"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dawn we rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until the noon hour; then there was the long march back from ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. Drown droni. Drown (trans.) dronigi. Drowsy dorma. Drub (beat) bati. Drudge laboregi. Drug ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... An Ignis Fatuus, that bewitches And leads men into pools and ditches, 510 To make them dip themselves, and sound For Christendom in dirty pond To dive like wild-fowl for salvation, And fish to catch regeneration. This light inspires and plays upon 515 The nose of Saint like bag-pipe drone, And speaks through hollow empty soul, As through a trunk, or whisp'ring hole, Such language as no mortal ear But spirit'al eaves-droppers can hear: 520 So PHOEBUS, or some friendly muse, Into small poets song infuse, Which they ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... surely shall accomplish, 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 the common good, and then reach out to share the fruits ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... then into the road by which they should come. The night was fine, but overcast by light clouds of grey mist, through which the moon pierced but very faintly. More than once her hopes were raised by the sound of hoofs, and dashed to the ground by the drone of wheels or by the appearance of a fat farmer jogging home. She asked more than one if they had seen a man on a brown horse and two children on ponies, but they only answered "no," and wished her civilly good night. In this way the rumour passed ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... who, being asked who they were, gave in these names, and professed to be devils, that, compelled by the order of the court, delivered a constrained testimony. The sentence was accordingly executed, and Grandier met his fate with heroic constancy. At his death an enormous drone fly was seen buzzing about his head; and a monk, who was present at the execution, attested that, whereas the devils are accustomed to present themselves in the article of death to tempt men to deny God their Saviour, this was Beelzebub, which in ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... run warm on the waves of the grass that lifts like a scented sea. No sound of the surf, no sob of the tides; but the drone of the drowsy bee Is drawing me out from the purple shades to wade in the daffodils, Where the long green billows go drifting by to lap ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... 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
... order himself; but his life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only—or being believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must utter or die—nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither head ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "But it's not true," he whispered ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... 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
... insert the word "droning" or "drony;" but among his Illustrations attached to the verb "to drone," there are two from Dryden, each, it may be seen, using the word "droning." There is no quotation containing the word ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 49, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1850 • Various
... do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill them; and that is all they are fit for. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... unfamiliar noises of night in the wilderness—the long, nameless note of a distant coyote; the stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees; strange cries of night birds, so different from those of the birds of day; the drone of great blundering beetles, and all that mysterious chorus of small sounds that seem always to have been but half heard when they have suddenly ceased, as if conscious of an indiscretion. But nothing of all this was noted in that company; ...
— The Damned Thing - 1898, From "In the Midst of Life" • Ambrose Bierce
... minor interference in business or government on some primitive planet. Usually, they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... it is said they frequently "catch the birds by their tails as they are going to roost;" and it is no doubt owing to this that they are so 'cute. Talk about "catching a weasel asleep," let me see any of my metropolitan drone friends who can catch a Yankee ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... revered; For there in lofty air was seen to stand The bold Protector of the conquer'd land; Drawn in that look with which he wept and swore, Turn'd out the Members, and made fast the door, Ridding the House of every knave and drone, Forced, though it grieved his soul, to rule alone. The stern still smile each friend approving gave, Then turn'd the view, and all again were grave. There stood a clock, though small the owner's need, For habit told when all things should proceed; Few their ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... is the quality of an eternal fable in the pathetic old tale of the stagehand who had always felt that, if chance would ever give him even the smallest of rles, he would show these actors where their shortcomings were. He would not drone out even the least important and most perfunctory of speeches. Not he. Into every syllable he would pour real meaning, real conviction. At last, after twenty years of yearning from the wings, chance did rush him on as an understudy. Unfortunately, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... twilight did my Graunie summon, To say her prayers, douce, honest woman! Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, Wi' eerie drone; Or, rustlin, thro' the boortries comin, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bullet whizzed through the sultry air and whirled the stage driver's slouch hat from his head. Zip! Zip! Zip! and the air was alive with the whine and drone of bullets. ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... remarkable and the most instructive of the different parthenogenetic phenomena are furnished by those cases in which the same germ-cells, according as they are fructified or not, produce different kinds of individuals. Among our common honey bees, a male individual (a drone) arises out of the eggs of the queen, if the egg has not been fructified; a female (a queen, or working bee) if the egg has been fructified. It is evident from this, that in reality there exists no wide chasm between sexual and non-sexual reproduction, but that both modes of reproduction ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... in the quiet night. A light shone dimly from her father's window. At intervals a deep, contented sighing came from the cows in the barnyard. She took the path past the house and down to the corral, where she paused, her ear arrested by the steady drone of milking. A lantern sitting on the black earth, cast a little circle of light, and threw a docile cow in dreadful silhouette against the barn. And by that dim light Beulah discerned the bent form of her ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... hair. But he undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when, looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver hair had already turned off the light, and now ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... floor New-rinsed with sunshine, or bespread With but the tiny coverlet And pillow for the baby's head; And pray Thou, may The door stand open and the day Send ever in a gentle breeze, With fragrance from the locust-trees, And drowsy moan of doves, and blur Of robin-chirps, and drone of bees, With after-hushes of the stir Of intermingling sounds, and then The good-wife and the smile of her Filling the silences again— The cricket's call And the wee cot, Dear Lord of all, ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 ...
— The Republic • Plato
... about God or what the minister was saying. Back home she had always, in church, sat between her mother and the little window where through the giant pines she could see a stretch of blue sky broken by a misty mountain-top; when one could see that and smell the pine and hear, above the drone of the preacher's voice, the clear note of a bird, one could feel very close to the God who had made this wonderful, beautiful world and had put that sweet note in the throat of a ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... 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
... pairfectly," he said in answer to the question. "It's a place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,—and there I am in the very midst of it—just where I want to be. Ye see, I was meant to be a meenister—one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin, and so forth a—sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable creature—an' if I had followed out this profession, I make nae doot that, with my aunt's seventy thousand, I should be a vera comfortable, respectable, selfish ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... which never seemed to droop in the heavy prison air; when I wrote that an honest laugh was never heard here, I ought to have made that one exception; he had a fair voice, too, and a large collection of songs, which he chanted out merrily, instead of merging all tunes into one dolorous drone. He was confined at first on the floor immediately under me, but, on the 20th. of May, changed his quarters into one of the large rooms in the main building, with windows opening back and front into the yard and the avenue; ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... experience or association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be illustrated by scores of examples. Thoughts of religious functions arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass brings up a pastoral picture of a shepherd playing upon his pipe; trumpets and drums suggest war, and so on. The delineation of movement is easier to the musician than it is to the poet. Handel, who has conveyed the sensation of a "darkness which might be felt," in a chorus of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Saturday, they met at the post office on week evenings, occasionally they saw each other for a moment after church on Sunday mornings. Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick could not imagine why her only child cared to attend that stuffy little country church and hear that prosy Kendall minister drone on and on. "I hope, my dear, that I am as punctilious in my religious duties as the average woman, but one Kendall sermon was sufficient for me, thank you. What you see in THAT church to please you, ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... there are the feminists who seek to do without man,—except for the minimum physiological purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who tell us that "men made the State,"—a sufficiently shameful admission—and that women have no business with these things. Do not their mothers blush for such; ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... windows and deserted sidewalks. It was past one o'clock in the morning. The wicked Forties were still ablaze with light and noisy foxtrots; but in the virtuous Hundreds, where Mr. Pett's house stood, respectable slumber reigned. Only the occasional drone of a passing automobile broke the silence, or the love-sick cry of some ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and as I had in a great measure ceased from participating in their adventures, or, during Lucy's illness, which lasted several months, joining in their festivities, they at length considered me as a drone in a hive, by no means compensating by my services as an ally for my admittance into their horde as a stranger. You will easily conceive, when this once became the state of their feelings towards me, with how ill a temper they brooked the lordship of my stately caravan ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ill—I could never describe to you," said Miriam, with her face aglow, "what it is to me to hear some silly man drone away ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... foggage, meaning a second grass or aftermath, not quite so rich or nourishing as the first growth; others, pointing at a kind of inferior bee, which receives the name of Foggie from its finding its nest among fog or moss; and others uncivilly insinuating that the Latin fucus, a drone, is the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... spectacles, and many revolutionary parades. Here scores of treasonable acts have been concocted, and daring robberies committed in the troublous times not long past. To-day it is peaceable enough; so quiet in the summer afternoons, here in the very heart of the busy city, that the drone of the busy humming-birds among the flowers comes soothingly upon the ear of the wakeful dreamer. Quiet now, but awaiting the next upheaval, for such, we are sorry to say, is pretty sure to come, sooner or later; the Roman Catholic Church party is not dead, but sleepeth. A strong, costly, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain as this, falling in the black and utter darkness. The shelve of the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... there was, who dwelt In an old gray collage all alone— She turned her wheel the live long day— There was music, I ween, in its solemn drone. As she twisted the flax, the threads of thought Kept twisting too, dark, mystic threads— And the tales she told were legends old, Quaint fancies, woven ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... o' such a clamoring? Sure thou hast heard that old tale o'er a hundred times; and thou too, my lord? Fie, then! Wouldst seek to flatter thy old nurse with this seeming eagerness? Go to! I say thou canst not in truth want to hear me drone o'er that ancient narrative. Well, then, an I must, I must. Soft! Hold my fan betwixt thy dainty cheeks and the blaze, sweetheart, lest the fire-fiend witch thy roses into very poppy flowers. And thou, my lord, come closer ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... Third-Estate of 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and swam easily, as I thought, shoreward. The song went on, but it seemed to ring in my ears as the drone of our miller's pipes comes up from the river on a still summer evening. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... up, and still up, unfalteringly speeds the Pilot and his mount. Sweet the drone of the Engine and steady the Thrust as the Propeller ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... yet to convince him," Hilton suggested, "he might send up a drone. We don't want to kill anybody, you know. One with the heaviest screening he's got—just to ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... them out of that hateful prison, for the bolts clanged behind her, down stairs and into the courtyard, where the sun's light almost blinded her and the fresh air struck her hot brow like ice. Then there were more voices, and people moving to and fro and the drone of a priest praying and a touch upon her hand from which she shrank. And oh! she wished that dream were done, for it was long, long. It wearied her, and grasped her heart with a cold ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... rocket space ship, the second one to be flown and that, with the exception of the ill-fated Hadley, farther from the earth than any man had been before. There was no sensation of movement in that hermetically sealed flyer, and, after the first few moments, the steady drone of the rocket motor failed to register on my senses. I was surprised to see that there was no ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... the ant in summer to provide; Drive with the bee the drone from out thy hive: Build like the swallow in the summer tide; Spare not too much, my son, but sparing thrive: Be poor in folly, rich in all but sin: So by thy death ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... pause. Their alert ears caught the sounds of a distant scuffle. Then a pistol shot jarred the peaceful drone ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... say this, love, that I have not come here to sponge upon your kindness. I will be no drone. I wish to be useful to you, Cora. Now you are far away from all milliners and dress makers and seamstresses, and I am very skillful with my needle and can do everything you might wish to have done in that line—I ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... see her when she's out for play or meals, And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals, But she is not always idle or a decorative drone, And if she wastes her wages, well, she wastes what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of that force. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... for afternoon, When the midday meal is over, When the winds have sung themselves into a swoon, And the bees drone in the clover, Then hie to me, hie, for a lullaby— Come, my baby, do; Creep into my lap, and with a nap We'll ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... observation planes. Squadrons from Connecticut and southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small end before her, the large end pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed in above, laying a smoke screen at 10,000 feet to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with the drone of jets, and with ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... The field to be won; What foes have you met, What work have you done? To courage alone Does victory come; To coward and drone ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... romance, this gave a certain majestic romance of its own; the romance of man's struggle to conquer the stupendous forces of Nature with his science. It was as if Vulcan's stithy had been dropped down into a profound ravine of the Alps, and the drone of machinery mingled with the music of ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... 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
... leaves the rose-shaded 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 violins; their laughter, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Roman. It is all admirable, from that grand sentence, Nec vero terroe ferre omnes omnia possunt—that is to say, that not every soil is suited to every tree, Senor Don Jose—to the exhaustive treatise on bees, in which the poet describes the habits of those wise little animals, defining the drone in ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... 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 at ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Spirit gripped him 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
... aloof. "I declare, he looks as if he had been up a week of Sundays, too," said she. Then she called out to him, in her high-pitched treble, which sounded odd coming from her soft circumference of throat. Maud's voice ought, by good rights, to have been a rich, husky drone, instead of bearing a resemblance to a parrot's. "Say, Wollaston Lee," she called out, and the boy approached perforce, lifting his hat—"say," said Maud, "I hear you and Maria eloped last night." ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a maddening wait. The Scientist's voice went on and on like the drone of an electric fan, interrupted only by an occasional murmur from Mother or Dad. For a while David sat in bed twisting the sheets in his hands; then he got up and paced the room in his bare feet. It seemed to him that three or four whole nighttimes had passed before he finally ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... No drone must hide himself under those eaves; Who sows not, will in harvest reap no sheaves. The slothful man himself, may plainly see, That honey's gotten by the working bee. But here's no work for life, that's freely given; Meat, drink, and cloths, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... heavy, dull, cold thing, The spirit of evil well may be: A drone too base to have a sting; 345 Who gluts, and grimes his lazy wing, ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forget those furtive visits. The intense stillness of the night, broken by an occasional rustling in the grass or the hedge; the smell of the flowers in the garden beyond; the distant drone ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... half-past twelve when the two men were back at the long table going over maps and blue-prints. There were no interruptions. An imprisoned house-fly buzzed monotonously and sullenly against a pane of glass, his drone fitting into the heavy silence on the face of the hot desert so that it became a ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... not altogether the fault of the minister that Shenac fell asleep, though his voice was a drowsy drone to many a one besides her. The week's activity was quite sufficient to account for her drowsiness, to say nothing of the bright sunshine streaming in through ten uncurtained windows, and the air growing heavy with the breathing of a multitude. Shenac ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... gone up to the drawing-room. Think how agreeable and graceful it would be for Mrs. Daniel O'Connell to repair to the sofa, among a few respectable friends, and, taking up her bagpipes, set her elbow a-going, until the drone gives two or three broken groans, and the chanter a squeak or two, like a child in the cholic, or a cat that you had trampled on by accident. Then comes the real ould Irish music, that warms the heart. Dan looks upon her graceful position, until the tears of love, taste, and admiration ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short breeches, and pointed hat, like that Aladdin wears in the cheap editions; ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... because he who is deficient in any of his limbs or members, and who is not in the possession of all his natural senses and endowments, is unable to perform, with pleasure to himself or credit to the fraternity, those peculiar labors in which all should take an equal part. He thus becomes a drone in the hive, and so far impairs the usefulness of the lodge, as "a place where Freemasons assemble to work, and to instruct and improve themselves in the mysteries of their ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels at the foot of the stairs crossed their pikes ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... offered no words, she made no signs, of sympathy; and, as if to prove her hearty disregard, or profound contempt for the prisoner's manifest distress, she by and by, to while the time, began to drone out a succession of grunting sounds, such as make up a red-man's melody, and such indeed as any village urchin can drum with his heels out of an empty hogshead. The song, thus barbarously chanted, at first startled and affrighted ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... never wean ourselves—shall we never heed the teachings of Philosophy (unless perchance they have been sounding in our ears like and enchanter's drone):— ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... out as far as Buffalo—and the young men in the Art Department were sent to make pictures. The experience of a reporter develops facility—you have to do the assignment. To write well and rapidly on any subject, the position of reporter on an old-time daily approached the ideal. Even the drone became animated, when the copy must be in inside of two hours. The way to learn to write is to write. But young men will not write of their own free will; the literary first-mate in way of a Managing Editor with a loaded club of expletives is necessary. Or, stay! there ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... affections, with no 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... was 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 ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... the student can stand without becoming a drone. Criticism? Yes, but no quibbling, no nagging. Criticism is something more than fault-finding. The teacher exalts his profession, ennobles his art, and begets consideration for himself when he maintains the highest standards for himself ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... and rugged her commonness 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 ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... 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 country garden on ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... can be little less ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of our nation's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... I have not been a doer, a faiseur, as the French would say, I do not wish to represent myself as a mere idle drone during the long years of my quiet life. Nor did I stand quite alone in looking on a scholar's life—even when I was living in a garret au cinquieme—as a paradise on earth. Did not Emerson write, "The scholar is the man of the age"? Did not even Mazzini, who certainly was constantly up ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... retrieve his own past errors and in a measure redeem the misspent life of the thief. He saw Cronk smooth his brow with a shaking hand, as if to wipe away from his befuddled brain the cobwebs of indecision and time-gathered shadows. His lips, drawn awry with intensity, opened only to drone: ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... 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 ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... drone to drone would say, 'A cold, cold wind blows in this way'; And the great Queen would turn her head From face to face, astonished, And, though her maids with comb and brush Would comb and soothe and whisper, 'Hush!' About the hive would shrilly ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke
... voices sank upon their advent, it became a hissing whisper, then a faint drone like that of bees, and then utter silence. In the solemn and grave demeanour of the dalals there was something almost sacerdotal, so that when that silence fell upon the crowd the affair took on the aspect of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... life will drone along uneventfully for years with scarce a perceptible progress, retrogression, or change; and then suddenly, with a few leaps, will cover more of alteration and event in a week than it has passed through in a ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... its forefathers did, and nothing else. Lower Canada wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland, before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live, indolently drawling through an existence diversified by feast and fast days; and all his social vices flourish in shelter of this seignorial system—this—this ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the hedge, and we hastened onward. My friend knocked at the little rustic door, and knocked again without response. And yet the cottage was not deserted, for a low sound came to our ears—a kind of drone of misery and despair which was indescribably melancholy. Holmes paused irresolute, and then he glanced back at the road which he had just traversed. A brougham was coming down it, and there could be no ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tobacco-pouch, began to smoke. Fire-boxes and spittoons, I should mention, were freely handed about; so that half-an-hour which passed before the sermon began was agreeably spent. In the meanwhile, mass was being celebrated in the main hall of the temple, and the monotonous nasal drone of the plain chant was faintly heard in the distance. So soon as this was over, the lay clerk sat himself down by the hanging drum, and, to its accompaniment, began intoning the prayer, "Na Mu Miyo Ho Ren Go Kiyo," the congregation fervently joining in unison with him. These words, repeated ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... of the bag-pipe is the drone ground bass which sounds without intermission. Each drone is fitted with a beating-reed resembling the primitive "squeaker" known to all country lads; it is prepared by making a cut partly across a piece of cane or reed, near the open end, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... paths of piety towards the new vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... and regretful "au revoir" to the circle, and passed on to look after the comfort and pleasure of her elder visitors, and Rosa soon discovered that her awakened curiosity would be in no wise appeased by listening to the steady, pattering drone of Mr. Dorrance's oration. Oratorical he was to a degree that excited the secret amusement of the facile Southern youths about him. With them, the art of light conversation had been a study from boyhood, the topics suitable for and pleasing to ladies' ears carefully ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... The drone of an approaching car reached his ears. Pencil in hand, he sat listening. The sound grew louder, then ceased. Either the car had passed or had stopped somewhere near the house. Came a rap on ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... smooth white vellum; Pelisson made a fair copy of his prologue; Moliere contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... me on in spite of fear. I may have gone a mile thus, perchance two or three, straining every sense, when a sound brought me to a stand. At first I could not distinguish it because of my heavy breathing, but presently I made sure that it was the low drone of human voices. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crept forward, and felt the ground rising. The voices had ceased. I gained the crest of a low ridge, and threw myself flat. A rattle of musketry set me shivering, and in an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... St. Ignatio, two miles inland from the town of Manaos. Outside lay the yellow, brassy glare of the sunshine, with the shadows of the palm trees as black and definite as the trees themselves. The air was calm, full of the eternal hum of insects, a tropical chorus of many octaves, from the deep drone of the bee to the high, keen pipe of the mosquito. Beyond the veranda was a small cleared garden, bounded with cactus hedges and adorned with clumps of flowering shrubs, round which the great blue butterflies and the tiny humming-birds fluttered and darted in crescents of sparkling ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suspicion, but full into each other's eyes with happiness. They loved their kinsman for his kindness to them. He became attached to them as helpmates; and the end of it all was, he came to Socrates and told him with delight how matters fared; "and now," he added, "they tax me with being the only drone in the house, who sit and eat the bread ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... of the worker is too well understood by every owner of bees to need a particular description. So also of the drone; and the Queen has already been sufficiently described to enable any one to select her out from among her subjects. If any further description is desired, the observer can easily satisfy himself by the use of a microscope.—Every swarm of ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks
... barrier. Would he make the run, or would he, in the parlance of the sporting world, "dog it?" Would his four years at a great American university make of him a better man, or would he degenerate into a snob and a drone? ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... drama 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 ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... witty invectives against usury. They say that it is a pity the devil should have God's part, which is the tithe. That the usurer is the greatest Sabbath breaker, because his plough goeth every Sunday. That the usurer is the drone that Virgil ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... they 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] That's owre ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... 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 olive ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... evening a clean-faced old man, with thin and many-patched clothes, with a worn and sickly face, with a few gray hairs straggling sadly about on his smooth crown: and that old man used often and often to drone out in a cracked voice and in a tune pitched too low by half an octave the very words which had just been repeated in Marion's hearing. What of all that? Why, that little gloomy kitchen was Marion's memory of home; that ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... not much! but let th' "dank wynd" moan, "Shimmer th' woold" and "rive the wanton surge;" I ask not much; grant but an "eery drone," Some "wilding frondage" and a "bosky dirge;" Grant me but these, and add a regal flush Of "sundered hearts upreared upon a byre;" Throw in some yearnings and a "darksome hush," And—asking nothing ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... boy named Sam, The laziest ever known, Who spent his time in idleness, Like any other drone. He loved to lie in bed till noon, With covers closely drawn, And when he managed to get up He'd yawn, and yawn, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... a kind 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
... small space between the glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... 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 born, Hereabout ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his sharp sting is gone, Forgets his golden work, and turns a drone: Such is a satire, when you take away That rage, in which his noble vigour lay. What gain you by not suffering him to tease ye? He neither can offend you now, nor please ye. The honey-bag and venom lay so near, That both together you resolved to tear; And lost your pleasure to secure your ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... a fiend 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
... mimicry of pagan festivals, while art went hand in hand with luxury. It seemed as though Bacchus and Pallas and Priapus would be reinstated in their old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call herself Christian. The hoarse rhetoric of friars in the Coliseum, and the drone of pifferari from the Ara Coeli, mingled with the Latin declamations of the Capitol and the twang of lute-strings in the Vatican. Meanwhile, amid crowds of Cardinals in hunting-dress, dances of half-naked girls, and masques of Carnival Bacchantes, moved pilgrims from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and fighting had given me the best of all the evils they had to offer. Was I now to drop that valorous life, which men so ardently seek, and was I to take up a browsing, kinelike existence at Haddon Hall, there to drone away my remaining days in fat'ning, peace, and quietude? I could not answer my own question, but this I knew: that Sir George Vernon was held in high esteem by Elizabeth, and I felt that his house was, perhaps, the only spot in England where my head could safely lie. I also had other ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... bergamot pear 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 ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... denominations, were 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 ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... Augustine 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 into competition ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... you your share o' our feast, Bees, bees, murmurin' low; Cakes an' yal(5) an' wine you mun taste, Bees, bees, murmurin' low. Gie some to t' queen on her gowlden throne, There's foison to feed both worker an' drone; Oh! dean't let us fend for oursels alone; Bees, bees, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... while they talked, and his rays were growing hot in the clear air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The queen rose ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... bees with unremitting attention, and who never could see a real copulation between a drone and a queen, was satisfied that copulation was unnecessary for fecundation of the eggs: but having remarked that, at certain times, the drones exhaled a very strong odour, he thought this odour was an emanation of the aura seminalis, or the ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... 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, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 15, 1773). Not six months before his death he asked Dr. Burney to teach him the scale of music (ante, p. 263, note 4). That 'he appeared fond of the bagpipe, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone' (Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 15), does not tell for much either way. In his Hebrides (Works, ix. 55), he shews his pleasure in singing. 'After supper,' he writes, 'the ladies sung Erse songs, to which I listened, as an English audience to an Italian opera, delighted with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... to the diddling drone of Piqueur's quavering voice. In the clear sweetness of the May morning above the twittering of the birds it raised itself, the quaint measures delighting her ears. Even in Piqueur's thin falsetto the old melody sang itself—tender, graceful, spirited, never ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... forestall 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 fool," to be precise. The epithet in ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... imitation of the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 of a submersible under ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... be laid low by the smallest beast of them all. Well, he had the remedy for this one, too. Rolling up his sleeve with shaking fingers, he pressed the mouth of the medikit to his bare arm. It clicked and began to drone an angry whine. That meant something, he knew, but he just couldn't remember what. Holding it up he saw that one of the hypodermics was projecting halfway from its socket. Of course. It was empty of whatever antibiotic the analyzer had called ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... windows with green outer blinds on each of its two sides, and a door at the end nearer the road. As Webb traversed the open space, where, on Sundays, horses were hitched to the trees and saplings, a drone as of countless bees fell on his ears. To a native this needed no explanation. During five of the week-days the building was used as a schoolhouse. The sound was made by the students studying aloud, and John's niece, Dolly Drake, had sole ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... in her level, crystal-clear tones; "you know nothing of a man. Your men are maromeros. They are fit only to roll cigarettes in the shade until the sun strikes and shrivels them up. They drone in your hammocks and you comb their hair and feed them with fresh fruit. My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... road to kingly sway; 'Tis every dull-got elder brother's way. Dropt from above, he lights into a throne; Grows of a piece with that he sits upon; Heaven's choice, a low, inglorious, rightful drone. But who by force a sceptre does obtain, Shows he can govern that, which he could gain. Right comes of course, whate'er he was before; Murder and usurpation are ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... in the Park. He had chosen the Park because it was dark and there would be none to see and interfere. He waited long in the shadow by the roadside. Presently from the darkness there came the distant drone of powerful engines. Lights appeared, like the blazing eyes of a dragon swooping down to devour ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the hill, the moon had risen. 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 ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... in 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 ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... "will disdain to subsist, like a drone, upon others' labours; like a vermin to filch its food out of the public granary; or, like a shark, to prey upon the lesser fry; but it will rather outdo his private obligations to other men's care and toil, by considerable service ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... 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
... his time to music; Eddie to reading up his French and 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 ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive— 10 Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. 15 It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the Deacon finished the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... as we find among the more advanced races of men, but among no other group of animals. I need only mention the social organisation and government of the monarchic bees and the republican ants, and their division into different conditions—queen, drone-nobles, workers, educators, soldiers, etc. One of the most remarkable phenomena in this very interesting province is the cattle-keeping of the ants, which rear plant-lice as milch-cows and regularly extract ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... zenith blue melts away toward the horizon in dreamy violet, and the retreating sun leaves limber shafts of orange light, like Parthian arrows, among the green branches of the elms, what sounds can charm the ear like the soft chirrup of the cricket, the homely drone of the hive-seeking bee, and the cool rustle of the breeze through the tops of the spring-sodden water grasses? How fondly the mind blends the evening colors and the incipient voices of the night! 'Oh,' says the metaphysician, 'this is association: just so ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the barren rocklands and taken her with the high hand of a lover. She, too, drifted away from the chilling courtroom with its judge and its petty officials.... And then all suddenly she knew that men were talking—and about her. She heard the drone of question and answer—the rambling statements of the stranger, Arizona, accusing her of strange things—of asking him to take her on rides in Courtrey's absence—of swinging with him nights in the hammock by ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... 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 ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... drone like that of a huge night-beetle, or prehistoric thunder-lizard, the machine leaped forward as a race-horse jumps ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... humming drone, like a swarm of angry bees—felt a peculiar, soothing warmth about his head; and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... be seen, therefore, that all young persons should endeavor to make each day stand for something. Neither heaven nor earth has any place for the drone; he is a libel on his species. No glamour of wealth or social prestige can hide his essential ugliness. It is better to carry a hod, or wield a shovel, in an honest endeavor to be of some use to humanity, than to be nursed in luxury and be ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B. |
