unreal wilderness, harkening to the drone of stories told in an unfamiliar tongue, to the minor-keyed dirges of an unknown race, to the thumping of countless moccasined feet in the measures of queer dances. The odors of a savage people had begun to pall on me, and the sound of a strange language ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... myself. They made up a lair for me with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and the rattle ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... cricket fluttered, Perched upon the place Vacant left, and duly uttered 'Love, Love, Love,' whene'er the bass Asked the treble to atone For its somewhat sombre drone." ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... noticed that my neighbour was the fellow 'Mwanga whom I had kicked out of the store. Happily I was so dusty that he could scarcely recognize me, but I kept my face turned away from him. What with the light and the warmth, the drone of the water, the silence of the folk, and my mental and physical stress, I grew ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... we read in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws for little folks are made; But if an insect of renown, Hornet or beetle, wasp or drone, Be caught in quest of sport or plunder, The flimsy fetter flies in sunder. Your simile perhaps may please one With whom wit holds the place of reason: 10 But can you prove that this in fact is Agreeable to life ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... not too late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined something deep, vastly ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... dreamy with a shadowy sweet delight, And with the high-risen moon came pensive thought, And men in love's despite must grow distraught And loiter in the dance, and maidens drop Their gathered raiment, and the fifer stop His dancing notes the pensive drone that chid, And as they wander to their dwellings, hid By the black shadowed trees, faint melody, Mournful and sweet, their soft good-night must be. Far better spoil the gathering vat bore in Unto the pressing shed, than midst the ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... there came one stupendous united cry of all the singers, and in that cry even the organ-drone of the crypt, and the clamour of the brute stones of pavement and pillar, of wall and roof, broke into words articulate. And ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... luscious nectar every flowing cell. By turns they watch, by turns with curious eyes Survey the heavens, and search the clouded skies, To find out breeding storms, and tell what tempests rise. By turns they ease the loaden swarms, or drive 210 The drone, a lazy insect, from their hive. The work is warmly plied through all the cells, And strong with thyme the new-made honey smells. So in their caves the brawny Cyclops sweat, When with huge strokes the stubborn wedge they beat, And all the unshapen thunderbolt complete; Alternately their ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... well, but not very well; the small difficulties will be got over, but I rather fear they will never draw the loads we expect of them. Still they promise to be a help, and they are lively and attractive features of our present scene as they drone along over the floe. At a little distance, without silencers, they ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... tell you the whole story, jest like it was," she went on in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a long way off. "That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin' shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a political race, and we got acquainted and he made up to me. I was workin' in ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand valves, combined—or, declined to combine—in a cacophony like nothing under the sun but the chant ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... there once it was my hap, Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap; From books degraded, there I sat at ease, A drone, the envy ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... of serious interest was going on upstairs. There sat Kate before the looking-glass, with flushed cheeks and quivering mouth. The low drone of many voices came to her through the floor. Then a dull silence and one voice, and Nancy Joe coming and going between the kitchen ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the light of the sun, And the dull dreary hours drone slothfully on, Euroclydon forges the cold biting sleet, And the snow-drifts he piles ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... whistling as though he had just come from a short walk. And the women sitting at their doorsteps as he passed: "There's that scoundrel Macquart! He has hidden his bales and his gun in some hollow of the Viorne." The truth was, Macquart had no means, and yet ate and drank like a happy drone during his short sojourns in the town. He drank copiously and with fierce obstinacy. Seating himself alone at a table in some tavern, he would linger there evening after evening, with his eyes stupidly ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... across the ford, assembled themselves together and lowed musically to the milkers. Phoebe Lyddon and John Grimbal still stood at the farm-gate, and they watched, as a boy and an aged man came forward with buckets and stools. Then, to the muffled thud of the water-wheel and the drone and murmur of the river, was added a purr of milk, foaming into tin pails, and sharp, thin monitions from the ancient, as he called the cows by their names and bid ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... conveying to millions of delighted spectators the impression that a real train had steamed out of the station, which was merely an imitation of one, on the Holden lot. The watcher passed on. He could hear the cheerful drone of a sawmill where logs were being cut. He followed the sound and came to its source. The saw was at the end of an oblong pool in which logs floated. Workmen were poling these toward the saw. On a raised platform at one side was ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... destitute. But observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical ...
— The Republic • Plato
... shadows and the rising drone of night sounds and the whispering of the breeze which was all that was left of the wind, the man came riding cautiously up through a draw to the willow growth just below Sinkhole watering place. He tied ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... sky overhead, like the lid of a chocolate-box. I liked, too, the services in the old church on Sunday nights, when the lights were lowered for the sermon, and I would put my hands over my ears and hear the voice of the preacher like the drone of a distant bee. After church the choral society used to practise in the Great Hall, and as I walked round the school buildings, snatches of their singing would beat against my face like sudden gusts of wind. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... universal hurry, no man ought to be so little influenced by example, or so void of honest emulation, as to stand a lazy spectator of incessant labour; or please himself with the mean happiness of a drone, while the active swarms are buzzing about him: no man is without some quality, by the due application of which he might deserve well of the world; and whoever he be that has but little in his power, should ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... he puffed at last, and they flung themselves down on the short, springy turf between the drone of the sea below and the light summer wind among the inland trees. They were looking into a combe half full of old, high furze in gay bloom that ran up to a fringe of brambles and a dense wood of ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... beneath it ran those ground noises that the rabbit, for instance, understands so well; but between these overtones and undertones he heard the scream of the hawk, spiraling down in huge circles, and the rapid call of a grouse, far off, and the drone of insects about his feet, or darting suddenly upon his brain and away again. He heard these things by the grace of the wind, which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and again shut off all except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often whisked away ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh," went the drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... languidly and heavily on the shore, as though sighing "Ouf!" and how slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... an old place with low rooms and all cosey. Octavia was in there—the dining-room—helping to lay the cloth, as she had been rather clumsy, too, and been sent away, and her young man was as nice as mine; and we four had a superb time, as happy as children, but Tom was nothing but a drone, for he sat with Kitty in a window seat behind some curtains, and did not ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... teacher struggling through the awful mud in gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... and then the brushes buzzed and fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming. The place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... daily employed in gathering together a little Stock of Gain from the finest Flowers about the Town, I mean the Ladies and the Beaus. I have a numerous Swarm of Children, to whom I give the best Education I am able: But, Sir, it is my Misfortune to be married to a Drone, who lives upon what I get, without bringing any thing into the common Stock. Now, Sir, as on the one hand I take care not to behave myself towards him like a Wasp, so likewise I would not have ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella and ran to ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... little—days of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red moons, and of streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed of rains and flood-time. And through it all—through the lazy drone of insects, the rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of living things ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had found for itself a new language in ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... The woods are loaded with go-getters who claim they are men of action and therefore have no need of books; that they are "the flat-bottoms who can ride over the dew." Though they are a little breezier, they are of the same bone and marrow as the drone who is always counseling halfspeed. "Don't sweat; just get by; extra work means short life; you're better off if they don't notice you." This chant can be heard by anyone who cares to listen; it's the old American invitation to mediocrity. But while mediocre, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... armed with sticks, blunderbusses, anything they could snatch up at a moment's notice; and some of them were not unacquainted with fighting. Dire silence prevailed among the men, but the women shouted as they ran, and the curious army moved forward to the drone and squall of drum and pipe. The enemy was sighted on the level land of Cabbylatch; and here, while the intending combatants glared at each other, a well-known local magnate galloped his horse between them and ordered them in the name of the King to return to their homes. But for the farmers ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... drone again became ascendant—a sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in the direction where ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... seemed to have changed; his eyes were bright and feverish; his face was drawn; his voice had lost its shipmaster's brusqueness, and had acquired the drone of the seaman's shore conventicle. There was no doubt about his earnestness; in Clay's mind, there was no doubt about the complications which would ensue ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... he was swooped to the world like a bird to his nest, Now is the drone of his coming the roaring of hell, Now with a splutter and crash are the engines ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... moth-fly, as he shot in air, Crept under the leaf, and hid her there; The katy-did forgot its lay, The prowling gnat fled fast away, The fell mosquito checked his drone And folded his wings till the Fay was gone, And the wily beetle dropped his head, And fell on the ground as if he were dead; They crouched them close in the darksome shade, They quaked all o'er with ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... walked slowly about, wrapped closely in blankets, though the night was warm. The gnats and mosquitoes were humming lazily, the trees barely stirring, and the voices of gossiping squaws or merry youths blended into a low drone. There was the smell in the air of wood and leaves burning, from a hundred smouldering fires. Father Claude stood for a long time gazing at the row of huts, and wondering that such an air of peace and happiness could hover over a den of brute savages, who were ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... glance up, and all the school glanced with her. The drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty mass of waveless ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... little distance, and, seating themselves on the ground, began to talk together, and after a while to drone some strange chant in unison. The executioners and the guards also sat down not far away, laughing, chatting, and passing a horn of snuff from hand to hand. Indeed, I observed that the captain of them even took some snuff to the victims, and held it in his palm beneath their noses while they drew ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... motionless. Over the house top, the great branches of the pine were turned to flames. The long drawn notes of a locust sounded above the steady drone of the crickets. Lydia had ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... outskirts of the village a mill-wheel droned lazily as the boys swung at scout's stride down the road. Suddenly the drone died away, and by the time the comrades were abreast of the quaint old wooden water-mill the wheel was still, and its day's ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... by my friendship, but not ready to accept me as his daughter's suitor! As if I would lounge away hours that mean dollars to me in his stiff old drawing-room, just to hear his everlasting drone about stocks up and stocks down, and politics gone all wrong. He has heard that I play cards, and—How pretty she looked! I believe I half like that girl, and when I think she has a million in her own right—Damn it, if I cannot win her openly and with papa's consent, I will carry her off with ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... the byre now at home beyond the sea, and it is not strange faces he will be seein', but the lads and lassies of the Glen, and it is John McNeash who holds the drone under his arm and the chanter in his hands, and the salty tang of the sea comes up to him and the peat-smoke is in his nostrils, and the pipes skirl higher and higher as Tonald McKenzie dances the dance of his forbears ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... after the long, damp, chilly night. The tropical forest at daybreak flings its arms up to the sun as if to embrace him, and all the teeming life it holds gives tongue. Flights of coloured and extraordinary birds rise like smoke wreaths from the steaming leaves, and the drone of a million, million insects from the sonorous depths comes like the sound of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... saying that I had worked long enough and that he should send for me. I was surprised when I received the word, "Mother, come," not aware he knew the condition. I had many hours of thought before I could decide when my voice was not even impaired, to give up my life's work and be a drone in the hive. At last I yielded to the desire of my sons to go south. I promised on condition that I came unheralded. I supposed I was going so far away no one knew me. Alas, this world is small, so it behooves us all to make our reputation without fault. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the old people were gone, an atrocious life of misery commenced for him. A dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of others. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown; and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, the soup was given to him grudgingly—just enough to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... by the hair and carried him far away, Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way: Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease. Tomlinson, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... hard to show that "There is no real difficulty under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating to any extent slight modifications of instinct which are in any way useful"! How could the working bee conserve the gains accumulated by experience or habit? The drone is the father and the queen is the mother of the sterile female working bee. Neither parent knows how to build a cell. How could they transmit their knowledge or their habits to the working bee? Every new swarm of bees would not know how to build their cells. There is no improvement from generation ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... reproves me thereupon, More sweet than Nature's, when the drone Of bees is sweetest, and more deep Than when the rivers overleap The shuddering pines, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... as a Brigade-Major's job is worth to confess ignorance at such a crisis. So, after sweeping the skies fruitlessly with his glasses and listening intelligently to the steady drone, he said, "Yes!" with as much conviction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss it ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... as he pushed the machine before him, and the next instant was whirling down the thoroughfare with the rapidity of an express train, bawling for people to "Stand clear!" In another moment he was out of sight, in a cloud of dust, and his yells fell to a drone in the distance. ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... which a sympathetic doctor was the main factor, he had himself permanently excused from chapel. Then he said to Scarborough: "You get up too late, old man. My grandfather used to say that only a drone lies abed after two in the morning, wasting the best part of the day. You ought to turn in, say, at half-past nine and rise in time to get your hardest work out of the way before the college ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... hands and walk behind. Indeed thy servants bore a troubled mind, O King, but how do else? So time went by. Meanwhile to make it seem she wrought some high Magic, she cried aloud: then came the long Drone of some strange and necromantic song, As though she toiled to cleanse that blood; and there Sat we, that long time, waiting. Till a fear O'ertook us, that the men might slip their chain And strike the priestess down and plunge amain For ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... sunshine the days of my youth went past. I still maintained my character as a drone and a dreamer. I used my time tramping the moorland with a gun, whipping the foamy pools of the burn for trout, or reading voraciously in the library. Mostly I read books of travel, and especially ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Arras;[31107] the last day it is spoken aloud in his great speech in the Convention;[31108] during the interval, it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or reports, in exordiums, parentheses and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of a bag-pipe.[31109]—Through the delight he takes in this he can listen to nothing else, and it is just here that the outward echoes supervene and sustain with their accompaniment the inward cantata which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and Miss Evans did not marry—they were too much alike—they might have gotten ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... people open their ears, and wonder who had got into the loft: they kept their places to enjoy the treat. When the organist saw this, he pushed the interloper off the stool, with "You'll never play 'em out this side Christmas." He then began his own drone, and the congregation began to move quietly away. "There," said he, "that's the way ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's song, and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... I have seen as a Raphael or a Rubens with some cheap lithograph." These modern copies are the result of recent efforts to revive the use of this fascinating instrument. A barytone of a kindred nature was the viola di bordone or drone viol, so called because there was a suggestion of the buzzing of drone-flies, or humble bees, in the tones of its sympathetic strings, which often numbered as many as twenty-four. These violas recall the Hardanger peasant fiddle of ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went to mass as to their favorite Calenda; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness, appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great Gree-gree; the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and gilding charmed them for a while away from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... familiar sounds of the wilderness—the little night sounds to which she had grown accustomed: the bellowing of frogs in the sedges, the chirp of tree-toads, and the harsh squawk of startled night-fowls. Even the air seemed unnaturally still, and the ceaseless drone of the mosquitoes served but to intensify the unnatural silence. The mosquitoes broke the spell of the nameless terror, and she slapped viciously at ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... this lazy drone upon the labours of the industrious bees, to his high content and their no small trouble, to whom his company was as offensive as his ravening was oppressive; nor could they get any relief by their complaining of him to ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... I can answer you," said the book-hawker. "I was once a monk, a lazy drone. Our convent was rich, and we had nothing to do except to appear for so many hours every day in church, and repeat or chant words, of the sense of which we did not for a moment trouble ourselves. Copies of the blessed gospel, ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... for walking. And at the end of a twenty-mile hike in heavy marching order he would casually stroll alongside some sweating soldier and drone out, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... open air under a sky, with fresh winds blowing about one. He tried to picture on that dull strip of metal overhead a stretch of green grass, a tree, even the blue sky and floating white clouds. But the patch remained stubbornly gray, the murmur of Wonstead went on and on, a drone in his aching ears, the throb of the ship's life beat through his own ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... greensward slopes to a wheat-field that is like a wall of gold. Here I lie and laze away the time, or dip into a favorite book, Stevenson's Letters or Belloc's Path to Rome. Bees drone in the wild thyme; a cuckoo keeps calling, a lark spills jeweled melody. Then there is a seeming silence, but it is the silence of ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o' the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws Of the high-tided man; skull-hous-ed asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth That broker is of immortality. Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... use, and, becoming smaller, render the bees raised in them diminutive. This is not probable, as a known habit of the bee is to clean out the cells before reusing them. Huber demonstrated that bees raised in drone-cells (which are always larger than for workers) grew no larger than in their own natural cells. And as bees build their cells the right size at first, it is probable they keep them so. Quinby assures ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... night of mournful drone, A part from aught to hear, to see, I dreamt not that from shires unknown In gloom, alone, By Halworthy, A man was drawing ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... in a sea of sunshine. Langdon could think of nothing more comparable than that—slumber. The valley was like a great, comfortable, happy cat, and the sounds they heard, all commingling in that pleasing drone, was its drowsy purring. He was focussing his glass a little more closely on the goat standing watchfully on its crag, when Otto ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... bees of the Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope with my own ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... able to rehearse My Ewie's praise in proper verse, I 'd sound it forth as loud and fierce As ever piper's drone could blaw; The Ewie wi' the crookit horn, Wha had kent her might hae sworn Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor far awa'; Sic a Ewe was never ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the last minute? But no. The organist has sailed into his set piece; the choir advances; follows the bride looking so lonely that I long to comfort her and remind her of my egg stand; and, last of all, the pretty bridesmaids. The clergyman begins his drone. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... is derived from Turkish beg armudi, prince's pear. With beg, prince, cf. bey and begum. The burden of a song is from Fr. bourdon, "a drone, or dorre-bee; also, the humming, or buzzing, of bees; also, the drone of a bag-pipe" (Cotgrave). It is of doubtful origin, but is not related to burden, a load, which is connected with ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... table lights, sparkling silver, and snowy covers of the supper room were visible. Here a high-light gleamed upon a bare shoulder; there, a stalwart male back showed, blocked out in bold black upon the bright canvas. Waiters flitted noiselessly about. The drone of that vocal orchestra filled the place: the masculine conversation, the brass and wood-wind—the sweeter tones of women, the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... the custom, a young man had charge of the meeting, and he stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper Cone, who had lost her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the nearing drone of a taxi which had spotted him in the bright pool of light at the ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... "I go there with you. Your House of Commons always fascinates me. I hear you speak, perhaps? No? What does it matter? I will hear the others drone. I go to ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the laundress now here, what a helping hand we might have of them! Where are now the two Chair-women also, they were commonly every day about the house, and now we stand in such terrible need of them, they are not to be found? Herewith must the poor Drone, very unexpectedly, get out of bed, almost stark naked, having hardly time to put on his shoes and stockins; for the labour comes so pressing upon her, that it is nothing but, hast, hast, hast, fetch the Midwife with all possible speed, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... It was almost at the full, and a few gently sailing scraps of cloud, which crossed it, made it seem to be coming towards them. The plains beneath were veiled in haze; detached sounds mounted from them: the prolonged barking of a dog, the drone of an approaching train. Round about them, the air was heavy with the scent of the sun-warmed pines. Maurice had taken her hand and sat holding it: it was the one thing that existed for him. All else was vague and unreal: only their two hearts beat in all the universe. But there was ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... with the hour, till honor and justice, truth and manliness, are lost together in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split and rent into ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Again the dull drone of the heavy stuff—the practised ear could gauge its fall, and I retreated a few yards into the passage. The courtyard outside caught it, and the entire chateau trembled violently at the concussion. But why, why these big guns? Another ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... ballad appears over a drone, as of bagpipe, through all the harmony of the madrigal. Strangest of all is the playful last refrain in the high piccolo over the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered, the periods lengthened. Kim was busy watching ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you,—because you are balked in your puny hope! Look at these women. What is their loss, do you think? Go back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy! Come here,—let me hear what you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... wild bees, let us briefly review the life of the Honey bee. The queen bee having wintered over with many workers, lays her eggs in the spring, first in the worker, and, at a later period, in the drone-cells. Early in the summer the workers construct the large, flask-shaped queen-cells, which are placed on the edge of the comb, and in these the queen larvae are fed with rich and choice food. The old queen deserts the nest, forming ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Sky Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts' top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom's space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... The lowland wind, at first a mere breeze playfully teasing the north wind, like a child that kicks the bed-sheets before falling asleep, increased its force and swiftness, and scattered huge mountains of snow, but the steadily rising drone of the north wind soon mastered the situation. Like silver grain strewn by an unseen hand the snow fell obliquely in steady streams over the land. A great calm followed. The long Dobrudgean winter had started. In the dim steady ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... studiously; others mildly read newspapers; others lounged, half-standing against their desks, unlighted cigars in their mouths, laughing; all the while the patient Speaker tapped with his gavel on a small square of marble. Suddenly perfect calm would come and the voice of the reading clerk drone for half an hour or more, like a single bee in a ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... the drone of a bagpipe, and a good supply of wind is required to fill it. Proverbially applied to those who undertake more than they are ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... much of a picture, the Captain thought. It was vague and indistinct and the drone plane was shooting the scene from too far away. But he could make out the Dzugashvili, a gloomy shape that bulked huge in the water, the planes clustered on its deck like small, black flies. But that wasn't what interested him. He had seen restricted photographs and complete descriptions ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson
... itself. It was, indeed, enjoying itself, if with the slightest of materials. Betty and Bertram Fraser laughed together; Lady Mary and Oliver ever so slowly conversed. Constance Byng and Mr. Overton discussed the latest opera, young Byng had joined Karen and the General, and a comfortable drone of politics came from Mrs. Overton and Mr. Canning-Thompson. Removed a little from these groups Lady Montgomery, very much like a turtle, sat with her head erect and her eyes half closed, evidently sleepy. It was upon Lady Montgomery that Madame von Marwitz's ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... shrieking passionately, like a hundred knife-grinders at work, is no joke; especially when their melodies are mingled with the discordant cries of herons, and bitterns, and cranes, and the ceaseless buzz and hum of insects, like the bagpipe's drone, and the dismal croaking of boat-bills and frogs,—one kind of which latter, by the way, doesn't croak at all, but whistles, ay, better than many a bird! The universal hubbub is tremendous! I tell you, reader, that you don't understand it and you can't ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... summon To say her prayers, douce, honest woman! Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin', Wi' eerie drone; Or, rustlin, thro' the ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... German—for he found both those languages would be very useful to him in the City; while Agnes was busy over her drawing-board, tracing designs for Christmas and Easter cards. She declared she was not going to be the only drone in the hive, and bade fair to be successful later on, for two of her little cards had already been accepted by a great City publishing firm. When Mr. Murray dropped in of an evening he used to have a long look from one to the other ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... him by that name merely because he was seen in Pleasant Valley about the time Farmer Green harvested his crops. As for working in the fields, Daddy Longlegs knew no more about that than did that fat drone, Buster Bumblebee. And Farmer Green would have laughed heartily at the idea of either ...
— The Tale of Daddy Longlegs - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey |
