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More "Fiddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bullfrog's croak, the craft that Sam Williams had lately mastered to inspiring perfection. This sonorous accomplishment Penrod had determined to make his own. At once guttural and resonant, impudent yet plaintive, with a barbaric twang like the plucked string of a Congo war-fiddle, the sound had fascinated him. It is made in the throat by processes utterly impossible to describe in human words, and no alphabet as yet produced by civilized man affords the symbols to vocalize it to the ear of imagination. "Gunk" is the poor makeshift ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... derelict in the streets of a far city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the dreams ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... to the cheek; how sweet the music of maiden voices rising upon the wintry air, and the tumbling of glossy curls underneath the hoods and sealskin caps as they sped through the delightful hours. Tullie Wasson was out there with his string band—Tullie with his old black fiddle, and Jim Grey with his cornet, and his son with his wondrous bass violin, and Tullie knew all the good old tunes, and a few fancy waltzes and polkas, but he was at his best in the Virginia Reel, and it was a pretty sight to see the joyous couples ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... into the meadows and woods a half day's journey for our disport, how then? For that once, said Sir Aymeris, I should bid them disobey their lady. Said Birdalone: And how if they disobeyed thee, and obeyed me? Quoth Sir Aymeris: If they bring thee back safe, they may chance to sing to the twiggen fiddle-bow, that they may be warned from such folly; but if they come back without thee, by All-hallows the wind of wrath shall ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... shot-silk quality, and is all the finer for that. When people talk of a horse as an ugly animal I think of its beautiful moments, but when I hear a flow of indiscriminate praise of its beauty I think of such an aspect as one gets for example from a dog-cart, the fiddle-shaped back, and that distressing blade of the neck, the narrow clumsy place between the ears, and the ugly glimpse of cheek. There is, indeed, no beauty whatever save that transitory thing that comes and comes again; all beauty is really the beauty of expression, is really kinetic and momentary. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... manor; and we must not forget Don Saltero and his famous coffee-house, the oddities of which Steele pleasantly sketched in the Tatler. The Don was famous for his skill in brewing punch and for his excellent playing on the fiddle. Saltero was a barber, who drew teeth, drew customers, wrote ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... as sweet as a dream And the fiddle that climbs to the sky, With head 'neath the curtain she stares out—O hark! The music so ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... "Fiddle-fiddle," cried the old man. "Don't bring sentimental women into this, Davy. As I was saying, Victor ought to be punished for the way he's been stirring up idle, lazy, ignorant people against the men that runs the community and gives 'em ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... ribbons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty many-coloured turmoil about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full of artistic odds and ends—her fiddle, of course, and piles of music, her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a number of chiffons, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood photographs of musicians and friends—the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time. The other musical instrument (if either of them deserve that name) was a hollow vessel of wood, like a platter, combined with the use of two sticks, on which one of our gentlemen saw a man performing. He held one of the sticks, about two feet long, as we do a fiddle with one hand, and struck it with the other, which was smaller, and resembled a drum-stick, in a quicker or slower measure; at the same time beating with his foot upon the hollow vessel that lay inverted upon the ground, and thus producing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... should have thought that you knew him better than that, Manutoli. To him a woman is a voice, and nothing else. If the same sounds could be got out of a flute or a fiddle he would like it much better, and think it far more convenient. I don't think my uncle Lamberto ever knew whether a woman was pretty or plain. I wish to heaven he would get caught for once in his life; it would suit my book very well. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... recollect the Chinaman wolfing his right out of the can and tipping it cornerwise to drink the ile. Bar Coe, he was the coolest customer of the lot, which was the more remarkable, as he was a mild-mannered man ordinarily, given to playing the China fiddle to himself, and very obliging if you wanted fresh yeast or the way he curried pigeon. Rau, the Belgian, with his hairy arms and stubby figure, struck one somehow as being more in his element in so wild ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... when the audience, late in the evening, had suddenly demanded a popular song from Mr. Nokes, he (Triplet), seeing the orchestra thinned by desertion, and nugatory by intoxication, had started from the pit, resuscitated with the whole contents of his snuff-box the bass fiddle, snatched the leader's violin, and carried Mr. Nokes triumphantly through; that thunders of applause had followed, and Mr. Nokes had kindly returned thanks for both; but that he (Triplet) had hastily retired to evade the manager's acknowledgments, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... sitting in a window, facing each other. He looked out toward the west, and presently was lost in thought. He folded his arms tightly across his breast, and his eyes were a hundred miles away. The sound of a fiddle in the long alley which led from the house to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... his hostelry were frequently entertained with music from that instrument. The virginal (a small rectangular spinet without legs) was the most common of instruments known to have been in possession of the colonists, while they also owned and played the fiddle, both small and large, the cornet, the recorder (a flageolet or old type of flute), the flute and the hautboy. These instruments in the hands of music lovers, frequently self-taught for the most part, entertained the planters' ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... through the cattle-dealer's thick head that he was the man to get hold of. When they had driven the red man into a corner, so that he couldn't lie himself out of it, he turned against Jost, and declared that Jost had planned the whole thing and that he himself had only played second-fiddle. Which can lie the worst, no one can tell, but that they are both reaping what they have sown, is certain enough. And now we're to have a wedding, are we? and our Dietrich is going to settle down into regular ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... comes the Times and eleven strikes (it does) already, and I have to go to Town, and I have no alternative but that this story of the Critic and Poet, 'the Bear and the Fiddle,' should 'begin but break off in the middle'; yet I doubt—nor will you henceforth, I know, say, 'I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy writing.' Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... silver-plated wedding ring. The nuns had presented a supply of skim-milk and butter. Mr. Spear provided jam, pickles, and coal-oil for the lamps. The Mounted Police contributed two dollars to pay for the "band"—the fiddle and the concertina—and ammunition enough for the feu de joie. The friends and relations had given a plentiful store of fresh, dried, and pounded fish; and had also furnished a lavish supply of moose, caribou, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... used in the musical accompaniment of the hula ku'i are the guitar, the uku-lele,[501] the taro-patch fiddle,[501] or the mandolin; the piano also lends itself effectively for this purpose; or a combination of these ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... with a dream, And I hear the tones from voices like the murmur of a stream; And oh, the heart seems young again and from its anguish free When I gaze upon these pictures that are ever dear to me; Then I see the darkies dancing, I can hear the fiddle ring As they gathered in the cabin and they cut the pigeon-wing; I can smell the 'possum roasting, I can see the cider flow, When memory takes me back again to scenes I used ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... in a dress of state, part of which consisted of a swallow-tail coat (with an overgrown chrysanthemum in the buttonhole), a red necktie, and a pink-and-silver liberty cap of tissue-paper. He was scraping a fiddle "like old times come again," and the tune he played was, "Oh, my Liza, po' gal!" My feet shuffled to it in ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... sampled: had tramped through Ireland with a fiddle; through Scotland with a lecture on Palestine, assisted by dissolving views; had been a billiard-marker; next a schoolmaster. For the last three months he had been a journalist, dramatic and musical ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... gave chase again. He ran and ran, but this time he couldn't catch the fox up; so he returned home and wept bitterly, because he was now all alone. At last, however, he dried his tears and got him a little fiddle, a little fiddle-bow, and a big sack, and went to the fox's hole and ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... have two sweethearts, then—one from the city and one from the country, a married woman and this poor girl," said he, in a jeering tone; "does little Reine know that she is playing second fiddle?" ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... little smile play about the corners of his thin pale lips. Obligingly he gave Dan lessons, and often the young man would accompany him, in the songs his mother had known and loved in her youth, when old Peter had come wooing with fiddle ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... not very well-devised beginnings. At the fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he said, "I can't fiddle about any more with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... "'Fiddle-de-dee!' I replied to this fine speech. 'What you call duty, I call curiosity. I am ravenously hungry, and I wish you would finish dressing and let us ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... shamefaced and downcast. Next came the aged parents; the father too was only a servant about the farm, and the hovel, the furniture, and the clothing, all bore witness that their poverty was extreme. A dirty, squinting musician followed the train, who kept grinning and screaming, and scratching his fiddle, which was patched together of wood and pasteboard, and instead of strings had three bits of pack-thread. The procession halted when his honour, their new master, came up to them. Some mischief-loving servants, young lads and girls, tittered ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you when we get you through sa. Old 'ooman at home sa:' chuckling very much. 'Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old 'ooman at ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... song. Then he says, pointing to one of the players, "and the first violin played this simple melody," whereupon the two sing the verse over again, the player imitating with his arms the movements of a violin player, and with his voice the sound of a squeaking fiddle. Then the conductor says, pointing to another player, "and the big trombone played this simple melody." Then the three sing together, the second player imitating the sound of a trombone and the appearance of a trombone player. This ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... mill-house all the children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to the light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle. ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of complexion peculiar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... forgotten most of it, but I remember one fact: that certain students of theology came to ask him whether he believed in free will, and, if so, how he could reconcile it with necessity. On hearing the question St. Francis's follower reflected a little while and then seized a fiddle and began capering and dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune and generally expressing a violent and invigorating indifference. The tune is not recorded, but it is the eternal chorus of mankind, that modifies all the arts ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... looked at Dr Lefevre in puzzled inquiry; but the doctor was considering the electrical apparatus before him, and the young man set off on his errands. When he returned with the fiddle-bow and the tuning-fork, he saw Lefevre had placed the machine ready, with ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... down to write my story for you, the life-story of old Rosin the Beau, your friend and true lover. Some day, not far distant now, my fiddle and I shall be laid away, in the quiet spot you know and love; and then (for you will miss me, Melody, well I know that!) this writing will be read to you, and you will hear my voice still, and will learn to know me better ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... reminds me to tell you, that I am not the author of the book called the Scottish Fiddle, which I have barely seen. The name alone, if you had known me, would have convinced you that I could not have been the author. I had made quite mistakes enough about Sir Walter, not to have to answer for this too. I took him for a mere courtier and political ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... circumspect walk hereafter, Satan could take little advantage by what was come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang forswore baith the pipes and the brandy—it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day past, that he would so much as take the fiddle or ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... a small chamber set apart for music practice, the only furniture it contained being a piano, a chair, some fiddle-cases, and music-stands, while on the mantelpiece, in the place of a clock, was a metronome that had something wrong with the works. Jack, however, had no eye for these details; his attention was centred in a group of boys who were struggling under the single gas-jet, ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... is going to church on Sunday morning and betting on where the veteran soprano in the choir is going to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swallowing worms. But if most of your life had been spent listening to Mrs. Sim Estabrook jumping for middle C about as successfully as a dog jumps for a squirrel ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... a Man is deprest with Cares, The Mist is dispell'd when a Woman appears; Like the Notes of a Fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the Spirits, and charms our Ears, Roses and Lilies her Cheeks disclose, But her ripe Lips are more sweet than those. Press her, Caress her, With Blisses, Her Kisses Dissolve us in Pleasure, ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... "I wish they would not say anything kind and pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... those noble sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... to do in life besides feeding lions," he said; and taking up his fiddle he became interested in it. He played it all the way across the Atlantic, and everyone said there was no reason why he should not play in the opera house. But an interview with the music conductor dispelled illusions. Ned ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the Finola," said Conroy, "is no earthly good to me. What I want is something that will put me into a nervous sweat, the same as I was when I was up against Ikenstein and the railway bosses. My nerves were like damned fiddle strings for a fortnight when I didn't know whether I was going to come out a pauper or the owner of the biggest pile mortal ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... you for a pumpkin, no one would contradict her. You puff and blow like a seal when you come upstairs; your paunch rises and falls like the diamond on a woman's forehead! It is pretty plain that you served in the dragoons; you are a very ugly-looking old man. Fiddle-de-dee. If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... pickaninny found a swamp blackbird's nest, and showed her how strangely it was made; then they climbed down the chimney of the school-house, and he showed her how the chimney swallow glued her nest together; and he coaxed a katydid to fiddle with his wings, that she might see that. At last they entered ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... young prince as I find him, coz: a Julian, or a Caracalla: a Constantine, or a Nero. Then, if he will play the fiddle to a conflagration, he shall play it well: if he must be a disputatious apostate, at any rate he shall understand logic and men, and have the habit of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pityingly after him. "We let him try to help us because it seems to amuse him, but he really doesn't know how to work with his hands. His fingers were made for the fiddle." ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... looks of you, I should say it was wearing your nerves to fiddle-strings. Ever take ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... yet completed. The feet remained to be "preserved," and the mode of curing these was entirely different. That was a secret known only to Swartboy, and in the execution of it the Bushman played first fiddle, with the important air of a chef de cuisine. He proceeded ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... nothing to do but exist as cheerfully as might be until the weather improved. The wet had shrunk canvas and rope gear till the tent-guys were as taut as fiddle-strings; and as it did not seem to have occurred to any of the servants to attend to this, an immediate tour of the camp had to be undertaken, in "rubbers" and waterproofs, to slack off guys and inspect the drainage system, as we had no wish to have our earthen floor—already sufficiently ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... As a fiddle and tambourine band were sitting among the company, Quickear suggested why not strike up? 'Ah, la'ads!' said a negro sitting by the door, 'gib the jebblem a darnse. Tak' yah ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... with shade trees and gardens, and the sloping lawns blazed with flowers. My mother said it was much prettier than Kaskaskia; not crowded with traffic; not overrun with foreigners. Everybody seemed to be making a fete, to be visiting or receiving visits. At sunset the fiddle and the banjo began their melody. The young girls would gather at Barbeau's or Le Compt's or Pensonneau's—at any one of a dozen places, and the young men would follow. It was no trouble to have a dance every evening, and on feast days ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Spectator; the first was Bowman's, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill. Lloyd's, in Lombard Street, was dear to Steele and Addison. At Don Saltero's, by the river at Chelsea, Mr. Salter exhibited his collection of curiosities and delighted himself, and no one else, by playing the fiddle. At the "Smyrna" Prior and Swift were wont to receive their acquaintances. From the "St. James's," the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James's Street, the Tatler dated its foreign and domestic news, and conferred fame on its waiter, Mr. Kidney, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Cockrell saw this salty relic of the Spanish Main among the crew which had disported itself on the tavern green at Charles Town,—the old man sitting aside with a couple of stray children upon his knees while his head nodded to the lilt of the fiddle. And again there had been a glimpse of him trudging in the column which had followed Stede Bonnet, with trumpet and drum, to attack the hostile Indians. Jack's heart warmed to Trimble Rogers and also to young Bill Saxby. They would find some way out ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... vibration going There in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, Why, fiddle you must, for all your life. What do you see, a harvest of clover? Or a meadow to walk through to the river? The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands For beeves hereafter ready for market; Or else you hear the rustle of skirts Like the girls ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights—the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... as yet too early to light the fire or go for the cows. Ted crept softly to a corner in the garret and took from the wall an old brown fiddle. It had been his father's. He loved to play on it, and his few rare spare moments were always spent in the garret corner or the hayloft, with his precious fiddle. It was his one link with the old life he had lived in a little cottage far away, with ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... out of memory is a commentary on my memory; just the same, a character as well named as Chip should, if he have substance beyond his name, leave an impression even on weak memories. B. M. Bower was a woman, Bower being the name of her first husband. A Montana cowpuncher named "Fiddle Back" Sinclair was her second, and Robert Ellsworth Cowan became the third. Under the name of Bud Cowan he published a book of reminiscences entitled Range Rider (Garden City, N. Y., 1930). B. M. Bower wrote a slight introduction to it; neither ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... in her sole charge, she would doubtless have done her duty to him but to stand by and see another doing it? No! a thousand times no! That part, insignificant in itself, and yet often one of the very sweetest and most useful in life's harmonies, familiarly called "second fiddle," was a part impossible to be ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... thought this very doubtful, but added proudly: "Powerful as their force may be, they shall not with impunity make any great attacks. Mine is compact, theirs must be unwieldy, and although a very pretty fiddle, I don't believe that either Gravina or Villeneuve know how to play upon it." On the 9th he for the first time got accurate information. An official letter from Dominica[102] announced that eighteen ships-of-the-line, with smaller ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city;" and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own deficiencies, and even disdain to please in certain conventional manners, asserting that "wanting all these things, he was ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... love me?" questioned Lottie Drugg, returning the embrace. "I wish I could hear you. But I can't hear father any more—nor his fiddle; only when he makes it quiver. Then I know it's crying. Did you know a fiddle could cry? You come home with me. Father will play the fiddle for you, ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... giving lessons on the flute, on the guitar, and in teaching French during the day, and at night was engaged as second violin in the orchestra of the Opera House; so that he had many strings to his bow, besides those of his fiddle. His wife, a pretty little lively woman, taught young ladies to make flowers in wax, and mended lace in the evenings. They were a very amiable and amusing couple, always at good-natured warfare with each other, and sparring all day long, from the time they met until they parted. Their ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... But—that kind a' stuff!—it takes a mighty deal of cross-cornered swearing to turn it into property. The only way ye can drive the peg in so the lawyers won't get hold on't, is by sellin' out to old Graspum-Norman, I mean—he does up such business as fine as a fiddle. Make the best strike with him ye can—he's as tough as a knot on nigger trade!—and, if there's any making property out on 'em, he's just the tinker ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... darling! (God! it went through my flesh as thrilling sound Must shake a fiddle when the strings are snatcht! Will she make the life in me all a slave Of my kist body,—a trembling, eager slave? It ran like a terror to my heart, the sense, The shivering delight upon my skin, Of her lips touching me.) My beloved,— It may be it were wise, that we took care ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... miles away, it was odd that he should be wandering aimlessly about thus. Besides, he had on his new Prince Albert, and there was a suspicion of a formal call in the smoothly oiled hair and tallowed boots. He carried his fiddle, too. There was to my mind every evidence that the visit had been preconceived, and to this point had been carried out with an eye on every detail. Had the contrary been true, there would have been no cause for Perry ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... sigh within their graves, waiting for the day of judgment. In one place there is a story that on a hill at Garun people used to hear very beautiful music. This was played by the elves, or hill folk, and any one who had a fiddle, and went there, and promised the elves that they should be saved, was taught in a moment how to play; but those who mocked them, and told them they could never be saved, used to hear the poor elves, inside the hill, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... that better than you can tell me, Tony, but 'tis such an easy way to get a living; I could enjoy such glorious indolence; could fish, and hunt, and shoot, and play the fiddle, and attend feasts and merry-makings, with such a happy consciousness of being found in the path of duty, that it would give a double zest to enjoyment. Now don't be envious, my dear demure cousin, and forestall me in my project. I am sure to gain my father's consent. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... The 'fiddle' immediately put his instrument under his arm, and, touching the brim of his napless hat, scraped a sort of bow, and smilingly asked the cook to name any ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... boyhood, almost destitute of many of the comforts of life," in order to get into the presence of his father's winter-worn locks, and spread a humid veil of darkness around his expectations; but he was always promptly sent back to the cold charity of the combat again; he learned to play the fiddle, and made a name for himself in that line; he had dwelt among the wild tribes; he had philosophized about the despoilers of the kingdoms of the earth, and found out—the cunning creature —that they refer their differences to the learned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... will but do something all day long Either do not think, or do not love to think Equally forbid insolent contempt, or low envy and jealousy Even where you are sure, seem rather doubtful Every virtue, has its kindred vice or weakness Fiddle-faddle stories, that carry no information along with them Flattery of women Forge accusations against themselves Forgive, but not approve, the bad. Frank, open, and ingenuous exterior, with a prudent interior Gain the affections as well as the esteem Generosity often runs into profusion Go ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... 'All I tell you is, that you are twenty-three years old, and I won't tell you anything, nor assist your unwholesome desire to be second fiddle.' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... summer, my child! Who can say how rich we shall be next summer? A party could be given in this barn with mother to play the piano and Mr. Popham the fiddle. The refreshments would be incredibly weak lemonade, and I think we might 'solicit' the cake, as they do ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... yer might as well talk of a popgun a holding its own with a Krupp. 'Ow the brains and the ochre got fust ladled hout is a bit beyond me, But to fancy as them as has got 'em will part is dashed fiddle-de-dee. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower while on horseback, and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside and while Shiro was preparing one of his famous suppers, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his "fiddle." Dorothy realized, with the first sweep of the bow, that she was playing a Stradivarius, the like of which she had played before only in her dreams. She forgot her listeners, forgot the time and the place, and poured out in her music all ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... of nothing, and began to swear at the virtuous fits of that silly Republic, which, in his opinion, rendered all government impossible. To think of such foolish fiddle-faddle stopping a man of his acumen and strength! How on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... can only work in one way, it can only produce one kind of result (genetic character), but the particular form or quality (Lamarckian "acquired character") of the result will depend upon the hand that works the machine (environment), just as the quality of the sound produced by a fiddle depends entirely upon the hand which plays upon it. It would be improper to apply the term "mutation" to those genetic characters which are not new characters or new variants of old characters, but such genetic characters are of the same nature as those characters to which the term mutation ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in him till being persuaded to play the fiddle he sat in the "social room," and sawed away on "Honest John," "The Devil's Dream," "Haste to the Wedding," and "The Fisher's Hornpipe." He lost all sense of being a millionnaire, and returned to ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues sheered safely off. For the first time in history the Missouri resounded to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the strains of a voyageur's fiddle. Usually, among forty men is one traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife; but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the Platte, down the Osage, ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... the sofa, on which he sprawled at length. "My good child, your nerves are like fiddle-strings after a frost. Remind me to make you up a tonic when we get back! Did ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one's footing on the deck. I have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,—the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his teacher Orphy falls upon hard times, but eventually his talent is recognized by a professor of music who takes him to Europe, and there, under peculiar circumstances, he plays on his home-made gourd fiddle before no less a personage ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... Ruth," sighed Helen, "what a business woman you are getting to be. Your career has really begun—and so promisingly. While I can't do a thing but play the fiddle a little, daub a little at batik, ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... and offered to do business with me at a fiddle.{6} "Tush, tush," said Peter Principal to the increasing multitude which now barred our passage, "we are only come to take a look, and watch the operation of the market." "Dividend hunters{7} I suppose," said a knowing looking fellow, sarcastically, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... favour with him, chuckled at his cleverness, had nearly disconcerted the poor boy; however, he was naturally resolute, and replied, "If I can do nothing else I can snuff candles, or deliver a message, or do anything that young lads do." "You can indeed?" "Yes, sir, and I can do more, I can play the fiddle and sing a good song." "A good song! I dare say—but d——d badly I'll answer for it." "Won't you give me a fair trial, sir?" "Fair trial indeed!" repeated the old man laughing, and walking on a step—"fair ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... face in his hands. "That was ignorance, an' I'm payin' for it by havin' you turn away an' snap my future like a fiddle string! Oh, how could my hand a-struck yoh ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... them muttered. Each of them thought far more than he uttered. One crow asked the other crow a riddle. One crow asked the other crow a riddle: The muttering crow Asked the stuttering crow, "Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle? Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?" "Bee-cause," said the other crow, "Bee-cause, B B B B B B B B B B B B ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... of it in his address. His grandfather had married a French lady, and although this union had not sensibly diluted the Westcote blood, Endymion would refer to it to palliate a youthful taste for playing the fiddle. He spoke French fluently, with a British accent which, when appointed Commissary, he took pains to improve by conversation with the prisoners, and was fond of discussing heredity with the two most distinguished of them—the Vicomte ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of palettes and adventures ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... there was his wife, and the slip of a girl who bowled over Blake there, and half a dozen ragged brats; and a fellow on a tramp, not a gipsy—some runaway apprentice, I take it, but a jolly dog—with no luggage but an old fiddle on which he scraped away uncommonly well, and set Blake making rhymes as we sat in the tent. You never heard any of his songs. Here's one for each of us; we're going to get up the characters and sing them about the country;—now for a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... well attested stories of some Negroes flinging themselves at the feet of an European playing on a fiddle, entreating him to desist, unless he had a mind to tire them to death; it being impossible for them to cease dancing, while he continued playing. Such is the irresistible ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... at the corn-shucking; In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse. On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under shelter of high banks, Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree. —Northward, young men of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... fiddle;—not in the concerts—but every where else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school!" He speaks of "the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; a vale hung with beautiful woods ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... can manage this thing without help. He only wanted to open your eyes a little, and get you ready for your day's work. You fellows who fiddle around with a few goods need waking up occasionally. Now, Toll, go off and let the General get up. I must have a railroad before night, or I shall not be able to ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Sat the Parliament-house, To hatch the royal gull; After much fiddle-faddle The egg proved addle, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... circular picture in chiaroscuro among the arabesques of the cappella nova in the cathedral at Orvieto. It represents the youthful Orpheus crowned with the laureate wreath playing before Pluto and Proserpine upon a fiddle or crowd of antique pattern. At his feet lies Eurydice, while around are spirits of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Applebite, about ten o'clock on the following evening, was seated on a sofa, between Mrs. Greatgirdle and Mrs. Waddledot (the two mamas deputed to open the campaign), each with a cup of very prime Mocha coffee, and a massive fiddle-pattern tea-spoon. On the opposite side of the room, in a corner, was a very large cage, in the sole occupancy of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... country-sides of the world human nature beats with exactly the same pulse. If a change come, it comes slowly and it changes all together, so that all are still alike. In the small towns novel-reading has been considered about as contemptuously as playing the fiddle, though admitted to be less dangerous than family card-playing. It was estimated that a novel-reader was confirming his indolence, and in danger of coming to the poor-house; a fiddler was prophesied to get ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... very comfortable here,—listening to that d——d monologue, which elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious father-in-law repeats himself every evening—save one, when he played upon the fiddle. However, they have been very kind and hospitable, and I like them and the place vastly, and I hope they will live many happy months. Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour. But we are ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether you've got it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said severely, addressing the unseen musician, "you are spoiling your fiddle and breaking your promise. You said you wouldn't be silly. Go to bed now ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door customers of the Rose, old benchers of the inn, who sit round a table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy's fiddle. Next, a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are surrounding the shoemaker's shop, where an invisible hole in their ball is mending by Master Keep himself, under the joint superintendence of Ben Kirby and Tom Coper, Ben showing much verbal respect and outward deference ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,—Laissez faire. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... a disguise, and abuse the women and affront the men whom he met, and sometimes to beat them, and sometimes to be beaten by them. This was one of his imperial nocturnal pleasures; his chiefest in the day was to sing and play upon a fiddle, in the habit of a minstrel, upon the public stage; he was prouder of the garlands that were given to his divine voice (as they called it then) in those kind of prizes, than all his forefathers were of their triumphs ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Mr Carr's deviation to the left was a triumph of smiling composure; nevertheless, Pixie's sharp eyes had seen and understood, and her heart felt a natural girlish pang. At twenty it is hard to accept with resignation the part of second fiddle, and Pixie's generosity had its limits—as whose has not? She had looked at Honor's pretty face and costly gown, had heard of her wealth and independence with the purest and most ungrudging pleasure, but when it became a case of ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... I look as bad as that?" laughed the other. "If I do, looks are deceitful, for I feel fit as a fiddle. I need only one thing to make a complete new man ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... all its saints! I think you are right, Clement Maldon," he muttered. "Beneath that black dress of yours you are a man like the rest of us, are you not? You have a heart, you have members, you have a brain to think with; you are a fiddle for God to play on, and however much your superstitions mask and alter it, out of those strings now and again will come some squeak of truth. Well, I am another fiddle, of a more honest sort, mayhap, though I do not lift two fingers of my right hand and ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... Gardener's Lane. I was wondering in which of these miserable huts my odd friend might live. I had completely forgotten the number; moreover it was impossible to make out any signs in the darkness. At that moment a man carrying a heavy load of vegetables passed me. "The old fellow is scraping his fiddle again," he grumbled, "and disturbing decent people in their night's rest." At the same time, as I went on, the soft, sustained tone of a violin struck my ear. It seemed to come from the open attic window of a hovel a short distance away, which, being low and without ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... horns she is playing A tune with a nourish or two! No cow-herd am I but my staying To play second fiddle won't do. Singing (to myself)—With my tol de rol tol-e-rate ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... in fact interrupted by a blatant noise which rose behind them, in which the voice of the preacher emitted, in unison with that of the old woman, tones like the grumble of a bassoon combined with the screaking of a cracked fiddle. At first, the aged pair of sufferers had been contented to condole with each other in smothered expressions of complaint and indignation; but the sense of their injuries became more pungently aggravated as they communicated with each ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... when upon this discourse he said if ever there was another Dutch war they should not find a Secretary; "Nor," said I, "a Clerk of the Acts, for I see the reward of it; and, thank God, I have enough of my own to buy me a book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife;"—"Why," says he, "I have enough to buy me a good book, and shall not need a fiddle because I have never a one of your good wives." This morning the House is upon a Bill, brought in to-day by Sir ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Babbitts and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling shrieked, "Come on! Let's put some pep in it! Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I'll try to make ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... with its thin old walls, vibrates at night like a great dry fiddle; the slightest noises grow great in it, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... littlest chile ter de oldest man er woman wud clean dey selves up en put on dey best clo's for ter "go befo de King", dats whut us called it. All wud gather in bak of de big house under de big oak trees en Marse Tom he wud cum out wid he fiddle under he arm, yo kno Marse Tom he war a grete fiddler, en sot hisself down in de chere whut Uncle Joe done fotched fer im, en den he tell Uncle Joe fer ter go git de barrel er whiskey en he wud gib em all er gill er two so's dey cud all feel rite good, en den Marse Tom he start dat ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... git the fiddle. That's the only song I can remember. They used to sing it in the little white meetin' house with the steeple a-p'intin' straight up. Wish I could remember more, but ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... and a glow of pleasure suffused her face. "There's going to be fun there, they say, for Jacob the miller is going to ask Neddy 'Pandy' to dance the 'candle dance,' and Robin Davies the sailor will play the fiddle for him. Hast ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... Gallery? Can anything be less interesting? Here and there the portrait of a General! But such portraits! One veteran warrior is actually shown in the act of playing upon a fiddle! As for the pictures of the victories, there is scarcely anything new worth looking at. Same good old Inkermann, by Lady BUTLER, as of yore; and the same good old recollections of Egypt from past Academies. For the rest, the room contains some comfortable chairs. They ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... he said to himself—"it always leaves you keyed up like a fiddle or a woman. I'll get over it after a while or I'll die trying," and he closed his teeth upon each other with a nervous twist that ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Bob the fiddler is the pride O' chaps an' maidens vur an' wide; They can't keep up a merry tide, But Bob is in the middle. If merry Bob do come avore ye, He'll zing a zong, or tell a story; But if you'd zee en in his glory, Jist let en have a fiddle. ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... Irish songs were sung, while Pat played upon the fiddle, and Betty and Mat enlivened the company ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... use is a man who dawdles away his time on a fiddle; of what benefit is he to mankind? Do fiddlers build cities? Do they delve into the earth for precious metals? Do they sow the seed and harvest the grain? No, no; they are drones—the ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... 'Oh, fiddle-de-dee!—every woman, unless she is a fool, knows intuitively what flirtation means, and can put it in practice. But it struck me last night that Aunt Margaret rather encouraged George to pay attention to Gladys. Of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... he takes with him is an old sheepskin jacket, in which he finds the wishing-box, which had been, unknown to him, the cause of his father's prosperity. When the "slave" of the box appears, the hero merely asks for a fiddle that when played upon makes everybody who hears it to dance.[FN388] He hires himself to the King, whose daughter gives him, in jest, a written promise to marry him, in exchange for the fiddle. The King, when the hero claims the princess, insists on her keeping her promise, and they are married. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... warmly. "Slept like a turnip through the beastly parts, and woke up for the bit from Dumbarton on. I also had the luck to remember what you said about the breakfast and took the precaution of wiring for it. Here I am, and as fit as a fiddle." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... been a long time since the merry sound of the fiddle had been heard in the village of Brunen. The throne was surrounded by little boys and girls listening with wondering delight at the gay music. But the grown girls stood afar off and did not look even once at the enticing fiddler, but hid themselves timidly behind the mothers, who ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... at length the provost raised his drooping crest, and spoke in a cheerful tone. 'Come, sit down to your glass, Mr. Fairford; we have laid our heads thegither, and you shall see it will not be our fault if you are not quite pleased, and Mr. Darsie Latimer let loose to take his fiddle under his neck again. But Summertrees thinks it will require you to put yourself into some bodily risk, which maybe you may not ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... of playing excellent jigs, reels, and hornpipes? And, besides this, there was a grand band hired from Rosseter, who, with their wonderful wind-instruments and puffed-out cheeks, were themselves a delightful show to the small boys and girls. To say nothing of Joshua Rann's fiddle, which, by an act of generous forethought, he had provided himself with, in case any one should be of sufficiently pure taste to prefer dancing to a ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... the mountains, and monumental stones are erected over warriors, who "buckled on their belts," and fell in single combat. From Hallingdal went forth the national Polska (the Halling), and only the Hardanger-fela (the Hallingdal fiddle) can rightly give its wild, extraordinary melody. Most beautiful are the flowers of remembrance which the Christian antiquity exhibits, and the eternal snow upon the crowns of the ancient mountains is not more imperishable than these innocent roses at their feet. So ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... modern painters, who mistake some of our great masters; because they sometimes put in some of those round characters of clouds, they must do the same; but if you look at any of their skies, they either assist in the composition or make some figure in the picture—nay, sometimes play the first fiddle.... ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... for it, then, but for your majesty to call for a fiddle, and amuse yourself, like Nero, while your city is burning," ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered. "And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come to Springvale ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... 'em, Peter. Look at 'em," laughed the captain. "It's a most noble sight! Watch the old fellow playing the fiddle, and I'll lay my eyes that in a half minute or so you'll have some of ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bright fancy. But he was fluent in speech, and his words, though not chosen, were usually appropriate. The captain had no powers of invention whatever. He used to say, when asked to tell a story, that he "might as well try to play the fiddle with a handspike." But this was no misfortune, for he had read much, and his memory was good, and supplied him with an endless flow of small-talk on almost every subject that usually falls under the observation of sea-captains, and on many subjects besides, ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... gloomy hiding-place, dim-lit by flickering lanthorn, I passed many weary hours, while all about me was a stir and bustle, a confused sound made up of many, as the never-ending tread of feet, the sound of hoarse voices now faint and far and anon clear and loud, the scrape of a fiddle, snatches of rough song, the ceaseless ring and tap of hammers—a very babel that, telling of life and action, made my gloomy prison the harder to endure. And here (mindful of what is to follow) I do think it well to describe in few ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... dancers out upon the lawn, and then they managed to go through one quadrille. But it was found that it did not answer. The music of the single fiddle which Crosbie had hired from Guestwick was not sufficient for the purpose; and then the grass, though it was perfect for purposes of croquet, was not pleasant to the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... deserved it, I'm afraid— You that had never learned the trade, But just some idle mornin' strayed Into the schuele, An' picked the fiddle up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... diddle diddle, The voters we'd fiddle With Free Education—that "boon." But Wisbech birds laugh At such plain party "chaff," And the "Dish"—at ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... the slope of a wooded hill, sawed logs and built two huts, one for Rothsay, and one for old Scythia. They were finished before night. And then the settlers had a house-warming, which was a breakdown dance to the music of the one fiddle in the settlement, and a supper of such eatables and drinkables as the ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Bargetown it might have been called; it was a veritable floating colony of French and Swede, Irish and Scotch, jabbering and smoking by day and lying quietly at night under the stars, save for the occasional jig and scrape of the fiddle of some active Milesian. Here, had I fully known it, was my chance for observation, but I was ignorant at that time of the ways of these people and did not venture among them. But the man in the velvet ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... wrings, Your cry politely cease, And fret your hearts to fiddle-strings That Van may die ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... has one more word which seems to me quite as good a candidate as any of the others, viz. roteur, a player on the rote, i.e. the fiddle used by the medieval minstrels, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... out at last). You're surprised! Surprised! You would be. You've never stopped to think what other people are thinking; you take it for granted that they all love you, and that's all you care about. Do you think I liked playing second fiddle to you all my life? Do you think I've never had any ambitions of my own? I suppose you thought I was quite happy being one of the crowd of admirers round you, all saying, "Oh, look at Gerald, isn't ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... greater part of them, yet let our admiration be [Transcriber's Note: superfluous 'be'] "be screwed to its sticking place," when we think upon the wonderous genius of the aforesaid Thomas Britton; who, in the midst of his coal cellars, could practise upon "fiddle and flute," or collate his curious volumes; and throwing away, with the agility of a harlequin, his sombre suit of business-cloths, could put on his velvet coat and bag-wig, and receive his concert visitors, at the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... tricks, who dare perform that which no sober man will attempt: they do indeed rather deserve themselves to be laughed at, than their conceits. For what can be more ridiculous than we do make ourselves, when we thus fiddle and fool with our own souls; when, to make vain people merry, we incense God's earnest displeasure; when, to raise a fit of present laughter, we expose ourselves to endless wailing and woe; when, to be reckoned wits, we prove ourselves stark wild? Surely to this case we may accommodate ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel de Chaumont ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... shuffling feet, of tinkling piano and whining fiddle, gave notice in advance that the dancers were on the floor. Clanton took the precaution to ease the guns in their holsters in order to make sure of a ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... mostly men decked in a preponderance of red, white, and blue, and usually accompanied by a tableau arrangement on a cart. Every twenty yards they stopped, went through a series of antics, supposed to be country dances, to the tune of the cornet and a fiddle, and then brought round the hat, frequently embracing any woman who objected to ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... friendship struck up between Frohman and Stoddart, who, in a way, was a character. He played the violin, and when business was bad and the company got in the dumps Stoddart added to their misfortunes by playing doleful tunes on his fiddle. But that fiddle had a virtue not to be despised, because it was Stoddart's bank. In its hollow box he secreted his modest savings, and in more than one emergency they were drawn on for company bed and board. When the organization reached Memphis Charles had so ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... the dancing sisters, out of breath, and laughing gaily, threw herself upon a bench to rest. The other leaned against a tree hard by. The music, a wandering harp and fiddle, left off with a flourish, as if it boasted of its freshness; though the truth is, it had gone at such a pace, and worked itself to such a pitch of competition with the dancing, that it never could have held on, half a minute longer. The apple- pickers on the ladders raised a hum and murmur ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... skies lifted somewhat and a four-horse waggon appeared, or rather two mules and two horses on a common freighting waggon, in which Lyman Hamblin and two others were playing, as nearly in unison as possible, a fiddle, a drum, and a fife. While we were admiring this feat we heard Jack's hearty shout and saw our waggon returning under his charge from Salt Lake with supplies, with a cook stove for our kitchen, and with a new suit ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... night; I never do in a strange bed. I feel a little indigestion, which one must expect at this time of the year. Carrie and I returned to Town in the evening. Lupin came in late. He said he enjoyed his Christmas, and added: "I feel as fit as a Lowther Arcade fiddle, and only require a little more 'oof' to feel as fit as a 500 pounds Stradivarius." I have long since given up trying to understand Lupin's slang, or asking ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... scrape execrably on a violin. He had many little puppet soldiers, whom, hour after hour, he would marshal on the floor in mimic war. He would dress his own servants and the maids of Catharine in masks, and set them dancing, while he would dance with them, playing at the same time on the fiddle. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... now and then, He groped and fiddled doggedly along, His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throng The stony peevishness of sightless men. He seemed scarce older than his clothes. Again, Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song, So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong, You hardly could distinguish one in ten. He stopped at last, and sat him on the sand, And, grasping wearily his bread-winner, Stared dim towards the blue immensity, Then leaned his head upon his poor old hand. He may have slept: he did not speak nor stir: His gesture ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Mrs. Lathrop, it was another road o' hills, 'n' I must say 's the sight made my blood run cold for the third time in one day. F'r a minute I thought seriously o' jus' takin' a train away ag'in 'n' lettin' Cousin Marion fiddle alone f'r another fifty years, f'r I give you my word o' honor, Mrs. Lathrop, 's I was 'most dead, 'n' Lord only knows what made me keep on, f'r what came after was enough to shake my faith in the Lord forever 'f I really believed ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... hubbub was Carlisle city that day; yet, as the two entered the courtyard of the castle, James was aware of another sound, rising clear above the tumult of the town—strains of music, surely, that came from a fiddle. As they stepped under the inner gateway and approached the Norman Keep, the fiddler himself came in sight playing with might and main, under a barred window about six feet from the ground. By the fiddler's ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... thought Paul, as he led the way with Miss Mary Mutlow, "if Dick were ever to hear of this, he'd think it funny. Oh, if I ever get the upper hand of him again——. How much longer, I wonder, shall I have to play the fool to this infernal fiddle!" ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... it is as unexplainable as the poem itself is untranslatable. It has that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel (if you have the conditions for recognizing it) in the first word a Norseman addresses to you. It has that wonderful twang of the Hardanger fiddle, and the color and sentiment of the ballads sung and the legendary tales recited around the hearth in a Norwegian homestead during the long winter nights. With Bjoernson it was in the blood. It was his soul's accent, the dialect of his thought, the cadence of his emotion. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the counter, or seated at numerous small tables, men were drinking villainous liquor, smoking and talking, and paying but scant attention to the strains of the fiddle or the accordion, save when some well-known air was played, when all would join in a boisterous chorus. Some were always passing in or out of a door which led into a room behind. Here there was comparative quiet, for men were gambling, and ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... and gardens, and the sloping lawns blazed with flowers. My mother said it was much prettier than Kaskaskia; not crowded with traffic; not overrun with foreigners. Everybody seemed to be making a fete, to be visiting or receiving visits. At sunset the fiddle and the banjo began their melody. The young girls would gather at Barbeau's or Le Compt's or Pensonneau's—at any one of a dozen places, and the young men would follow. It was no trouble to have a dance every evening, and on feast days and ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... had a passion for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... fighting for Pancho Villa in Mexico; and the instant the European conflict started, Freyberg realised that he might do better in Europe. He therefore deserted Villa, and set out afoot for San Francisco. His splendid constitution stood him in good stead, and he arrived there as fit as a fiddle, soon afterwards winning enough money in a swimming race to take him to London. In the English capital he received a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, and his promotion has ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... disport, how then? For that once, said Sir Aymeris, I should bid them disobey their lady. Said Birdalone: And how if they disobeyed thee, and obeyed me? Quoth Sir Aymeris: If they bring thee back safe, they may chance to sing to the twiggen fiddle-bow, that they may be warned from such folly; but if they come back without thee, by All-hallows the wind of wrath shall sweep their ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... their true function is to work in the theatres and halls to beguile the audiences and divert their thoughts from the terrible reality of German invasion. With each step that the Germans draw nearer the mummers redouble their efforts to excite laughter. Thus did NERO fiddle. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... tragedy. The rehearsals, where "the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!—the tragic heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick shawls,—the untidy ballet-girls" (there was a dance in "Foscari") "walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary fiddle,"—she was never weary of calling up for the amusement of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... been caught near his home by a sudden shower while on horseback, and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside and while Shiro was preparing one of his famous suppers, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his "fiddle." Dorothy realized, with the first sweep of the bow, that she was playing a Stradivarius, the like of which she had played before only in her dreams. She forgot her listeners, forgot the time and the place, and poured out in her music all the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... glad it is not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl- like demeanour, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... took its name, Few critics can unriddle: Some say from 'pastrycook' it came, And some, from 'cat' and 'fiddle.' ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... have the gypsies now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The authorities have sent them away. But we've Jews that play the cymbals and the fiddle in the village, so one might send for them. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... these neighborhood vengeances. It is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... fire, things weren't going exactly as I had left them. Pridgin was reported to be working hard—a most alarming symptom. It was commonly surmised that he could not stand playing second or third fiddle to Crofter; and as Tempest was apparently content to be second, Pridgin had come to the painful conclusion that the only comfortable place for him in Sharpe's was Number One. It was extremely inconvenient all round; for it made it necessary ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... took his place at the head of the table, where he had sat ever since the father left it. Uncle Neil was very much beloved, but he was in no sense the head of the family. He was a gay, easy-going body, given to singing songs and playing the fiddle, and not at all calculated to keep a virile group of boys and girls in order. So, John, the eldest son at home, was the real head of the family, and his mother's support. For John was wise and strong and many, many years ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... toes Had once as many as we; When they said, "Some day you may lose them all," He replied, "Fish fiddle de-dee!" And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink Lavender water tinged with pink; For she said, "The World in general knows There's nothing so good for ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... hot and cold just to think of it, and my heart thumps with agitation. I don't feel happy exactly, but very excited and important. I have such a lonely feeling sometimes, and I do so long for someone to love me best of all. At home, though they are all kind enough, I am always second fiddle, if not third, and it is nice to be appreciated! I could never care for Wallace in that way, but I like him to like me. It makes things interesting, and I was feeling very flat and dejected, and in ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that his friend in the expedition was not Colonel Perez, who had insultingly dubbed him the Second Fiddle (or Charango). He attached himself therefore with the fidelity of a spaniel to Mr. Marcoy, walking alongside and resting his arm on the pommel of his saddle. After an hour's traverse of a comparatively desert plateau called the Pedregal, covered with rocks and smelling of the patchouli-scented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Howe as a statesman, was, nevertheless, a thousand times of more moment and concern with his band of Bleu followers in the House of Commons, than a dozen Howes, and the consequence is that we find for four years the great old man playing second fiddle to his inferiors, and cutting a far from heroic figure in the arena."[18] What Holton said by way of warning to Brown was realized in the case of Howe. He was "the noblest ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... peril of unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded, snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely" indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation; since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... groupe suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door customers of the Rose, old benchers of the inn, who sit round a table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy's fiddle. Next, a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are surrounding the shoemaker's shop, where an invisible hole in their ball is mending by Master Keep himself, under the joint superintendence of Ben Kirby and Tom Coper, Ben showing much verbal respect and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... laden with lumber. Bargetown it might have been called; it was a veritable floating colony of French and Swede, Irish and Scotch, jabbering and smoking by day and lying quietly at night under the stars, save for the occasional jig and scrape of the fiddle of some active Milesian. Here, had I fully known it, was my chance for observation, but I was ignorant at that time of the ways of these people and did not venture among them. But the man in the velvet coat interested me. He gesticulated the whole time most violently, waved ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... that a more delightful collection of notes was never appended to any poem. Would that all commentators had so assiduously illustrated their text. Here is none of the literary indolence by which nine out of ten works are disfigured, nor the fiddle-faddle notes which some folks must have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... come to hear it, Jean!" cried they: "but take care of your fiddle or you will get it ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pulling at his white whiskers. 'There ain't a better judge of musical instruments in the whole world than what I am. I had an uncle,' says he, 'that was a partner in a piano-factory, and I've seen thousands of 'em put together. I know all about musical instruments from a pipe-organ to a corn-stalk fiddle. There ain't a man lives, sir, that can tell me any news about any instrument that has to be pounded, blowed, scraped, grinded, picked, ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... thus employed, the rest walked about the room, and talked and laughed and sang, so as to drown the sound of the files. Presently they heard from the other side of the building the loud tones of a fiddle, the player evidently keeping his bow going at a rapid rate. Then came the sounds of laughter and the stamping of feet, as if ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... evening, had suddenly demanded a popular song from Mr. Nokes, he (Triplet), seeing the orchestra thinned by desertion, and nugatory by intoxication, had started from the pit, resuscitated with the whole contents of his snuff-box the bass fiddle, snatched the leader's violin, and carried Mr. Nokes triumphantly through; that thunders of applause had followed, and Mr. Nokes had kindly returned thanks for both; but that he (Triplet) had hastily retired to evade the manager's acknowledgments, preferring to wait an opportunity like the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... it, then, but for your majesty to call for a fiddle, and amuse yourself, like Nero, while your city ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... guide of this afternoon, have just seated themselves in the corner of the drawing room where I am writing, and are playing, one the fiddle, and the other the guitar. Perhaps they are trying to get up a "hop," later, but there do not seem materials enough for it, and their tune is at present squeaky—jerky—with an attempt at an adagio. The nigger ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... interval here when the supporters of each party gathered round and gave advice and encouragement. The lady seemed as fresh as a fiddle, but the man was very exhausted and had to have a spirituous stimulant. After a quarter-of-an-hour's interval ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... do so hang about ye, So whimper, and so hug, I know it Gentlemen, And so intice ye, now ye are i'th' bud; And that sweet tilting war, with eyes and kisses, Th' alarms of soft vows, and sighs, and fiddle faddles, Spoils all our trade: you must forget these knick knacks, A woman at some time of year, I grant ye She is necessarie; but make no business of ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... musical ship's company," he says, "and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations, good, bad or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish, Russian or Norse—the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch accent, varied the proceedings; and once ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... hired to teach a few of them about. I could learned if I'd had or been 'round somebody knowed something. He read to us some. He read places in his Bible. Anything we have and ask him. We didn't have books and papers. I loved to play my fiddle, call figures, and tell every one what to do. I didn't take stock in reading and writing ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... the screech of a fiddle could be heard or the lazy music of an accordion, coming from some "Sailors' Home." Steps of dancing with rattle of iron-shod boot-heels clicking over sanded floors, the hoarse shout of the "caller-off," and now and again angry tones with cracked feminine falsettos broke on the air; and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... but 'a portee' of that company. Points of history, matters of literature, the customs of particular countries, the several orders of knighthood, as Teutonic, Maltese, etc., are surely better subjects of conversation, than the weather, dress, or fiddle-faddle stories, that carry no information along with them. The characters of kings and great men are only to be learned in conversation; for they are never fairly written during their lives. This, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the beauty of the night. The lovely southern sky was studded with stars; the breeze laden with perfumes that only a Texas prairie knows; and the air full of melody,—the deep laughter of the cowboys lounging about the bunk-house, and the sweet tone of Shady's fiddle as he played to the ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... Virginian dishes, and learned many new culinary secrets from my lord's French man. We have heard how exquisitely and melodiously he sang at church; and he sang not only sacred but secular music, often inventing airs and composing rude words after the habit of his people. He played the fiddle so charmingly, that he set all the girls dancing in Castlewood Hall, and was ever welcome to a gratis mug of ale at the Three Castles in the village, if he would but bring his fiddle with him. He was good-natured and loved to play for the village children: so that Mr. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strings of this ukeke, the Hawaiian fiddle, are tuned to [e]; to [b] and to [d]. These three strings are struck nearly simultaneously, but the sound being very feeble, it is only the first which, receiving the sharp impact of the blow, gives out enough volume to make a ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... they are back home here under the roofs of thatch. And what a work their women folks make with them when they return! What feasting and merrymaking! What screwing of fiddle-pegs, nimble motion of elbows and long-sustained dancing and skipping. I don't deny that there is clink of glasses, too, at times, to aid the passage of the hours far ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... unyielding. Both sails were snow-white, semi-transparent and supple in movement, like the ivory sails on the model ships in Rosenborg Palace. The mast seemed to bend slightly and the stays were as taut as fiddle-strings. The boat quivered like a leaf. The waves pounded hard against the thin strakes of the boat's side. I could feel them on my cheek, though their dampness never penetrated; but in between these hammer ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Miss Panney. "The young man and that Cicely Drane of yours have agreed to marry each other, and I suppose the old lady will live with them, and Miriam will have to get down from her high horse and agree to play second fiddle, or go to school again. She is too ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... to stand! The music-master could not stand it, But rushing forth with fiddle-stick in hand, As savage as a bandit, Made up directly to the tattered man, And thus in broken sentences began: "Com—com—I say! You go away! Into two parts my head you split— My fiddle cannot hear ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... terrace with a wild garden all round. It must have been very pretty before the war, even in its deserted state it is very nice; forget-me-nots and bits of lake and stream everywhere. I feel as fit as a fiddle and am ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... him into the church. Was there ever an uglier woman? Two of her front teeth were gone, and she was bald. Fortunately for her, Beauty draws us with a single hair, or she had not netted Calfsfoot. Now what a miserable time he has of it. She is a vixen. You know what fiddle-strings are made of; well, I'm told she supplies her own. But why should I dwell on infelicitous unions of this kind? It was obvious to every rational creature from the first—and to him most concerned—that ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... post-office on his way down and he had the Boston morning paper in his hand. Of course he was filled to the brim with war news. We discuss little else in Bayport now; even the new baby at the parsonage has to play second fiddle. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... very well-devised beginnings. At the fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he said, "I can't fiddle about any more with my ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... is my riddle, So I'll fall back on my fiddle; For I'd stan' myself on en' To accommodate a frien' Nex' do', nex' do'— To accommodate a ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... They are very rarely old, as many of the organ- grinders are; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and threes; the violinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and the harper unslings his instrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through their repertory,—pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, not unmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... playing, but that's not doing anything; and, if he had done nothing, there would ha' been no fiddling. You understand me, miss, I know: work comes before music, and makes the soul of it; it's not the music that makes the doing. I'm a poor hand at saying without my fiddle, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... wood, he dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... rope, now taut, and resembling a huge "fiddle string," as Bandy-legs remarked, testing it as he passed along. It led them to the brow of an abrupt little descent, a sheer drop of perhaps twenty feet. Down this slope they followed the rope with their eyes and then discovered it was attached to a large and heavy barrel that could almost be called ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... illiterate peasant for a meal's meat; a scrivener better paid for an obligation; a falconer receive greater wages than a student; a lawyer get more in a day than a philosopher in a year, better reward for an hour, than a scholar for a twelvemonth's study; him that can [378]paint Thais, play on a fiddle, curl hair, &c., sooner get preferment than a philologer ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was a young man I should have been ashamed to have spent as much time at my looking-glass as if I'd been a girl. I could make myself as smart as any one when I was going to a dance, or to a party where I was likely to meet pretty girls; but I should have laughed myself to scorn if I'd stood fiddle-faddling at a glass, smirking at my own likeness, all ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... abide with her long beyond the tarrying of the spirit in the flesh. "He said I looked nice. I met him the first time I wore the purple dress. It was at a corn-husking party at Jerry Grumb's barn. Some man played the fiddle and we danced." ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... branch! I loved my little sister Anna, too. But what did they do to her behind those marble walls? Did you fiddle for her? What was she when they let her go? My pretty little Anna! The fires of hell for those damned green stones of yours, Stefani! She heard of them and wanted to see ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... trample down all this sentimental fiddle-de-dee, what was the plain English of the case so far as she was concerned? Unbidden, innumerable circumstances stored from local knowledge offered themselves as guides for argument. Take any girl of that class—well, what are her chances? Why, you are ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul of the world. Through technique the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... poetize the tragedy of one's own life is fatuous; it is like enjoying one's dizziness on the brink of a precipice, or the pangs of sickness without seeking a remedy. But to poetize the tragedy of others, to fiddle while Rome is burning, is brutal. Nevertheless, though it is not commonly possible to do things on Nero's scale, precisely the same attitude is the commonest thing in the world, and is fostered by the whole aesthetic ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... disorderly street we proceeded to the street of the Princess of Pleasure wherein I saw many English, French, Italians and Paynims. The Princess is very fair to behold, with mixed wine in one hand, and a fiddle and a harp in the other; and in her treasury, innumerable pleasures and toys to gain the custom of everybody, and retain them in her father's service. Yea, many were wont to escape to this pleasant street to drown their grief for losses and debts they had ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... was to be a grand frolic at Bob Mosely's, to greet the hunters. This Bob Mosely was a prime fellow throughout the country. He was an indifferent hunter, it is true, and rather lazy to boot; but then he could play the fiddle, and that was enough to make him of consequence. There was no other man within a hundred miles that could play the fiddle, so there was no having a regular frolic without Bob Mosely. The hunters, therefore, were always ready to give him ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... clever playing attracted the attention of the leader, a big fellow named Spaun, who sat immediately in front of him. On turning round to ascertain who it was that was bringing forth such excellent tone from his fiddle, and, moreover, playing with such precision, Spaun discovered it to be 'a small boy in spectacles, named Franz Schubert.' From that moment big Spaun became little Franz's intimate friend and counsellor. To him one day ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... teacher, and then lowered her eyes. Her beautiful little face was beginning to have its usual effect upon most of the ladies present. Some of the stony despair had left it; the color came and went in her cheeks. She ceased to fiddle with her apron, and clasped her two little ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... to make bombs or automatic bankrobbers; he just wanted to fiddle with the stack, see what it would do. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times, then shrugged, got up, went over to his closet, and put the thing away. There wasn't anything he could do with it until he'd bought ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... does a considerable trade in wine. It is immortalized in the Nibelungenlied in the person of "Volker von Alzeie,'' the warrior who in the last part of the epic plays a part second only to that of Hagen, and who "was called the minstrel (spilman) because he could fiddle.'' It became an imperial city in 1277. In 1620 it was sacked by the Spaniards and in 1689 burnt by the French. Annexed to France during the Napoleonic wars, it passed in 1815 to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... spoken to."' Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20, 1773. Boswell writing of this Tour said:—'I also may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation; I do not mean leading, as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness—starting topics, and making him pursue them.' Ib. Sept. 28. One day he recorded:—'I did not exert myself to get Dr. Johnson to talk, that I might not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... brass or latten; but when silver became popular table spoons of silver were procured whenever it was possible to afford them, and a collection including in the varieties the Apostle and the seal top, and its various developments from the rat-tail to the fiddle, is obtainable. As regarding spoons Westman has written: "The spoon is one of the first things wanted when we come into the world, and it is one of the last things we part with ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... success. As for the conversation with which the Prince is credited, it is of the most amazing kind. We find him on one page gravely discussing the depression of trade with Mr. Ezra P. Bayle, a shoddy American millionaire, who promptly replies, 'Depression of fiddle-sticks, Prince'; in another passage he naively inquires of the same shrewd speculator whether the thunderstorms and prairie fires of the West are still 'on so grand a scale' as when he visited Illinois; and we are told in the second volume that, after ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... was leifer to have at his bedde's hedde Twenty books clothed in blacke or redde Of Aristotle and his philosophie Than robes riche or fiddle or psalterie." ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... safest in the long run—when a versifier suspects that he lacks the true inspiration, he had better try the confidence game, and induce the public to admire by writing that which no one can understand. It would seem, too, that writing poetry and playing on the fiddle have this much in common, that a true genius at either is fit for nothing else. The amateurs can take care of themselves, but the born-masters display an amiable worthlessness for every thing but their art. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... ought to know that it isn't right to neglect the boy that's come to do a day's work with you. (Going to the door) Many's the day I put in with the scythe in Ireland, and in England too; I did more than stroll with the fiddle, and I saw more places than where fiddling brought me. (Brian MacConnell comes to the door) I was just going out to you, Brian. I was telling the girl here that it's not right to neglect the boy that's giving you a day's work out of his ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... queer external symbol of a never-failing enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger, the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the Paradise where we might live, if ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and you had trod on both of 'em at once, and, then a grand clatter and scramble and string of jumps, up and down, back and forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and mice more than like anything I call music. I like to hear a woman sing, and I like to hear a fiddle sing, but these noises they hammer out of their wood and ivory anvils—don't talk to me, I know the difference between a bullfrog ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like—A train of artillery? said my uncle Toby—A train of a fiddle-stick!—quoth my father—which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle.—I declare, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Society's Home Galleries." It was a line we found under some babies' photos on the society page of a great newspaper printed in New York City. Professor Gluckstein and his son Rudolph played the "Star-Spangled Banner" on the piano and fiddle during ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... mention is made of money spent on behalf of one person in his house, he puts at the side of the page a clay pipe, rudely drawn; an entry of the payment of wages to another servant has a jug of ale; another a quill pen; another a couple of brooms, as the housemaid; a fiddle for the dancing master for his daughter; payment made to the sexton or parish-clerk has a representation of the village church by its side, and the window-tax a small lattice-window; and on the days ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... used to play the fiddle, left a girl here with child; and though I gave her two tayes in silver to bring up the child; she killed it as soon as it was born, which is a common thing in this country. The whistle and chain belonging to Mr Foster, the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... him a very thorough inspection in the rubbing room after breakfast, but could find nothing wrong. "Sure, you're as sound as Colin Meagher's fiddle, me boy. Where is it it ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... kitchen, however, besides being the warmest, was by far the gayest place. Here we watched our dinner cooked, and ate it afterwards; heard of wars and rumours of wars; listened to heroic ballads, chanted by a warrior, and accompanied by a species of one-stringed fiddle; and made the acquaintance of two very fashionable young men. One was the bishop's nephew, a handsome lad about seventeen, who was, on account of his youth, very shy and modest, and acted as cavaliero servente to the kitchen-maid. The other was a remarkably good-looking and well-dressed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... rather than have her son seen in the city with that specimen. Accordingly, when the hour for retiring arrived, she ordered Corinda to show him into the "east chamber," a room used for her common kind of visitors, but which Joel pronounced "as neat as a fiddle." ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... a man and a stranger, a walkin' up and puttin' his arm round her, and huggin' her up to him as clost as he can; that act, that a woman would resent as a deadly insult and her incensed relatives avenge with the sword, if it occurred in any other place than the ball-room and at the sound of the fiddle. The utter inconsistency of her meetin' it with smiles, and making frantic efforts to get more such affronts than any other woman present — her male relatives a lookin' ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... and be done with the horror. And whiles we crawled thus round and round within this narrow space, ever and anon above the stealthy rustle of his movements, above his stertorous breathing and evil muttering, above the wild throbbing of my heart rose the wail of the fiddle and the singing: ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... day of his triumph came. At the end of the month the master read off the class-list, and, much to his disgust, George Dawkins found himself playing second fiddle ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... Dance and song The shepherd for the dance was dress'd, With ribbon, wreath, and coloured vest, A gallant show displaying. And round about the linden-trees, They footed it right merrily. Juchhe! Juchhe! Juchheisa! Heisa! He! So fiddle-bow was braying. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the singing of hymns being very beautiful. The bearing of these Christianized Hottentots was in complete contrast to that of a Dutch family whom he visited as a medical man one Sunday. There was no Sunday; the man's wife and daughters were dancing before the house, while a black played the fiddle. ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... world forsooth, nor the world for you! and if that is not flying in the face of your Creator, and wanting to know better than Providence!—And then you say, 'you cast a gloom by your mere presence.' Fiddle-de-dee! It was not much in the way of gloom that Molly brought back with her from her three days' visit to you—or if that is gloom—well, the more your presence casts of it the better—that is all I can say. Ah, but you should have seen her, poor ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... in dexterity. Then another fear assailed him. How would he get through his work? for most of it had passed through Jonah's nimble fingers. Ah well, it was no matter! He was a lonely old man with nothing but his fiddle to bring back ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... saints! I think you are right, Clement Maldon," he muttered. "Beneath that black dress of yours you are a man like the rest of us, are you not? You have a heart, you have members, you have a brain to think with; you are a fiddle for God to play on, and however much your superstitions mask and alter it, out of those strings now and again will come some squeak of truth. Well, I am another fiddle, of a more honest sort, mayhap, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... out one evening at ould Tom Dundon's wake; an' whatever came betune them, she made no more about it but just draws her cloak round her, and away wid herself and the sarvant-girl home again, as if there was not a corpse, or a fiddle, or a taste of ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... music, and dancing with serious, incongruous elegance. Round and round the circle he footed it, his long thin legs twinkling in absolute accord with the complicated jig that his long thin fingers were ripping out of the cracked and raucous fiddle. A very plain, stout young woman, with a heavy red face and discordantly golden hair, shuffled round after him in a clumsy pretence of dancing, and as the couple faced Mrs. Pat she saw that the old man was blind. Steam was rising from his domed bald ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night leave-takings at that time. "It's because he is so put upon by everybody now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make one, before this day's sun sets. If I can once get a half-hour with him, I'm not afraid after that; I know the way it is with men!" said the confident Margarita, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... such days of activity as will possibly cause us to forget the reality of things. We want, as Lord Mount-Temple said, the Deep Church as well as the High and Low. Yes, let us have orchestras in churches if you will, but I don't want the man to go into a place of worship with his fiddle-case under his arm and the idea in his mind that he is going to take part in a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... away at the kite line, which was as taut as a string on a bass fiddle. Suddenly there was a loud snap and the cord parted. Sam and Dick fell back from the edge of the cliff, while the entangled kites soared away for ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... the Athenian, which was haughty and arrogant, in taking so much to himself, had been a grave and wise observation and censure, applied at large to others. Desired at a feast to touch a lute, he said, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town, a great city. These words (holpen a little with a metaphor) may express two differing abilities, in those that deal in business of estate. For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... nonsense talk, which meant nothing. Now when the woman addressed this funny kind of talk to him, he answered her in her own way, as he imagined, readily enough: "Hey diddle-diddle, the cat's in the fiddle, fe fo fi fum, chumpty-chumpty-chum, with bings on her ringers, and tells ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... He's not even told one of his fine friends what his brother does; he says it's for the sake of his school. He's living a lie for his own pride. He's got himself made master of a college, fine as a fiddle, and he cares more about that than about his brother. With all his prayers and his sermons in church every Sunday, he'd let me go to the dogs rather than live out the truth. He thinks I've gone to the devil now, because I left him in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... seen many Midsummer-eves under different skies, but never such a one as this. So far, far from all that one associates with this evening. I think of the merriment round the bonfires at home, hear the scraping of the fiddle, the peals of laughter, and the salvoes of the guns, with the echoes answering from the purple-tinted heights. And then I look out over this boundless, white expanse into the fog and sleet and the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... whole soul, once fair and blooming—I swear it—with its leaves fresh from the dews of heaven, one rank leprosy, this man who, rolling in riches, learned to cheat and pilfer as a boy learns to dance and play the fiddle, and (to damn me, whose happiness he had blasted) accused me to the world of his own crime!—here is this man who has not left off one vice, but added to those of his youth the bloodless craft of the veteran knave;—here is this man, flattered, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... through a forest and thought of all manner of things, and when nothing was left for him to think about, he said to himself, "Time is beginning to pass heavily with me here in the forest, I will fetch hither a good companion for myself." Then he took his fiddle from his back, and played so that it echoed through the trees. It was not long before a wolf came trotting through the thicket towards him. "Ah, here is a wolf coming! I have no desire for him!" said the musician; but the wolf came nearer and said to him, "Ah, dear musician, how ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... is, I tell you! A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, A fire to thaw our thumbs, (poor fellow! The paw he holds up there's been frozen,) Plenty of catgut for my fiddle, (This out-door business is bad for strings,) Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, And Roger and I set up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Cambridge University by the scholarships and prizes which he had won. One beautiful little dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End Theatre as the dormouse in "Alice in Wonderland." She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she proved, but more than all the rest of the family put together earned. At that time I never went to theatres. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... saddles and bridles, all English too, with a good deal of ammunition and baggage. The consternation of the tories was so great that they never dreamt of carrying off anything. Even their fiddles and fiddle bows, and playing cards, were all left strewed around their fires. One of the gamblers, (it is a serious truth) though shot dead, still held the cards hard gripped in his hands. Led by curiosity to inspect this strange sight, a dead gambler, we found that the cards ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... he became a conductor, was a world-famous performer on the double bass, that big growling brute of an instrument popularly known as the bull fiddle. In those days all that was visible of his impressive person was his head, one of his ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... night in a disguise, and abuse the women and affront the men whom he met, and sometimes to beat them, and sometimes to be beaten by them. This was one of his imperial nocturnal pleasures; his chiefest in the day was to sing and play upon a fiddle, in the habit of a minstrel, upon the public stage; he was prouder of the garlands that were given to his divine voice (as they called it then) in those kind of prizes, than all his forefathers were of their triumphs over nations. He did not at his ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... trip I 'd have taken you. It was just what you needed—a week of lolling around a deck in the hot sun with the sea winds blowing over your face. That's what you want to do—get out under the blue sky and soak it in. If you don't believe it, look at me. Fit as a fiddle; strong as a moose. You said you wanted to sprawl in the sunshine,—why the devil don't you take a week off ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... time I belonged to the ship I was away on detached duty. Scarcely had I joined her, when I was sent on shore in command of a party of men to clear a transport lying in Rhode Island. While I was engaged in this far from pleasant duty I had to put up at the Cat and Fiddle Tavern, kept by a certain Mrs Grimalkin. To cover her sympathy with the rebels she used to exhibit on all public occasions an exuberance of loyalty which I thought rather suspicious. By watching her narrowly I was not long in discovering that she kept up a ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... I cannot court thy sprightly eyes, With the base-viol plac'd between my thighs; I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-stretch'd minikin; I cannot whine in puling elegies, Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies; I am not fashion'd for these amorous times, To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes; I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing, Oiling my saint with supple sonneting; I cannot ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... of old-fashioned courtesy and heart-kindness. He knew Borrow well, and quite discredited the innuendoes and insinuations of many Norwich folk about him. It was a joke with the Murray circle that "big Borrow was second fiddle at his home, and there is ample testimony that his wife was a capable manager and looked after his affairs, literary as well as domestic." Though Borrow boasted of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, Mr. ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... give you my fiddle, They'll think that I'm gone mad, For many a joyful day My fiddle and ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... "Quidam, Anglice a Certain Person," in other words Walpole himself. Quidam pours gold into the pockets of the four patriots, drinks with them, and then, when the 'bottle is out' (a too frequent occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing after him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every one of these patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the fiddler there knows; so that he intends to make them ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... guard the fairy tree. When the king had pronounced sentence everyone was very sorry, because the little fellow was a favourite with them all. No fairy harper upon his harp, or piper upon his pipe, or fiddler upon his fiddle, could play half so sweetly as he could play upon an ivy leaf; and when they remembered all the pleasant moonlit nights on which they had danced to his music, and thought that they should never hear or dance to it any more, their little hearts were ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... by 'Lina.) "How that made me gnash my teeth, for I had suspected that I was only playing second fiddle for Alice Johnson, 'darling, precious ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... himself would undoubtedly have said, 'fit as a fiddle,' or 'right as rain.' His cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling. He had his arms akimbo, and his feet planted wide apart. His grey bowler rested on the back of his head, to display a sleek coating of hair plastered down over his brow. In his white satin tie shone a dubious but large diamond, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... o'clock returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians' fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And her name was as pretty as she was—"Florence," he ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... his fiddle along, and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept time to the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held—and where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and stockmen and shearers from far and near brought each his lass and tripped it from early night to early dawn, to the strains of old Andy Ferguson's fiddle and young Dave Boone's concertina. Norah had been allowed to look on at one or two of these gatherings. She thought them the height of human bliss, and was only sorry that sheer inability to dance prevented her from "taking the floor" with Mick Shanahan, the horse breaker, who had paid ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... loved my little sister Anna, too. But what did they do to her behind those marble walls? Did you fiddle for her? What was she when they let her go? My pretty little Anna! The fires of hell for those damned green stones of yours, Stefani! She heard of them and wanted to see them, and ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... gentleman. But no words could do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it. Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island—why, you could not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day, was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... our little stock of flour and dried meat with them as fairly as possible and decided we would try the trail. When our plans were settled we felt in pretty good spirits again, and one of the boys got up a sort of corn-stalk fiddle which made a squeaking noise and in a little while there was a sort of mixed American and Indian dance going on in which the squaws joined in and we had a pretty jolly time till quite late at night. We were well pleased ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... self-sufficient, especially Taberner, Phipps, and Church, who, as I am informed, have, in violation of my sub-dean's and chapter's order in December last, at the instance of some obscure persons unknown, presumed to sing and fiddle at ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... strings of the old fiddle will tighten up a good deal, if I abstain from attempting to play upon the instrument at present—but that a few jigs now will ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... Bott to notify the police of the theft, but the old man was prostrated with grief, and it was the wife who, with Ellen Clancy, finally accompanied Flechter to Police Headquarters. The police had no idea who had taken the old fellow's fiddle, and did not particularly care anyway. Later they cared a ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... "Wounded? A fiddle-stick's end!" said the doctor. "No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him.—Now, Mrs. Hawkins, just you run up-stairs to your husband, and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this fellow's trebly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... came after a certain miracle on May-day. The Major had taken Chad to the festival where the dance was on sawdust in the woodland—in the bottom of a little hollow, around which the seats ran as in an amphitheatre. Ready to fiddle for them stood none other than John Morgan himself, his gray eyes dancing and an arch smile on his handsome face; and, taking a place among the dancers, were Richard Hunt and—Margaret. The poised bow fell, a merry tune ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... interesting "belongings." Anticipating a treasure, Mr. Mickley sent for some violin-connoisseurs to enjoy with him a first sight of the precious instrument. On opening the express-package a very worthless "fiddle" was revealed. After the laugh had gone round, he said dryly, "I think the value of this must be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... they hear a fiddle, are forced to turn over on their backs and howl; some are unmoved by music. So some men are tortured by every violation of symmetry, while some cannot discern a straight line. I belong to the former class, and ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on foreign aid, farming and livestock raising (sheep and goats), and trade with neighboring countries. Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during more than two decades of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). During that conflict, one-third of the population fled the country, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... something like order, the first week commonly passes in reconnoitring, cool civilities, and cautious concessions, to yield at length to the never-dying charities; unless, indeed, the latter may happen to be kept in abeyance by a downright quarrel, about midnight carousals, a squeaking fiddle, or some ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... through the camp Sucatash followed the girl. They came at last to a long, dim bulk, glowing with light from a height of about six feet and black below that level. From this place surged a raucous din of voices, cursing, singing and quarreling. A squeaky fiddle and a mandolin uttered dimly heard notes which were tossed about in the greater turmoil. Stamping feet made a ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Disparaging comparisons were made with Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut, and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players." ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... you remember Abraham? He was the man who had the future. When we were students he beat me all along the line. He got the prizes and the scholarships that I went in for. I always played second fiddle to him. If he'd kept on he'd be in the position I'm in now. That man had a genius for surgery. No one had a look in with him. When he was appointed Registrar at Thomas's I hadn't a chance of getting on the staff. I should have had to become a G.P., and you know what likelihood ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... Dora sawed away at the kite line, which was as taut as a string on a bass fiddle. Suddenly there was a loud snap and the cord parted. Sam and Dick fell back from the edge of the cliff, while the entangled kites soared away for ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... are grouped, the hero himself, a comic servant with a red nose and a fiddle, an open trunk, and a young lady in travelling costume, viz. white satin shoes, paste diamonds, ball-dress, and lace veil. The tips of her fingers rest in the gloved hand of her assailant, whose voice comes deep and mellow through ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... handkerchief, and a well-chalked countenance, did Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk, at or about the hour of half past eight—being precisely sixty minutes behind the period announced, in consequence of the non-arrival of the one fiddle and ditto flute comprising, or rather that ought to have comprised, the orchestra—made his debut, and a particularly nervous bow to the good folks there assembled, "as and for" the character "of Hamlet, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... had something to bear, Braney, when you fell on him,' said Potts, and murmured aside: 'He can be smartish. Hears me call Braney Rufus, and says he, like a fellow-chin on his fiddle—"Captain Mountain, Rufus Mus'. Not bad, for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eccentricity. He had a passion for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... to great straits and had to live after the Indian fashion. A party of Loyalists who came before us late in the spring, had gone up the river further, but they were no better off than those at St. Ann's. The men caught fish and hunted moose when they could. In the spring we made maple sugar. We ate fiddle heads, grapes and even the leaves of trees to allay the pangs of hunger. On one occasion some poisonous weeds were eaten along with the fiddle heads; one or two died, and Dr. Earle had all he could do to ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... knew Mr. Joseph Spence,(387) I do not think I should have been so much delighted as Dr. Kippis with reading his letters. He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius. It was a neat, fiddle-faddle, bit of sterling, that had read good books and kept good company, but was too trifling for use, and only ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... barefooted, stoop-shouldered, stuttering, yet with a chord of natural rhetoric in his high fiddle-string of a windpipe, stood looking after them till they passed down the thoroughfare under the jib-sail, and Joe Johnson did not say a word till some marsh brush intervened between them, he being apparently under a remnant of that panic which had seized ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... "You would never hang about the house, worrying mother about eating and fiddle-faddles, instead of doing any one ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inches long; joints are shorter than the spikelets, excavate on one side and with a pore which is hidden by the sessile spikelet. The sessile spikelet consists of four glumes. The first glume is somewhat fiddle-shaped, dilated above the middle into an orbicular wing, and towards the base into two auricles joined by a transverse ridge, scaberulous, 5-nerved. The second glume is somewhat membranous, ovate, acute and 3-nerved. ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... a cable from our Paris office just before I left. It seems that M. Theophile d'Aurelle plays the fiddle in the orchestra of the Cafe de Paris. He played as usual to-night, so that it is manifestly impossible that he should also be lying in the New York morgue. Moreover, none of his friends, so far as he knows, is in America. No doubt he may be able to identify the photograph of the dead man, ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... a little Italian boy, who lives in Chicago. When I first knew him, he was roaming about from house to house, playing on the fiddle, and singing. ...
— The Nursery, No. 107, November, 1875, Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... the Dutch mercer of New York had clad him. De Catinat had also put on the dark coat of civil life, and he and Adele were busy preparing all things for the old man, who had fallen so weak that there was little which he could do for himself. A fiddle was screaming in the forecastle, and half the night through hoarse bursts of homely song mingled with the dash of the waves and the whistle of the wind, as the New England men in their own grave and stolid fashion ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this, or rather that I had died ere I had seen it; why didst not make me acquainted when thou wert first resolv'd to be a whore, I would have seen thy hot lust satisfied more privately: I would have kept a dancer and a whole consort of musicians in my own house only to fiddle thee. ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... whanging of the piano in the saloon beneath had attained to an even greater pitch of discord than was normally the case. To it was added the excruciating rasp of a fiddle. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come. in the evening, the man I had sent up the river this morning returned, and reported that he ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... played upon his fiddle All through that leafy June, He always played hey-diddle-diddle, And ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... probably lose his license. On a given day about three hundred or four hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Jean tuned his fiddle afresh, and placing it with a knowing jerk under his chin, and with an air of conceit worthy of Lulli, began to sing and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... lied about Pan, because they listened to the haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that. He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as the lusts ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a born artist and musician. Music, tone, sound, colour, vibrate in every page of your romances. Had your parents taught you harmony, the piano, and the fiddle, your music would have burst forth along its normal lines. As they merely taught you the alphabet and grammar, your creative faculty turned to literature; you wrote romances full of music, instead of composing music full of romance. It is ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... sportsman from a very early age. Their grandfather's ship was sailing for Europe once when the boys were children, and they were asked, what present Captain Franks should bring them back? George was divided between books and a fiddle; Harry instantly declared for a little gun: and Madam Warrington (as she then was called) was hurt that her elder boy should have low tastes, and applauded the younger's choice as more worthy of his name and lineage. "Books, papa, I ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... knows that we see little enough of our women folks, and, when we have the chance to see them, and feel the touch of their hands, we waste our time like a lot of fools making military guesses. If I'm not too old to dance to the tune of the shells I'm not too old to dance to the tune of the fiddle and the bow. That's a glorious air floating in from the ballroom. I think I can show some of these youngsters like Kenton here how to shake ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her and says she is right as a fiddle. I'm the young fellow that telephoned the Police for you. I got back word, early this morning, that your folks finally got home, without any harm to anyone. And say! Maybe there wasn't some joy when they heard you two ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... close to the smells of the earth. They learned the ways of birds and bugs, why birds have wings, why bugs have legs, why the gladdywhingers have spotted eggs in a basket nest in a booblow tree, and why the chizzywhizzies scrape off little fiddle songs all summer long while the summer ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... humped herself up over a green fiddle that she had under her cloak, and nearly deafened them ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... hale be your fiddle, Lang may your elbuck jink diddle, To cheer you thro' the weary widdle O' war'ly cares; Till barins' barins kindly ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and excitement leads the crow to investigate any unusual sight or sound that catches his attention. Hide anywhere in the woods, and make any queer sound you will—play a jews'-harp, or pull a devil's fiddle, or just call softly—and first comes a blue jay, all agog to find out all about it. Next a red squirrel steals down and barks just over your head, to make you start if possible. Then, if your eyes ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... neighbours is levity, ours heaviness. In the ancient bass-fiddle, Europe, the thickest string is the German, with deep tone and heavy vibration; but once in vibration, it hums as if it would go on humming for an eternity. Our primitive ancestors deliberated on every thing twice—in drunkenness, and in sobriety; and then they acted. But we, with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... "A fiddle-stick! It is I who have cause to complain of you, not you of me! You throw dust in my eyes by accusing where you should stand otherwise accused. And you ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the whole village went round and round and round under the low ceiling in the valse, young and old, rich and poor, high and low, the sound of their laughter and the scraping of their feet cut now and again by an agonized squeak from Zeron's fiddle. From time to time a staggering, panting couple would fling themselves out, help themselves liberally to pink sirop from the bowl on the side table, and then fling themselves in once more, until Zeron stopped from sheer exhaustion, to tune up for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... accept your honourable proposals with pleasure. Indeed, for myself, I desire nothing better! I will go on turning sour; I will go on giving music lessons and growing imbecile in this hole of a town.... You will fiddle away, turn women's heads, travel, be rich, famous and happy—and every four or six weeks I may hope to be taken for one night to some shabby room where you entertain your women of the street.... It was shameful, ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... the frontier was primarily vocal—the singing of hymns and, possibly, folk songs. Instrumental music was confined to the fiddle, which one Fair Play settler felt valuable enough to mention in his will.[51] The fiddle also provided the musical background for the rollicking reels and jigs which the Scotch-Irish enjoyed so much.[52] That it was ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... compared by Mr Paton to that of the Scotch Highlander; and it is not without strong points of resemblance. "He is brave in battle, highly hospitable; delights in simple and plaintive music and poetry, his favourite instruments being the bagpipe and fiddle; unlike the Greek, he shows little aptitude for trade; and, unlike the Bulgarian, he is very lazy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... in the end, doesn't it? You did not want to play second fiddle; you didn't want Rudd to appear to have scored. You wanted to be the central figure. Much the same, isn't it? The love ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Brandan kneeled down on his knees and wept for joy, and made his praise devoutlie to our Lord God, to know what these birds meant. And then anon one of the birds flew from the tree to St. Brandan, and he with the flickering of his wings made a full merrie noise like a fiddle, that him seemed he never heard so joyful a melodie. And then St. Brandan commanded the foule to tell him the cause why they sat so thick on the tree and sang so merrilie. And then the foule said, some time we were angels in heaven, but when our master, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... well if nineteen could make a woman to her mind. If tailors were men indeed well furnished, but with more moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like apes by such mimic marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them to spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for futilous women's fancies; which are the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys.... It is no little labor to be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they be not shifted anew once in a few months grow too sour for ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... long, slow afternoons, and whispered words of love, and light conversations at dusk, and all that sort of rot. And all the while, outside his door the guns were booming; at the gates of the world a perilous storm had broken. The earth was on fire; but while Rome burned, he, like Nero, played a fiddle—and was content. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... HIM," he says, "whatever you do! He's only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!" However, they - ha, ha, ha! - they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord's opinion, for when it was produced, he says, "My fiddle! The Butcher's a purloiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... certain gentleman, remarkable for his probity, decorum, and extreme sensitiveness. Well, A., the wag, and B., the victim, landed together, but selected, in the general overflow and hurly-burly, different lodgings. Next morning, A. finds B. stowed away in ——'s Hotel, fine as a fiddle, snug as a bug, in a good room, and doing about as well as could be expected. A. had had indifferent luck, and the quarters he had lit upon were any thing but comfortable, the inmates of the Hotel being ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... said Miss Panney. "The young man and that Cicely Drane of yours have agreed to marry each other, and I suppose the old lady will live with them, and Miriam will have to get down from her high horse and agree to play second fiddle, or go to school again. She is too young ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... for the first time was beaded. He wanted silver wire. He would have accepted catgut. He had neither. For one moment, in agony himself, he looked about; then a look of joy came to his face. An old fiddle was lying in the window. A moment, and he had ripped off a string. In two strides he was back at the dripping table, where lay one marble figure, stood a ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... hot weather. Our mess-room leads out into a sort of terrace with a wild garden all round. It must have been very pretty before the war, even in its deserted state it is very nice; forget-me-nots and bits of lake and stream everywhere. I feel as fit as a fiddle and am as brown ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... to help her pick over berries for canning the following day. It was a sacrifice to make, too, with the midsummer evening calling to them in all its varied orchestral tones: Katydids and peep frogs, the swish of the wind through the big Norway pines on the terraces, and the scrape of Shad's old fiddle from the back porch. It was Friday evening, and Mr. and Mrs. Robbins had driven over to the Judge's to attend a community meeting, the latter being one of Cousin Roxy's ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... wan morning, an' de pilot geev us warning, "W'en you come on Rapide Cuisse, ma frien', keep raf' she's head on shore, If you struck beeg rock on middle, w'ere le diable is play hees fiddle, Dat's de tam you pass on some place, you don't ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... took out a little fiddle and began playing on it. When the bear heard the music he could not help dancing, and after he had danced some time he was so pleased that he said to the tailor, 'I say, is fiddling difficult?' 'Mere child's play,' ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... entrance into the wood, he dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears how incautious and ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... it—and if that zone is impenetrable, I'll bet they'll be able to dope out something just as good. Relieved? That doesn't half tell it, guy—I feel as if I had just pitched off the Old Man of the Sea who's been sitting on my neck! What say you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel kind of relieved—they had me worried some—it's the first time I've felt like singing since ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... it is not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... from the table. The Duke sat like a rock in his place and finished what he was saying, though no one noticed it. Miss Skeat clutched her silver fruit-knife till her knuckles shone again, and she set her teeth. Mr. Barker, who had a glass of wine in the "fiddle" before him, took it out when the sea struck and held it up steadily to save it from being spilled; and Lady Victoria, who was not the least ashamed ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... were shown the scene of one of these neighborhood vengeances. It is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of complexion peculiar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... must be told how Fiddle Mord took a sickness and breathed his last; and that was thought great scathe. His daughter Unna took all the goods he left behind him. She was then still unmarried the second time. She was very layish, and ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... hear, or read another man's act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... will tell thee. Five nights ago I did on raiment of the fashion of them beyond Deepdale, and I had with me a fiddle, and was in the manner of a minstrel, and thou wottest that I am not so evil a gut-scraper, and that I have many tales and old rhymes to hand, though I am no scald as thou art. Well, I got out a-gates a night-tide by the postern on the nook of the south-east ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... established in this great Western country; in the days when Indian "Sun" dances, and other barbarous functions were held. In the days of the Red River Jig, when a good fiddler of the same was held to be a man of importance; when the method of tuning the fiddle to the necessary pitch for the playing of that curious dance was a secret known only to a privileged few. Some might call them the "good" old days. "Bad" is the adjective ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... Heart of a Man is deprest with Cares, The Mist is dispell'd when a Woman appears; Like the Notes of a Fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the Spirits, and charms our Ears, Roses and Lilies her Cheeks disclose, But her ripe Lips are more sweet than those. Press her, Caress her, With Blisses, Her Kisses Dissolve us in Pleasure, and ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... off at right angles from his tune, and winding up with a grand flourish on the guttural notes. Behind him, led by his little boy, came the blind fiddler, his honest features glowing with all the hilarity of a rustic bridal, and, as he stumbled along, sawing away upon his fiddle till he made all crack again. Then came the happy bridegroom, drest in his Sunday suit of blue, with a large nosegay in his button-hole; and close beside him his blushing bride, with downcast eyes, clad in a white robe and slippers, and wearing a wreath of white roses in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Helen, "what a business woman you are getting to be. Your career has really begun—and so promisingly. While I can't do a thing but play the fiddle a little, daub a ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... him at it. Or he will cite his avocations to prove he is not included. But he plays golf fretfully with his eye always on the score. He drives his motor furiously to hold a schedule. Yet in his youth many of these prosperous fellows learned to play upon a fiddle, and they dreamed on college window-seats. They had time for friendliness before they became so busy holding this great world by ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... where there are large, separate estates, marriages are generally managed through agents, who find out accurately the relative circumstances of the prospective couples, and arrange everything beforehand. When a marriage of this kind had been brought about, Crappy Zachy used to play the fiddle at the wedding, for he had quite a reputation in the region as a fiddler; moreover, when his hands were tired from fiddling, he could play the clarionet and the horn. In fact, he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... if so the Bible is wrong. The fact is that the "blessed book," instead of being woman's best friend, is her worst enemy. The Tenth Commandment makes her domestic property, and Paul winds up by telling her that her sole duty is to play second fiddle in ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... "I fiddle a little. I try to learn something different for them every time. The last time I learned to do conjuring tricks. They'd get tired of me if I didn't bring something new. I'm thinking of learning the penny whistle before ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... wife so much any more, but transferred all his love to little Giglio. So did everybody love him as long as he had the ring; but when, as quite a child, he gave it to Angelica, people began to love and admire HER; and Giglio, as the saying is, played only second fiddle. ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... commented on the cat's behaviour to some friends who had also been to the Folies-Bergere on different nights. "But," said the first friend, "the evening I went, that cat did wonderful things; came down the ladder on her ball, played the fiddle, and stood ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... superciliously or pityingly at their poor amusements; they were far too much absorbed in the dancing which was going on busily—I can't say gaily—in the two hollow squares. In one of these an elderly, pinched little man who looked almost half-witted, was monotonously scraping a battered fiddle, for two solemn couples to dance round and round, always on the same axis. But the other "dancing salon" was more lively. There a man dressed like a buffoon, with a tall hat, a lobster claw for a nose, a uniform ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... saloons; they leaned joking over the bars, they sat behind their cards at the tables, they strolled to the post-trader's to buy presents for their easy sweethearts their boots were keeping audible time with the fiddle at Mrs. Slaghammer's. From the multitude and vigor of the sounds there, the dance was being done regularly. "Regularly" meant that upon the conclusion of each set the gentleman led his lady to the bar and invited her to choose ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... when Rome was burning," Abe replied. "He's got nothing on you. You would fiddle if Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... and read a scene from Gogol, this time without evoking a single token of approbation. The flute-player flitted past once more; again the pianist thundered; a young fellow of twenty, pomaded and curled, but with traces of tears on his cheeks, sawed out some variations on his fiddle. It might have appeared strange that in the intervals between the recitations and the music the abrupt notes of a French horn were wafted, now and then, from the artists' room; but this instrument was not used, nevertheless. It afterward came out that the ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... help himself. These E's would fiddle around in places where human beings shouldn't have gone. Most of the time they weren't allowed even one mistake. He was lucky, sure, but part of it might be because he'd never been sent out with the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... cried one or two eager voices, while several heads leaned forward in the direction of the fiercely- moustached man who sat next to Lotys. "Where have you been with your fiddle? Do you arrive among us to-night infected by the pay, or the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... very convenient for that purpose because of its size. Early next morning the festivities began. Commissary whisky was provided in abundance. "Sport" (William Harris) furnished music for the occasion, which he extracted from an old fiddle procured from some unexplainable source. The ball opened with a good pull all around from the canteen. Ordinary forms of entertainment and social enjoyment soon became stale and they concluded to try the mazy dance. Our tent was floored with puncheons, and the racket which they kicked up ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... the Captain shrieked, finding his voice at last. 'MILLE DIABLES! Are you aware, sir, that I am in possession of this house, and that no one harbours here without my permission? Guest? Hospitality? Bundle of fiddle-faddle! Lieutenant, call the guard! Call the guard!' he continued passionately. 'Where is ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... be open as to treatment and this will be as the temperament of the restorer will suggest or the exigencies of the moment may demand. Temporary alleviation of symptoms—how to make the thing go somehow—when there is no fiddle physician within beck or call, is a problem frequently arising and very annoying, necessity then being the mother of invention, often of a most curious sort, as most professional repairers who have ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... between his separate players, as the conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition, the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... narrer channels, then more broad ones. By Fiddler's Elbow, named Heaven knows for what purpose, for no fiddle nor no elbow wuz in sight, nothin' but island and water and rock all crowned with green verdure. Mebby it dates back to the time we read of when the stars sung together, and if stars sing, why shouldn't islands dance, and if islands dance it stands to reason they must ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... a girl had a right to want was a good husband. She was quite satisfied with her own lot in that respect, but she was anxious enough on behalf of Kate. And when a young man did come, who might make matters so pleasant for them, Harry quarreled with him because he was a free-selector. "A free fiddle-stick!" she had once said to Kate—not, however, communicating to her innocent sister the ambition which was already filling her own bosom. "Harry does take things up so—as though people weren't to live, some in one ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... The idea existed in his own day, and is abroad yet, that "the devil guided his hand," for the thought that the devil is more powerful than God has ever been held by the majority of men—more especially if a fiddle is concerned. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... now; but as you have not, fortunately for me, and unfortunately for yourself, the dozen men at hand, I am to hold the fiddle while you play upon it, as I have seen a couple of negro ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... ground they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once—but I never tried the experiment—that each of our Four Races light and handle fire ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... frigate saw all this, and he beheld at the same time the clusters of happy sailors, sauntering with light step and pleasant faces up and down the waist and gangways; and he heard, too, the scraping of a fiddle on the forecastle, the shuffling, dancing feet, and the least notion of a jovial sea-song coming up from the gun-deck. Yes, it must have been a glorious pride with which that gallant officer gazed around him from the quarter-deck of the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... old bard who shaped the character of Volker the Fiddler in the Nibelungen Lay, had a glowing vision of the power of music and of the violin. Players on the videl, or fiddle, abounded in the days of chivalry, but Volker, glorified by genius, rises superior to his fellow minstrels. The inspiring force of his martial strains renewed the courage of way-worn heroes. His gentle measures, pure and melodious as a prayer, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... projected twenty great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger from a far distant shore, was about to make a little ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... rapidly, imitating each time he repeats the verse some one action characteristic of the members of a band. For instance, the first time he may go through the pantomime of playing a fife; the next time, without any pause between, he may imitate the beating of a drum; the next, playing a fiddle, trombone, flute, cymbals, triangle, imitate the drum major, etc. All of the other players ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... only just left school, and he feels he can't laugh, and talk, and tell you stories about foreign countries, as this young fellow can, and having been so long accustomed to have you to himself, he naturally would not like the playing second fiddle ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... I had nearly died of starvation, when Jack Dawson gave me a footing on the stage, where I would play the part of a hero in one act, a lacquey in the second, and a merry Andrew in the third, scraping a tune on my fiddle to ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... 'Zat fust-rate 'otel, ze Fiddle House; ze landlord he maks var' big fuss over ze grand persons as come zere—var' big fuss. Mamselle GRANDROSE she var splendid danseuse, she 'ave ze grande attentions: Madame COLSON she grande chanteuse ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... expected to defer to the brother from the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... upward on the "light fantastic toe." On that eve, such an impulse had inspired the limbs of the Mormon emigrants. Scarcely had the debris of the supper been removed, ere a space was cleared midway between the blazing fires; music swelled upon the air—the sounds of fiddle, horn, and clarionet—and half a score of couples, setting themselves en quadrille, commence treading time to the tune. Sufficiently bizarre was the exhibition—a dance of the true "broad-horn" ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... sleep very well last night; I never do in a strange bed. I feel a little indigestion, which one must expect at this time of the year. Carrie and I returned to Town in the evening. Lupin came in late. He said he enjoyed his Christmas, and added: "I feel as fit as a Lowther Arcade fiddle, and only require a little more 'oof' to feel as fit as a 500 pounds Stradivarius." I have long since given up trying to understand Lupin's slang, or asking him ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... right," said Burns, smiling back. "It's a land of musicians. The fiddle's a good ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... friends one sunny morning up the winding hill-path to the little gray chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy, and whose sorrowful Christ looked down through the open porch across the blue and hazy width of the river. Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with their hands full of wood-flowers, ran before them; his old blind poodle smelt its way faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way upward with the cross held erect against ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... said Meggy, looking pityingly after him. "We let him try to help us because it seems to amuse him, but he really doesn't know how to work with his hands. His fingers were made for the fiddle." ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... ye want o' pay?" Solomon answered. "Ain't ye willin' to fight fer yer own liberty without bein' paid fer it? Ye been kicked an' robbed an' spit on, an' dragged eround by the heels, an' ye don't want to fight 'less somebody pays ye. What a dam' corn fiddle o' ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... officers resolved to celebrate the event by giving a ball. "This was an enterprise of a desperate character;—building a brig hundreds of miles from a ship-yard was a trifle to giving a ball in the wilderness. True, one fiddle and half a dozen officers were something; refreshments and a military ball-room might be hoped for; but where, pray, were the ladies to come from?" They would not think of dancing with each other, and ladies must be found. Vigorous efforts were made by sending boats ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... of the grief of the bookmaking host At the sound of the summons to go to the post— For down to the start with her thorough-bred air As fit as a fiddle pranced ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... you, I should say it was wearing your nerves to fiddle-strings. Ever take anything ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... old story—none the worse for being true—regarding a fine young Irish gentleman, who being asked if he could play the fiddle, replied he had no doubt he could, but he couldn't exactly say, for certain, because he had never tried. This is not inapplicable to my uncle and his fencing. He had never had a sword in his hand before, except once when he played Richard the Third at a private theatre, upon which occasion it was ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar fall without saying, "The Ides of March are come" and "Et tu, Brute!" Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the reason why.[4] Historic criticism will not hear of the "Thou hast conquered, Galilean!" which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate; yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in the phrase the keynote of his world-historic ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... southern wall an old fiddle squeaked dolefully, and from beyond the stockade came the drowsy call of a bird deep ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... cleverness, had nearly disconcerted the poor boy; however, he was naturally resolute, and replied, "If I can do nothing else I can snuff candles, or deliver a message, or do anything that young lads do." "You can indeed?" "Yes, sir, and I can do more, I can play the fiddle and sing a good song." "A good song! I dare say—but d——d badly I'll answer for it." "Won't you give me a fair trial, sir?" "Fair trial indeed!" repeated the old man laughing, and walking on a step—"fair trial! a pretty trial truly—however," said he, turning ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse or fix up a watch, an' he does it in about the same way, too; bleeds a horse ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... hospitable and kind hearted de Robeck on Triad. The Navy are still divided. Some there are who would wish me to urge the Admiral to play first fiddle in the coming attack. This I will not do. I have neither the data nor the technical knowledge which would justify me to my ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... goggled him. He blurted finally, "Like hell you will. There's not enough money in the system to fiddle with the awarding of the Medal of Honor. There comes a point, Demming, where even your dough can't carry ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... he heard Bower's smooth, well rounded accents through the half-open door. "Nothing I should like better," he was saying. "Are you tired? If not, bring your friend to my rooms now. Although I have been in the train all night, I am fit as a fiddle." ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... gazed a moment in silence, and then rushed en masse upon the intruder, the landlord bringing up the rear, and sounding a charge upon his fiddle. But, as they drew nigh, the black cloak began to assume a familiar look; the hat, also, was an old acquaintance; and, these being removed, from beneath them shone forth the reverend face and form ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... second only to Paganini, was receiving an enthusiastic reception from audiences "panting for the music which is divine." Upon this particular evening Dr. Pyne sat next to me, when he suddenly exclaimed: "If honorary degrees were conferred upon musicians, Ole Bull would be Fiddle D.D." At another time, when Dr. Edward Maynard, a well-known Washington dentist, was remodeling his residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, now a portion of the Columbia Hospital, Dr. Pyne was asked to what order of architecture it belonged and replied: "Tusk-can, I suppose,"—a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... table wine had been spilt, and dripped to swell a red pool upon the floor. Underneath the table, still grasping his empty tankard, lay the first of my lord's guests to fall, an up-river Burgess with white hair. The rest of the company were fast reeling to a like fate. Young Hamor had a fiddle, and, one foot upon a settle, the other upon the table, drew across it a fast and furious bow. Master Pory, arrived at the maudlin stage, alternately sang a slow and melancholy ditty and wiped the tears from his eyes with elaborate ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... soul, once fair and blooming—I swear it—with its leaves fresh from the dews of heaven, one rank leprosy, this man who, rolling in riches, learned to cheat and pilfer as a boy learns to dance and play the fiddle, and (to damn me, whose happiness he had blasted) accused me to the world of his own crime!—here is this man who has not left off one vice, but added to those of his youth the bloodless craft of the veteran ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... replied. "A man must always be first by natural creation. When he allows himself to play second fiddle, he is a fool!" ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... a light canoe Floats like a freshly fallen feather, A fairy thing, that will not do For broader seas and stormy weather. Her sides no thicker than the shell Of Ole Bull's Cremona fiddle, The mall who rides her will do well To part his scalp-lock ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... Butcher - on which the landlord cries out, "Don't take HIM," he says, "whatever you do! He's only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!" However, they - ha, ha, ha! - they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord's opinion, for when it was produced, he says, "My fiddle! The Butcher's a purloiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of a ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... while wandering through those meadows as the sun was sinking, and had entered Perigord—once famous for troubadours, and now for truffles. Nobody can live there today by making verses, and the representative of the jongleur, who once sang from castle to castle to the accompaniment of the mediaeval fiddle, and who was so heartily welcomed at all the baronial feasts and merrymakings, is now a wandering beggar, who gathers crusts from the peasants by his rude minstrelsy, that changes from the pious ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... to his employer's, as has been said. In his way down the village street he had to pass a public house, the only one the place contain'd; and when he came off against it he heard the sound of a fiddle—drown'd, however, at intervals, by much laughter and talking. The windows were up, and, the house standing close to the road, Charles thought it no harm to take a look and see what was going on within. Half a dozen footsteps brought him to the low casement, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. His father, he says he don't know what to do with him ... There's a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the works ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... replied Cabot, suddenly remembering, "I slept splendidly, and am as fit as a fiddle. Have we made a ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous ...
— Progress and History • Various
... a way out of the difficulty this time. "If you'll tell me what language 'fiddle-de-dee' is, I'll tell you the French ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... his claim till she died, and many other women lived in the camps with their husbands. When the road opened, there was a rush of hurdy-gurdy girls for dance-halls; but that did not modify the rough chivalry of an unwritten law. These hurdy-gurdy girls, who tiptoed to the concertina, the fiddle, and the hand-organ, were German; and if we may believe the poet of Cariboo, they were something like the Glasgow girls described by Wolfe as 'cold to everything but a bagpipe—I wrong them—there is not one that does not melt away ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... fishing, and promised to be a good sportsman from a very early age. Their grandfather's ship was sailing for Europe once when the boys were children, and they were asked, what present Captain Franks should bring them back? George was divided between books and a fiddle; Harry instantly declared for a little gun: and Madam Warrington (as she then was called) was hurt that her elder boy should have low tastes, and applauded the younger's choice as more worthy of his name and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... admiration be [Transcriber's Note: superfluous 'be'] "be screwed to its sticking place," when we think upon the wonderous genius of the aforesaid Thomas Britton; who, in the midst of his coal cellars, could practise upon "fiddle and flute," or collate his curious volumes; and throwing away, with the agility of a harlequin, his sombre suit of business-cloths, could put on his velvet coat and bag-wig, and receive his concert visitors, at the stair-head, with the politeness ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and snow. They had a good dinner and after dinner the soldiers danced. On New Year's Day, 1805, they fired off all their guns. The captains let the soldiers go to the Mandan camp. They took their fiddle and danced for the Indians. One soldier danced on his hands with his head down. The Indians liked this dancing very much. They gave the soldiers some corn ...
— The Bird-Woman of the Lewis and Clark Expedition • Katherine Chandler
... Afghanistan is an extremely poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on farming (wheat especially) and livestock raising (sheep and goats). Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during more than 16 years of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). Over the past decade, one-third of the population fled the country, with Pakistan ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Toby. "It puts our Druid Hill Park in the shade, that's a fact; makes it take a back seat and play second fiddle, ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse. On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under shelter of high banks, Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... shaped the character of Volker the Fiddler in the Nibelungen Lay, had a glowing vision of the power of music and of the violin. Players on the videl, or fiddle, abounded in the days of chivalry, but Volker, glorified by genius, rises superior to his fellow minstrels. The inspiring force of his martial strains renewed the courage of way-worn heroes. His gentle measures, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... blowing and panting, on the dingy sofa. He was small and dry, with black eyes and a wrinkled face. He wore a blonde wig which did not match his yellow complexion, and was neatly dressed in black, with an old-fashioned swallow-tail coat of blue. He carried a small fiddle and spoke volubly without regarding the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... to throw my money into the sea, Terence," he reminded his port engineer, "but when I do get that reckless I limit myself to twenty thousand dollars, and that, in round figures, is what this old ruin will stand me about the time the torpedo blows you up on top of the fiddle. However, that is a trifling investment if we succeed in destroying a late-type German submarine with a couple of hundred thousand dollars' worth of torpedoes aboard. As a sporting proposition it's somewhat more expensive than golf, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... but they had what they called a team-boat, that is, a boat with machinery to make it go, that could be worked by horses. There were eight horses that went around and around, and made the boat go. One afternoon, two dancing masters, who were wicked fellows, that played the fiddle, and never went to church on Sundays, got on the boat, and sat just where the horses had to pass them ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... being deemed especially marvellous—until some expert told Mrs Swann that playing solely from ear was a practice to be avoided if she wished her son to fulfil the promise of his babyhood. Then he had lessons at Knype, until he began to teach his teacher. Then he said he would learn the fiddle, and he did learn the fiddle; also the viola. He did not pretend to play the flute, though he could. And at school the other boys would bring him their penny or even sixpenny whistles so that he might show them of what wonderful feats a common ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... who manned this fleet on wheels were men of a type that finds no parallel except in the boatmen on the western rivers who were almost their contemporaries. Fit for the severest toil, weathered to the color of the red man, at home under any roof that harbored a demijohn and a fiddle, these hardy nomads of early commerce were the custodians of the largest amount of traffic ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... but would have its defects passed over. It is an unhappy, luckless organization which will be perpetually fault-finding, and in the midst of a grand concert of music will persist only in hearing that unfortunate fiddle out ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bridge, and the Mate is, as usual, in a hurry. The mooring winch is groaning horribly as she hauls on a cable running from the stern to the quay while the tug pulls our head slowly round. Right down to the centre of the loading disc now. The Second Mate rushes to the fiddle-top, and shouts for "more steam"—the winch has stuck—and a howl from below tells him that the donkeyman is doing his best. As I go below again the sharp clang of the telegraph strikes ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... that they get used up, body and mind, in a few months. Depend upon it, the same thing is true in other arts. I once taught a fiddler that used to get a hundred guineas for playing two or three tunes; and he told me that it was just the same thing with the fiddle—that when you laid a tight hold on your fiddle-stick, or even set your teeth hard together, you could do nothing but rasp like the fellows that play in bands for a few ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... an end," says the old Scotch proverb, audit was with a sigh of relief that Fanny at last saw Uncle Jake lay down the tortured fiddle, and the guests with lingering steps and wishful eyes retire to seek the few hours of repose that were left of the night. "Confusion worse confounded" reigned for a time in the apartment appropriated to the ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... the manor; and we must not forget Don Saltero and his famous coffee-house, the oddities of which Steele pleasantly sketched in the Tatler. The Don was famous for his skill in brewing punch and for his excellent playing on the fiddle. Saltero was a barber, who drew teeth, drew customers, wrote ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... this form of pleasure soon wearied him, and he was glad to escape from London in June. He knew the shadowy and intermittent temptation which beckoned him to that house; music had power over him, and he grew conscious of watching Alma Frothingham, her white little chin on the brown fiddle, with too exclusive an interest. When 'that fellow' Cyrus Redgrave, a millionaire, or something of the sort, began to attend these gatherings with a like assiduity, and to win more than his share of Miss Frothingham's conversation, Harvey felt a disquietude which happily took the form of disgust, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... at that moment. How they laughed and chaffed and talked, to be sure! Interspersed in the hubbub were now and then snatches of merry song, and now and then the notes of a somewhat squeaky and asthmatical violin, invariably followed by some one shouting, "Stop that awful fiddle!" "Hit 'im in the eye with a bit o' biscuit!" or "Grease his bow!" Then a deeper bass voice, evidently Scotch, and just as evidently a junior surgeon's, saying, "Let the laddie practise.—Fiddle away, my boy; I'll thrash all hands if they ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... say anything about a riddle—I said we are as fit as a fiddle!" cried Tom. "Never mind. No use trying to talk with the racket this motor makes, and it isn't the noisiest of its kind, either. I'll tell you when we get down. ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... Gaston brought his fiddle along, and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept time ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the violin professionally. He had studied hard and his teachers said that he had talent. But his father forbade it. He said it wasn't a man's work to fiddle in public. My husband," she sighed, "was a very firm man and wanted Jonathan to learn the business. So Jonathan went to the technical school here and studied engineering. Jonathan," she added proudly, "had been well brought up and knew that his ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... a wide level plot in the outskirts of the settlement, around which the trees spread their sheltering arms. On a plank raised on two casks sat the blacksmith with his fiddle. The carpenter sat beside him with a kettledrum, more literally a kettledrum even than the real thing, for that drum was a kettle! On a little mound that rose in the centre of the plot sat, in state, Dick and Mary, March ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... courtesy and heart-kindness. He knew Borrow well, and quite discredited the innuendoes and insinuations of many Norwich folk about him. It was a joke with the Murray circle that "big Borrow was second fiddle at his home, and there is ample testimony that his wife was a capable manager and looked after his affairs, literary as well as domestic." Though Borrow boasted of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, Mr. Elwin told him that ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... earth keeps some vibration going There in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, Why, fiddle you must, for all your life. What do you see, a harvest of clover? Or a meadow to walk through to the river? The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands For beeves hereafter ready for market; Or else you hear the rustle ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... what comfort is, I tell you: A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, A fire to thaw our thumbs (poor fellow, The paw he holds up there has been frozen), Plenty of catgut for my fiddle, (This outdoor business is bad for strings), Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, And Roger and I set ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... of them thought far more than he uttered. One crow asked the other crow a riddle. One crow asked the other crow a riddle: The muttering crow Asked the stuttering crow, "Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle? Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?" "Bee-cause," said the other crow, "Bee-cause, B B B B B B B B B B B B B ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... the madrigal, 'Down in a Flowery Vale'—the latter always a sure card; a duet from Semiramide, by two young ladies—rather shaky; solo on the clarionet, by a gentleman who makes the instrument sound like a fiddle—great applause; 'In manly Worth,' by an oratorio tenor; the overture to Masaniello, by the band; concerto (posthumous, Beethoven), by a stern classical man—audience yawn; pot pourri, by a romantic practitioner—audience waken up; ballad, 'When Hearts ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... lanthorn, I passed many weary hours, while all about me was a stir and bustle, a confused sound made up of many, as the never-ending tread of feet, the sound of hoarse voices now faint and far and anon clear and loud, the scrape of a fiddle, snatches of rough song, the ceaseless ring and tap of hammers—a very babel that, telling of life and action, made my gloomy prison the harder to endure. And here (mindful of what is to follow) I do think it well to describe in few words the place ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... father owned an old violin. He had been inclined to music in early youth, and Jim got permission to practise on it, and he went by himself in the hot attic and practised. Jim's mother did not care for music, and her son's preliminary scraping tortured her. Jim tucked the old fiddle under one round boy-cheek and played in the hot attic, with wasps buzzing around him; and he spent his pennies for catgut, and he learned to mend fiddle-strings; and finally came a proud Wednesday afternoon when there were visitors in Madame's school, and he stood on ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... take refuge for Sunday peace and devotion. It had nothing to do with faith or religion, but it was there. And sometimes in the midst of his work in the daytime he would divine, as in a quite separate consciousness, the tones of a fiddle-bow drawn across the strings, like reddish waves coming to him from far off, filling him with harmony, till ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... political attitude with William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, all that William thought was logical; the stream was tending that way; few denied it, except politicians interested in advancing their own fortunes by setting Austria back in the great game of grab. However, William, instead of loading ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heavy on her mind now, and finds it hard to keep up with others and at the same time out of debt, she has the right to hope that by and by she will be so good an actress, and so valuable to the theatre, that a fat salary will make the clothes matter play second fiddle, as is right and proper it should, to ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... indeed a tolerably common incident, and his jokes altered not. He had begun his parting one, which was to the effect that sorra a man in the counthry of Connaught could see clearer than himself if the night was dark enough, when Dan's arrival interrupted him, and made him declare, taking out his fiddle, that 'twould be a poor case if the lad didn't get e'er a tune at all. Dan was not much in the humour for tunes, but he said, "Ay, Joe, give us a one, man-alive," and Joe struck ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the operator knew him. The lowest haunt in the town had a tent south of the Union Pacific tracks; and Cutler, getting his irons, and a man from the saloon, went there, and stepped in, covering the room with his pistol. The fiddle stopped, the shrieking women scattered, and Toussaint, who had a glass in his hand, let it fly at Cutler's head, for he was drunk. There were ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated sufferings. She was seized with ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... n't much of an eater. School-teachers are n't as a rule. They pick, and paw, and fiddle round a meal in a way that gives a healthy-appetited person the jim-jams. She did n't touch the fried pumpkin. And the way she sat there at the table in her watch-chain and ribbons made poor old Dave, who sat opposite her in ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... two. Every effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean up"—a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has finished her allotted task. At half-past two it ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Laird, slowly, his rung grasped firmly in his hand, and his bonnet set back from his face, which was deadly pale. "But—man-is yon Rory? I'd know his fiddle in a thousand." ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... Larry was the master's favorite—not because he was particularly studious, but because he took to the fiddle as naturally, Dermot said, "as a ducklin' takes to the wather, just." Indeed, the boy showed such extraordinary talent for music, that, for the mere love of it, Dermot gave him lessons, and often lent him an old fiddle ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... children ran to the door when we halted and called to someone within. The fiddle played on with no faltering, but a woman came out—a gaunt and tattered woman who was yet curiously cheerful. The children lurked in her wake as she came to us and peered from beyond her ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... not one of your fashionable fine spoken mealy mouthed preachers: I tell you the plain truth. What are your pastimes? Cards and dice, fiddling and dancing, guzzling and guttling! Can you be saved by dice? No! Will the four knaves give you a passport to heaven? No! Can you fiddle yourself into a good birth among the sheep? No! You are goats, and goat like you may dance yourselves to damnation! You may guzzle wine here, but you shall want a drop of water to cool your tongue hereafter! ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... interruptions of the currents of mental life and action, are never favorable to reflection. If I wish to cheer a man who is bowed to the earth in grief for the loss of a companion, I will not break in upon his mourning with a lively tune upon a fiddle. If I wish to attract him to a religious life, I will not interrupt the flow of his innocently social hours by some terrible threat or warning. In truth, I know of nothing that calls for more care, or nicer discrimination, or choicer address, than a personal attempt to move an irreligious ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... related to the elves and the trolls," thought Gertrude. The old man was standing upon the hearth, playing his fiddle, so as not to be in ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... 'Fiddle-de-dee. He is an ape a monkey to be carried on his mother's organ. His only good quality was that you could have carried him on yours. I can tell you one thing there is not a woman breathing that will ever carry William Belton on hers. ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... help but be sick of it? Ah, mon vieux," said our comrade, musing, "all those individuals fiddle-faddling and making believe down there, all spruced up with their fine caps and officers' coats and shameful boots, that gulp dainties and can put a dram of best brandy down their gullets whenever they want, and wash themselves oftener twice than once, and go to church, and never ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... of his daughter and his wooden leg; he was happy with his fiddle and his verses; he did not hold with physical or emotional violence, and asked the world for nothing more than to be left alone beside his stove with a knowledge that there was something in the pot and a few cakes of hard bread in the bin. He could not understand the new skipper, his terrible ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... little house on the hill, And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... to-day), I am reminded that the Promenade Concerts begin in August. You go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the "Lohengrin" overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another." Either Murdoch exaggerated, or the poet's ear developed later (Murdoch is speaking of him between the ages of six and nine); for he learned to fiddle a little, once at least attempted to compose an air, could read music fairly easily, and could write down a melody from memory. His correspondence with Johnson and Thomson shows that he knew a vast number of old tunes and was very sensitive ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... help wishing I was you, so's I could tell them all the beau-ti-ful fancies you make up as you lie here under the trees day in and day out. I told 'em about you and pictured this garden for 'em, and the flowers which Hicks cuts by the bushel-basket, and Juiceharpie which plays the fiddle and dances and sings like ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Broadwood half a mile — You mustn't leave a fiddle in the damp — You couldn't raft an organ up the Nile, And play it in an Equatorial swamp. I travel with the cooking-pots and pails — I'm sandwiched 'tween the coffee and the pork — And when the dusty column checks and tails, You should hear me spur the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... I s'pect she's relieved in her mind now the bar at the hotel is closed," snapped Mrs. Scattergood. "Hopewell Drugg can't go fur astray if he don't go playin' that fiddle of his to no more o' them dances. Though you can't trust no man too fur—that's been ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... many Midsummer-eves under different skies, but never such a one as this. So far, far from all that one associates with this evening. I think of the merriment round the bonfires at home, hear the scraping of the fiddle, the peals of laughter, and the salvoes of the guns, with the echoes answering from the purple-tinted heights. And then I look out over this boundless, white expanse into the fog and sleet and the driving wind. Here is truly no trace of midsummer merriment. It is a gloomy lookout altogether! ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the gallant young officers resolved to celebrate the event by giving a ball. "This was an enterprise of a desperate character;—building a brig hundreds of miles from a ship-yard was a trifle to giving a ball in the wilderness. True, one fiddle and half a dozen officers were something; refreshments and a military ball-room might be hoped for; but where, pray, were the ladies to come from?" They would not think of dancing with each other, and ladies must be found. Vigorous efforts were made by sending ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... to mark and punish instantly any infraction of the rule. But at the stroke of twelve all this was changed. Constraint gave way to license; pious hymns were replaced by Bacchanalian ditties, and the shrill quavering notes of the village fiddle hardly rose above the roar of voices that went up from the merry brotherhood of the Green Wolf. Next day, the twenty-fourth of June or Midsummer Day, was celebrated by the same personages with the same noisy gaiety. One of the ceremonies consisted ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... enjoyed our hospitality. Allow us to express our hope that we may have the pleasure of entertaining you often during the winter. We shall be at home here every Saturday evening throughout the season—pop-corn refreshments and corn-stalk-fiddle ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... her horns she is playing A tune with a nourish or two! No cow-herd am I but my staying To play second fiddle won't do. Singing (to myself)—With my tol de rol tol-e-rate ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... photograph of the Hermes in here in place of this fiddle-de-dee Art Calendar. She'll like ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... isolation, and found, as is not utterly uncommon, quite a few maids and matrons among the households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights—the major holding that none was necessary ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... not know, the world from which she had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed only to rough men's voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with associations of life genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan so far removed as then from him, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... from our Paris office just before I left. It seems that M. Theophile d'Aurelle plays the fiddle in the orchestra of the Cafe de Paris. He played as usual to-night, so that it is manifestly impossible that he should also be lying in the New York morgue. Moreover, none of his friends, so far as he knows, is in America. ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... all right," said Burns, smiling back. "It's a land of musicians. The fiddle's a good ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... in your room at night, you hear some music under your window, and look out, and there is a boat with a man with a fiddle, and a woman with a voice, and they are serenading you. To be sure, they want some money when they are done, for everybody begs here; but they do it very prettily and are ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... fit as a fiddle now, sir," said the mate testily. "Why, nothing would do me more good than to stretch myself by having a set-to with ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... forgive me," says he, deliberately still. He had sworn to himself that he would not play second fiddle on this occasion at all events, and he holds himself to his word. "But I feel as if I could not play to-day. I should disgrace you. Let me get you another partner. Captain Grant is out ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... them with many compliments by the high Lodge-gate in the split-oak park palings and they stood still; even Stalky, who had played second, not to say a dumb, fiddle, regarding McTurk as one from another world. The two glasses of strong home-brewed had brought a melancholy upon the boy, for, slowly strolling with his hands in his pockets, he crooned:—"Oh, Paddy dear, and did ye hear ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned virtuosi—he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini won't sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his guitars. Others are bound on crusades—one to die miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving their oddity a continental ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... some ideas of dancing is really ludicrous. The Cambro-Britains, in a very late period, used to be played out of church by a fiddle, and to form a dance in the church-yard at the end of the service. But the ideas which the Chinese have of dancing exceeds all others. When Commodore Anson was at Canton, the officers of the Centurion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle, and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. There was an indescribable little trill and tremble in it at its loudest, which suggested its being carried off its legs, and made to ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... clothes, and kept him out of bad company; and now I'm not allowed to say a word, but just stand by while you let him go to ruin. The next thing we'll have him in a nigger minstrel band, or playing on a fiddle!" ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... which I had brought down the implements of outer-world civilization; but Perry was a man of peace. He could never weld the warring factions of the disrupted federation. He could never win new tribes to the empire. He would fiddle around manufacturing gun-powder and trying to improve upon it until some one blew him up with his own invention. He wasn't practical. He never would get anywhere without a balance-wheel—without some one to direct ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack; Or moskeneer, or flash the drag; Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack; Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag; Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag; Rattle the tats, or mark the spot You cannot bank a single stag: Booze and the blowens ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... chinaberry tree in the patio; the town on the American side was fast asleep; the wind with the smell of sagebrush stirred a clump of bamboo. The desert night had him—and when he rode away toward the Mexican line he had forgotten his gun and taken his fiddle. ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... definitely that her confidence in exceptional powers was justified. He was jealous of her! Sally laughed almost scornfully. Fancy a big fellow like Toby being jealous of a little thing like her. Men! They were all alike. All right as long as they were playing first fiddle! That was it: Toby didn't want her to have a chance at all. He wanted her always to be number two. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... Why, she was in the kitchen talkin' and fiddle-faddlin' with them eggs; she thinks I ain't up to 'em. There warn't nothin' on earth the matter with her then. She had sot the table in here and fixed up the fire, and then she come in to the kitchen and went to ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... of his strange advent momentarily silenced the quarrel; but soon it leaped up again, under the shelter of the noisy music,—the common, tedious, tippler's quarrel. It rose higher and higher. The fiddler looked askance at it over his fiddle. Chirac cautiously observed it. Instead of attending to the music, the festal company attended to the quarrel. Three waiters in a group watched it with an impartial sporting interest. The ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... grief of the bookmaking host At the sound of the summons to go to the post— For down to the start with her thorough-bred air As fit as a fiddle pranced ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... together with some others, were for the most part, as a maul on the head of pride, and desire of vain-glory. What, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a sounding brass? Is it so much to be a fiddle? hath not the least creature that hath life, more of God in it than these? Besides, I knew 'twas love should never die, but these must cease and vanish: so I concluded, a little grace, a little love, a little of the true fear of God, is better than all the gifts: yea, and I am fully ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... they were Neroes men, like Nero arm'd With Lutes and Harps and Pipes and Fiddle-cases, Souldyers to th'shadow ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... ould Tom Dundon's wake; an' whatever came betune them, she made no more about it but just draws her cloak round her, and away wid herself and the sarvant-girl home again, as if there was not a corpse, or a fiddle, or a ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... sweethearts, then—one from the city and one from the country, a married woman and this poor girl," said he, in a jeering tone; "does little Reine know that she is playing second fiddle?" ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... mother. He only talks to me about the Greek and Latin poets and about music. I say, you don't want to see me squeezing a big fiddle between my knees and sawing at it with a bow as if I wanted to cut all the strings, ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the chapel is strong, lively, and congregational. Sometimes there is more cry than wool in it; but taken altogether, and considering the place, it is creditable. There is neither an organ, nor a fiddle, nor a musical instrument of any sort that we have been able to notice, in the place. All is done directly and without equivocation from the mouth. The members of the choir sit downstairs, in a square place fronting the pulpit; the young men—in their quiet moments—looking ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... was only second fiddle—" she began, with an assumption of scornful irascibility which became her less ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... horses, with new saddles and bridles, all English too, with a good deal of ammunition and baggage. The consternation of the tories was so great that they never dreamt of carrying off anything. Even their fiddles and fiddle bows, and playing cards, were all left strewed around their fires. One of the gamblers, (it is a serious truth) though shot dead, still held the cards hard gripped in his hands. Led by curiosity to inspect this strange sight, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... and in half-an-hour a young doctor arrived, and ordered all the other men out of the hut. Then he pulled a gaudy handkerchief out of his pocket, sprinkled it with some stuff out of a small phial, tied it over his mouth and only then began to fiddle about the sick man, feeling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... forever worritin' after anything. I did think, howsomever, it 'ud be sorter nice to have us four live together. Young folks makes a house kinder lively. But I don't git on, somehow; so I guess I might as well hang up my fiddle an' quit." And the ancient wooer slowly rose to ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... clothing such as a king might wear. Gunther bade make known, he would to the Hunnish land. I'll do you now to wit who Folker was. He was a noble lord, the liege of many doughty knights in Burgundy. A minstrel he was called, for that he wist how to fiddle. Hagen chose a thousand whom he well knew; oft had he seen what their hands had wrought in press of battle, or in whatever else they did. None might aver aught else of them ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... "Fine as a fiddle," was the reply. "I'm not going to have any trouble with it after this! Did you find Chester's fond parent," he added, glancing in the direction of the ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... I see Marse Thomas a twistin' de ears on a fiddle and rosinin' de bow. Then he pull dat bow 'cross de belly of dat fiddle. Sumpin' bust loose in me and sing all thru my head and tingle in my fingers. I make up my mind, right then and dere, to save and buy me a fiddle. I got one dat Christmas, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... time to heaven. The church is full, and many remain outside, uncovered, and kneeling in humility. But who comes here, thought I, as a man in a shabby coat walked to within a few yards of the church door, and laid down his burden, consisting of a drum, a fiddle, a roll of canvass, a chair, and a long pole. This is a curious stock in trade, methinks; how in the name of all the saints do you gain your livelihood? This was soon ascertained. A minute before the mass was over, he fixed his pole upright in the ground, hung his canvass ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... their shoes and they were close to the smells of the earth. They learned the ways of birds and bugs, why birds have wings, why bugs have legs, why the gladdywhingers have spotted eggs in a basket nest in a booblow tree, and why the chizzywhizzies scrape off little fiddle songs all summer long while ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel (if you have the conditions for recognizing it) in the first word a Norseman addresses to you. It has that wonderful twang of the Hardanger fiddle, and the color and sentiment of the ballads sung and the legendary tales recited around the hearth in a Norwegian homestead during the long winter nights. With Bjoernson it was in the blood. It was his soul's accent, the dialect of his thought, the cadence ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... none of it in his pocket; or as that judicious moralist Nicolle, of the Port-Royal Society, said of a scintillant wit—"He conquers me in the drawing-room, but he surrenders to me at discretion on the staircase." Such may say with Themistocles, when asked to play on a lute—"I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... concludes with a dialogue between Quidam, in whom the audience recognised Sir Robert Walpole, and four patriots, to whom he gives a purse which has an instantaneous effect upon their opinions. All five then go off dancing to Quidam's fiddle; and it is explained that they have holes in their pockets through which the money will fall as they dance, enabling the donor to pick it all up again, "and so not lose one Half-penny by ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... heart is a fiddle; the strings are rozend with ioy that my other young Mr. is come home, & my tongue the sticke ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... mirth unfeigned the cottage chimney rings, Though only vocal with four fiddle-strings: And see, the poor blind fiddler draws his bow, And lifts intent his time-denoting toe; While yonder maid, as blythe as birds in June, You almost hear her whistle to the tune! Hard by, a lad, in imitative guise, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... diddle! The cat and the fiddle! He played such a merry tune, That the cow went mad With the pleasure she had, And jumped right over the moon. But then, don't you see? Before that could be, The moon had come down and listened. The little dog ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... steal, peculate time, chronology steal, embezzle handbook, manual lockjaw, tetanus hole, cavity mistake, error dig, excavate mistake, erratum boil, tumor wink, nictation tickle, titillate blessing, benediction dry, desiccated wet, humid warm, tepid flirt, coquet forgetfulness, oblivion fiddle, violin sky, firmament sky, empyrean flatter, compliment flee, abscond flight, fugitive forbid, prohibit hinder, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... to hear you speak, and sorry I come at an inconvenient time, when you were busy with your music; and—let me see— didn't Mr Mark say something about your wanting the cash to buy a new pianner? Or was it an old fiddle? I quite ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... was alert on the receit of your strange-shaped present, while yet undisclosed from its fuse envelope. Some said,'tis a viol da Gamba, others pronounced it a fiddle. I myself hoped it a Liquer case pregnant with Eau de Vie and such odd Nectar. When midwifed into daylight, the gossips were at loss to pronounce upon its species. Most took it for a marrow spoon, an apple scoop, a banker's guinea shovel. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the parents on both sides, in order to avoid the expense of a regular wedding. The principal amusement on Sundays and holidays is the choro ([Greek: choros]), which is danced on the village green to the strains of the gaida or bagpipe, and the gusla, a rudimentary fiddle. The Bulgarians are religious in a simple way, but not fanatical, and the influence of the priesthood is limited. Many ancient superstitions linger among the peasantry, such as the belief in the vampire and the evil eye; witches and necromancers are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... over the high moors, here open and grassy in contrast to the heather of the Peak, and shortly after crossing the county boundary, reaches the head of the pass well known by the name of an inn, the Cat and Fiddle, at its highest point, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... chess, women, poetry, eloquence, music, and all such fiddle-faddle. What is the use of mediocrity ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... discredits de imbimin' of awjus liquors. De imbimin' of awjus liquors, de wiolution of de Sabbaf, de playin' of de fiddle, and de usin' of bywords, dey is de fo' sins of de conscience, an' if any man sin de fo' sins of de conscience, de debble done sharp his fork fo' dat man.—Ain't dat ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... sixpenny one, and I walked all the way to Dunmouth and back to get it for you—twenty miles. It aren't much of a thing for an orficer and a gentleman, though, I know. But, I say, look here, would you like to learn to play the fiddle?" ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... Galleries." It was a line we found under some babies' photos on the society page of a great newspaper printed in New York City. Professor Gluckstein and his son Rudolph played the "Star-Spangled Banner" on the piano and fiddle during ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... stories of some Negroes flinging themselves at the feet of an European playing on a fiddle, entreating him to desist, unless he had a mind to tire them to death; it being impossible for them to cease dancing, while he continued playing. Such is the irresistible passion for ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... distinguished by the cognomen of Jemmy Ducks. Jemmy was a sensible, merry fellow, and a good seaman: you could not affront him by any jokes on his figure, for he would joke with you. He was indeed the fiddle of the ship's company, and he always played the fiddle to them when they danced, on which instrument he was no mean performer; and, moreover, accompanied his voice with his instrument when he sang to them after they were tired of dancing. We ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... eye. What can be more maliciously pungent than this on Spence? "As I know Mr. J. Spence, I do not think I should have been so much delighted as Dr. Kippis with reading his letters. He was a good-natured harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius. It was a neat fiddle-faddle bit of sterling, that had read good books, and kept good company; but was too trifling for use, and only fit to please a child."—On Dr. Nash's first volume of 'Worcestershire': "It is a folio of prodigious ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... dodging it, and so were the smaller children. Without any fear of it they were all sitting on the hearth at the old woman's feet,—Ben and Melissa popping corn in the ashes, and Tom and Andy watching Barney's deft fingers as he made a cornstalk fiddle for them. ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... chat with her he seemed to be just as pleased to gossip with lumberjacks and mill-men, or even with Indians who might come in for tobacco or tea and were reputed to have vast knowledge of the land to the North. Once he half promised to come to a barn-dance in which Scotty Humphrey would play the fiddle, and she watched for him, eagerly, but he never turned up, explaining a few days later that his dog Maigan, an acquisition of a couple of months before, had gone lame and that it would have been a shame to leave the ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... turned to the third queen and asked, "What are you quarrelling about?" The queen answered, "Why should I do nothing but fiddle about the nursery?" Vasishta thought for a while and said, "In a former life, O Queen, you were a maid of a jungle tribe. Every Monday you used to fast yourself and offer the choicest fruits that you picked to the god Shiva. In return for them ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... ballustraded and friezed, very much lighted both within and without, and, from the sounds that issued from it, and the persons who retired and entered, evidently a locality of great resort and bustle. A sign, bearing the title of the Cat and Fiddle, indicated that it was a place of public entertainment, and kept by one who owned the legal name of John Trottman, though that was but a vulgar appellation, lost in his well-earned and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... she would doubtless have done her duty to him but to stand by and see another doing it? No! a thousand times no! That part, insignificant in itself, and yet often one of the very sweetest and most useful in life's harmonies, familiarly called "second fiddle," was a part impossible to be ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... assisted into the old two-seated wagon, Hannibal, rolling his eyes and showing his teeth, clambered on the front seat, placing his fiddle in its case between his knees, and grasping the reins shouted to the horses, which started off at a rattling pace, young Carter and an escort of admiring cavaliers riding behind as a ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... right this morning, yet you had to go fiddle-faddling with that architect instead of staying at home where you belonged. And now she's dead. My little girl, my little girl!" And the big man burst ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears how incautious and neglectful of itself ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... Heroes and Peace Seem'd to smile at the sound of the fiddle, Proud to fill up each tall shining space Round the lanthorn[1] that stood in the middle. And GEORGE'S head too; Heav'n screen him! May he finish in peace his long reign! And what did we when we had seen him? Why—went round ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... the "light fantastic toe." On that eve, such an impulse had inspired the limbs of the Mormon emigrants. Scarcely had the debris of the supper been removed, ere a space was cleared midway between the blazing fires; music swelled upon the air—the sounds of fiddle, horn, and clarionet—and half a score of couples, setting themselves en quadrille, commence treading time to the tune. Sufficiently bizarre was the exhibition—a dance of the true "broad-horn" breed; but we had no thought of criticising an entertainment so opportune to our purpose. The ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... pardon," yawned Louise. "But Elizabeth couldn't hear way over there with Olga and Miss Laura. I say, girls," she added with her usual giggle, "I feel as if I'd been wound up to concert pitch and I've got to let down somehow. Get out your fiddle, Rose, and play us a jig. I've got to get some of this seriousness out of my system ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... the shepherd dressed, In ribbons, wreath, and gayest vest Himself with care arraying: Around the linden lass and lad Already footed it like mad: Hurrah! hurrah! Hurrah—tarara-la! The fiddle-bow was playing. ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... saying, "Future Buds and Debutantes From Society's Home Galleries." It was a line we found under some babies' photos on the society page of a great newspaper printed in New York City. Professor Gluckstein and his son Rudolph played the "Star-Spangled Banner" on the piano and fiddle during this feature. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... judge of it.' GOLDSMITH. 'He is what is much better: he is a worthy humane man.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, that is not to the purpose of our argument[660]: that will as much prove that he can play upon the fiddle as well as Giardini, as that he is an eminent Grecian.' GOLDSMITH. 'The greatest musical performers have but small emoluments. Giardini, I am told, does not get above seven hundred a year.' JOHNSON. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... sloping lawns blazed with flowers. My mother said it was much prettier than Kaskaskia; not crowded with traffic; not overrun with foreigners. Everybody seemed to be making a fete, to be visiting or receiving visits. At sunset the fiddle and the banjo began their melody. The young girls would gather at Barbeau's or Le Compt's or Pensonneau's—at any one of a dozen places, and the young men would follow. It was no trouble to have a dance every evening, and on ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... tender fiddle-stick!" 'Beida retorted. "He's bleedin' for his country, is 'Biades, if you really want to know; and if you was helpful you'd lend us that knife ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... out, "Don't take HIM," he says, "whatever you do! He's only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!" However, they - ha, ha, ha! - they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord's opinion, for when it was produced, he says, "My fiddle! The Butcher's a purloiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of a ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... formed in couples, and—the best man with the bride, the bridegroom with the best maid, leading the way—marched in slow procession in the moonlight night to Tibbie's new home, between lines of hoarse and eager onlookers. An attempt was made by an itinerant musician to head the company with his fiddle; but instrumental music, even in the streets, was abhorrent to sound Auld Lichts, and the minister had spoken privately to Willie Todd on the subject. As a consequence, Peter was driven from the ranks. ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... Hubutt—Dudeldum—fiddles squeaking and bag-pipes droning as if they never would stop. The crazy throng shouted amidst the din; the noise still rings in my ears. There was no end to the games and dancing. The lads tossed their brown, blue and red-stockinged legs in the air, just as the fiddle played—the coat-tails flew and, holding a girl clasped in the right arm and a mug of beer high over their heads till the foam spattered, the throng of men whirled round and round. There was as much screaming and rejoicing as if every butter-cup in the grass had been changed into a gold ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... at the counter, or seated at numerous small tables, men were drinking villainous liquor, smoking and talking, and paying but scant attention to the strains of the fiddle or the accordion, save when some well known air was played, when all would join in a boisterous chorus. Some were always passing in or out of a door which led into a room behind. Here there was comparative quiet, for men were gambling, ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... doesn't come home by spring—I hope, I hope he will!—but if he does not, I will take desperate measures. I will try farming myself, Hugh. I have thought of it, and I certainly will. I will get Earl Douglass or somebody else to play second fiddle, but I will have but one head on the farm and I will try what ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... songs were sung, while Pat played upon the fiddle, and Betty and Mat enlivened the company with an ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... felt that everything depends upon causation; how to play the fiddle, or sail a yacht, or get one's living, or defeat the enemy. The price of pig-iron six months hence, the prospects of the harvest, the issue in a Coroner's Court, Home Rule and Socialism, are all questions of causation. But, in such cases, the conception ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt Mawmets ( puppets) Mawmett ( Mahomet) Meath (A curious corruption of Mentz. Old printers distorted foreign names in an extraordinary manner.) Mechall Mention ( dimension) Mew Middleton, quotation from his Family of Love Minikin ( fiddle) Mistris Moe Monthes mind Mooncalf More hayre than wit Morglay Mosch Mother Motion ( suggestion, proposal) Mouse Much (ironical) Mumchance Muscadine Muschatoes ( moustaches) Mushrumps ( mushrooms) Music played between ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... principal occupation was his violin, and it was her delight to listen to him. She more than once observed to the vicar, "Such music is quite heavenly." "I am in despair," cried out the village fiddler, "I may now stick my fiddle in my thatched roof, for a greater performer is come to reside in the parish." The existing superstition of the country is that his spirit, playing on his favourite instrument, still haunts one wing of Brynbella. If he designed the building, his architectural taste does not merit the praises ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... send are not my best, only very ordinary and humdrum affairs—but ex pede Herculem! Hon'ble Sir, and you will see how transcendentally superior are even such poor effusions compared to the fiddle-faddle and gim-crack style of article with which you are being fobbed off by ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... know, exactly pretty, but she had a sort o' queer, say-little way about her that caught my eye. I was a gawky boy, as green as a gourd, and never had been about with women. Dick was just the opposite: he was a reckless, splurging chap that dressed as fine as a fiddle, wasn't afraid to talk, joke, and carry on, and he could dance to a queen's taste; so he naturally had all the gals after him. I was afraid he was going to cut me out, and I was fool enough to—well, ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... conducted by Moisey Ilyitch Shahkes, the tinsmith, who took more than half their receipts for himself, played as a rule at weddings in the town. As Yakov played very well on the fiddle, especially Russian songs, Shahkes sometimes invited him to join the orchestra at a fee of half a rouble a day, in addition to tips from the visitors. When Bronze sat in the orchestra first of all his face became crimson and perspiring; it was hot, there was a suffocating smell ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that I must go to the dinner before I could be persuaded to have anything to do with it, and it was really comical to hear why each of them was so keen on the affair. Collier gloried openly in the fact that it would be a huge feed, and said he was glad Dennison had engaged Rodoski to play the fiddle because music gave him a better appetite, and he advised me strongly not to miss such a good chance of enjoying myself, and thought me mad to hesitate. Lambert said that Dennison had asked him to propose Ward's health, and that ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... I could get them to distinguish one tune from another." Either Murdoch exaggerated, or the poet's ear developed later (Murdoch is speaking of him between the ages of six and nine); for he learned to fiddle a little, once at least attempted to compose an air, could read music fairly easily, and could write down a melody from memory. His correspondence with Johnson and Thomson shows that he knew a vast number of old tunes and was very sensitive to their individual ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... won't, mother. He only talks to me about the Greek and Latin poets and about music. I say, you don't want to see me squeezing a big fiddle between my knees and sawing at it with a bow as if I wanted to cut all the strings, ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... His appearance was grave, but not morose, as if he were always examining things and people without condemning them. It was evident that he expected to take the upper hand in general, to play the first fiddle, to hold the top saw, to "be helped to all the stuffing of the pumpkin," as dear Uncle Sam was fond of saying. Of moderate stature, almost of middle age, and dressed nicely, without any gewgaws, which look so common upon ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... run through his head, and he could not put it out of it. The lilt of it captured him, and suddenly he began thinking of the wonderful brain that musicians must have to compose music. And then his thoughts switched to a picture he had seen of a man in a garret with a fiddle beneath his chin. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is a most pig-headed sot! (aloud) Young man, you cannot know the risk you run. Th' alternative's in earnest—not in fun. Dame Turandot will spin you a tough riddle, That's not to be "got thro' like any fiddle." Not such as this, which any child might guess— (Though the Emperor could not, I must confess;) "What gives a cold, cures a cold, and pays the doctor's bill?" Not short enigmas lightly disentangled; Hard nuts you'll have to crack, fresh made, new-fangled; And if you cannot guess them ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... spent on behalf of one person in his house, he puts at the side of the page a clay pipe, rudely drawn; an entry of the payment of wages to another servant has a jug of ale; another a quill pen; another a couple of brooms, as the housemaid; a fiddle for the dancing master for his daughter; payment made to the sexton or parish-clerk has a representation of the village church by its side, and the window-tax a small lattice-window; and on the days that they brewed, a small barrel is drawn by the side of the date. And the chief object ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... the strings of the old fiddle will tighten up a good deal, if I abstain from attempting to play upon the instrument at present—but that a few jigs now will probably ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... a wonder! After playing a whole evening I used always to find all my fiddle-strings snapped. But now, though I've been playing for three whole days, they are all sound. May the Lord grant us ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... and gave chase again. He ran and ran, but this time he couldn't catch the fox up; so he returned home and wept bitterly, because he was now all alone. At last, however, he dried his tears and got him a little fiddle, a little fiddle-bow, and a big sack, and went to the fox's hole and began ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... Lloyd's, in Lombard Street, was dear to Steele and Addison. At Don Saltero's, by the river at Chelsea, Mr. Salter exhibited his collection of curiosities and delighted himself, and no one else, by playing the fiddle. At the "Smyrna" Prior and Swift were wont to receive their acquaintances. From the "St. James's," the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James's Street, the Tatler dated its foreign and domestic news, and conferred ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Peter. Look at 'em," laughed the captain. "It's a most noble sight! Watch the old fellow playing the fiddle, and I'll lay my eyes that in a half minute or so you'll have some ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were a great attraction. You dropped a penny into a little slit in a box and a doll would begin to dance and play the fiddle: and there was the Magic Mill, where for another modest copper a row of tiny figures, wrinkled and old and dressed in the shabbiest of rags, marched in weary procession up a flight of steps into the Mill, only ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thinking he would draw pay for at least another three weeks. He kicked, but Hugo says the plot demanded it. I bet, at that, he was just trying to cut down his salary list. I bet that continuity this minute shows Pa drinking his corn out of a jug and playing a fiddle for the dance right down to the last scene. Don't artists get the razz, though. And that Hugo, he'd spend a week in the hot place to save a thin dime. Let me tell you, Countess, don't you ever get your ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... brave-hearted boys for the most part. I might have had their names on my bills as long as their fingers could hold a pen, but slit me if I like bleeding my own companions. They might have found a place for me, too, had I consented to play second-fiddle where I had been used to lead the band. I' faith, I care not what I turn my hand to amongst strangers, but I would fain leave my memory ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hotspur could be bright, and he was proud of being bright. With this woman he was always subdued, always made to play second fiddle, always talked like a boy; and he knew it. He had loved her once, if he was capable of loving anything; but her mastery over him wearied him, even though he was, after a fashion, proud of her cleverness, and he wished that she were,—well, dead, if the reader choose that mode ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... for you to say," returned Nick, apparently not aware of his insolence. "Come, now, I'll tell you what I'll do. My father's got a bill against yours for a dollar and sixty-four cents. I told father I had a use for the fiddle, and he says if you'll give it to me, he'll call it square. There, what do you ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... are very rarely old, as many of the organ- grinders are; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and threes; the violinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and the harper unslings his instrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through their repertory,—pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, not unmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley and Captain Jenks of the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... monumental stones are erected over warriors, who "buckled on their belts," and fell in single combat. From Hallingdal went forth the national Polska (the Halling), and only the Hardanger-fela (the Hallingdal fiddle) can rightly give its wild, extraordinary melody. Most beautiful are the flowers of remembrance which the Christian antiquity exhibits, and the eternal snow upon the crowns of the ancient mountains is not more imperishable than these innocent roses at their ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... mechanical result can be obtained; in the present instance, mind, any deviation from this base of operations, as I may safely say, will land you in no end of difficulties, as everything must be "square with the fiddle," as we have a habit of saying, though the whole is a matter of curves and lines, there being nothing of squareness about it. Having drawn this decided line, I take my half outline, plate 1, and place it exactly where, by tracing close to the side of ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... comes! On her horns she is playing A tune with a nourish or two! No cow-herd am I but my staying To play second fiddle won't do. Singing (to myself)—With my tol de ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common fiddler, a common lawyer, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... close:—the mouths in the boudoir are assuming the shape of elongated O's—an epidemic that has extended to the Wall-flowers; the "harp" has accompanied his instrument with fitful snores; the "violin" scarcely knows the back from the front of his fiddle, or the "cornet" which end to blow into;—yet, upon being asked for "Roger de Coverley," they make a desperate effort to awake, for they know it to be the last dance—which is supported by the whole strength of the ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... should give you my fiddle, They'll think that I'm gone mad, For many a joyful day My fiddle and I ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... de pooh man dance One night in de yeah; Pooh man foh de rich man prance All times, do yuh heah? Pooh man play de violin While de rich man swing; Pooh man squeeze de fiddle in When he wants toh sing! Mistah rich man, hab yoh fun Makin' grub foh us; Min' dat stohy ez yuh run 'Bout ole Lazaruss! Guess yuh'll dance some ober dah, Jes' ez like ez not; Swing dem pahtnehs fas' en fah ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... took us to the whizbangs concert party last night. It was A1—one chap makes his fiddle absolutely speak. He played that Volunteer Organist and parts of Henry VIII., the basso sang 'Will o' the Wisp,' and most of the other songs were old 'uns. I tell you, you wouldn't believe we had such things a couple of ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... styte (stuff and nonsense), Shargar. Do ye think I dinna ken a fiddle whan I see ane, wi' its guts ootside o' 'ts wame, an' the thoomacks to screw them up wi' an' ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the road. Mrs. Lathrop, it was another road o' hills, 'n' I must say 's the sight made my blood run cold for the third time in one day. F'r a minute I thought seriously o' jus' takin' a train away ag'in 'n' lettin' Cousin Marion fiddle alone f'r another fifty years, f'r I give you my word o' honor, Mrs. Lathrop, 's I was 'most dead, 'n' Lord only knows what made me keep on, f'r what came after was enough to shake my faith in the Lord forever 'f I really believed 's any one but Cousin Marion had one word to say in the matter. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... a molar tooth was lodged in a bronchus causing death on the eleventh day. Warren mentions spontaneous expulsion of a horse-shoe nail from the bronchus of a boy of two and one-half years. From Dublin, in 1844, Houston reports the case of a girl of sixteen who inhaled the wooden peg of a small fiddle and in a fit of coughing three months afterward expelled it from the lungs. In 1849 Solly communicated the case of a man who inhaled a pebble placed on his tongue to relieve thirst. On removal this pebble weighed 144 grains. Watson ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... love over his depth with that beefy Mrs. Claymore and takes me motoring to pour his love (of her) into my aural labyrinths. I don't object to playing second fiddle, but when it comes to holding the triangle for the drummer, I pass blind. Never mind, while he isn't watching some day he'll get stung, for I'm really fond of him. You say that you are so much stronger willed than I am—did you ever look at yourself in the mirror? ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... the canyon got bright as day. I looked up, and there was a room with lights and people talking and laughing, and fiddles screeching. Dad, and the preacher at home when I was a boy, told me the fiddle was the devil's invention; I believe ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... unforgettable day. He staid with us till late; forgot his stick: we dismissed him with Macpherson's Farewell. Macpherson (see Burns) was a Highland robber; he played that Tune, of his own composition, on his way to the gallows; asked, "If in all that crowd the Macpherson had any clansman?" holding up the fiddle that he might bequeath it to some one. "Any kinsman, any soul that wished him well?" Nothing answered, nothing durst answer. He crushed the fiddle under his foot, and sprang off. The Tune is rough ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... uniform on the bridge, and the Mate is, as usual, in a hurry. The mooring winch is groaning horribly as she hauls on a cable running from the stern to the quay while the tug pulls our head slowly round. Right down to the centre of the loading disc now. The Second Mate rushes to the fiddle-top, and shouts for "more steam"—the winch has stuck—and a howl from below tells him that the donkeyman is doing his best. As I go below again the sharp clang of the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... occupies, Crushing and a confusing noise; Spurs of the Cavalier Guard clash, The feet of graceful ladies fly, And following them ye might espy Full many a glance like lightning flash, And by the fiddle's rushing sound The voice of ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... in comes the Times and eleven strikes (it does) already, and I have to go to Town, and I have no alternative but that this story of the Critic and Poet, 'the Bear and the Fiddle,' should 'begin but break off in the middle'; yet I doubt—nor will you henceforth, I know, say, 'I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy writing.' Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... hurts no one, and is fitted for a child at table. Don't pick your teeth, or spit too much. Behave properly. Don't laugh too much. Learn all the good manners you can. They are better than playing the fiddle, though that's no harm, but necessary; ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... British. Come, I am going to sleep, I must wake up, I must aim higher—aim higher," cried the little artist to himself. All through his tea and afterward, as he was giving his eldest boy a lesson on the fiddle, his mind dwelt no longer on his troubles, but he was rapt into the better land; and no sooner was he at liberty than he hastened with positive ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his son again, this brave honest lad, a change seemed to have come over the old man. The boy had been a willing dutiful soldier, everybody said so, and yet they were going to shut him up in prison for five long months, all because of a piece of fiddle-faddle! Devil take them all! What was the use of being a good soldier? And at a stroke every trace disappeared of the obedient and respectful old sergeant who had worn the uniform so proudly; he was peasant pure ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... King of the rath, "I thought it was no harm. He said he was tired of being by himself, and you know how handy he is with the fiddle or the pipes. If he'd been a fir darrig, that's always playing tricks and making trouble everywhere, why, then, of course—but he was only a ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... three legs As I was going up primrose Hill There was an old man of Tobago Pease pudding hot When I was a ba-che-lor, I liv-ed by my-self To market, to market, to buy a fat pig Jacky, come give me thy fiddle Old King Cole High diddle doubt, my candle's out Bat, bat, come under my hat I'll tell you story My little old man and I fell out Little Tommy Grace Pus-sy sits be-side the fire. How can she be fair? Oh, the rus-ty, dus-ty, rus-ty mill-er There was a crook-ed man, and he went ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... rustling his ears, warmed by the old liquor, caught the first bars of a tune he had known in his youth; and lifting high his voice he sang it over and over again. He passed a negro cabin whence often had proceeded at night the penetrating cry of a fiddle, and it was night now but no fiddle sent forth its whine. A dog shoved open the door, and by the fire light within the old man saw a negro sitting with a gun across his lap, and beside him stood two boys, looking with rapture upon ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... light canoe Floats like a freshly fallen feather, A fairy thing, that will not do For broader seas and stormy weather. Her sides no thicker than the shell Of Ole Bull's Cremona fiddle, The mall who rides her will do well To part his scalp-lock ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... 'Business! Fiddle!' cried Bessie. 'All you City fellows are the same. You encourage each other in drink, drink, drinking whenever you have a chance, and then you say it's all a matter of business. I won't have you coming home in that state, so there! I won't ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... hear Cicely play. Arrived in the drawing-room they found the only truly modern thing in it, a grand piano, of that noted French make which as far surpasses the German model as a genuine Stradivarius surpasses a child's fiddle put together yesterday, and, taking her seat at this instrument, Cicely had transformed both herself and it into unspeakable enchantment. The thing of wood and wire and ivory keys had become possessed, as it were, with the thunder of the battling clouds ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... something a thousand miles across country, south-east, and about twenty years back into the past, and no doubt he sees himself (as a young man), and a Gippsland girl, spooning under the stars along between the hop-gardens and the Mitchell River. And, if you get holt of a fiddle or a concertina, don't rasp or swank too much on old tunes, when he's round, for the Oracle can't stand it. Play something lively. He'll be down there at that surveyor's camp yarning till all hours, so we'll have plenty of time for the story—but don't you ever give ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... anything be less interesting? Here and there the portrait of a General! But such portraits! One veteran warrior is actually shown in the act of playing upon a fiddle! As for the pictures of the victories, there is scarcely anything new worth looking at. Same good old Inkermann, by Lady BUTLER, as of yore; and the same good old recollections of Egypt from past Academies. For the rest, the room contains some comfortable chairs. They are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... him that he could scarce show without surprising you an adjustment to the smaller conveniences; so that when he took up a trifle it was not perforce in every case the sign of an uncanny calculation. When the elephant in the show plays the fiddle it must be mainly with the presumption of consequent apples; which was why, doubtless, this personage had half the time the air of assuring you that, really civilised as his type had now become, no apples were required. Mr. Longdon viewed him with a vague apprehension ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... superfine black, with hat and beaver, mounted on a powerful steed, black and glossy, like that which bore Greduv to the fight of Catraeth. I should wish, moreover," he continued, "to see the Welshmen assembled on the border ready to welcome me with pipe and fiddle, and much whooping and shouting, and to attend me to Wrexham, or even as far as Machynllaith, where I should wish to be invited to a dinner at which all the bards should be present, and to be seated at the right hand of the president, who, when the cloth was removed, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... daylight. About nine o'clock he arrived, and went to the railroad station; there the operator knew him. The lowest haunt in the town had a tent south of the Union Pacific tracks; and Cutler, getting his irons, and a man from the saloon, went there, and stepped in, covering the room with his pistol. The fiddle stopped, the shrieking women scattered, and Toussaint, who had a glass in his hand, let it fly at Cutler's head, for he was drunk. There ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... of the inn and entered, followed by the dog. The place was the same; nothing had been changed. There was the old wooden gallery where the fiddle had played such merry tunes. The rough uneven floor had the same holes, the same hills and dales. The great settle by the fire was marked, as in former years, with mysterious crosses and initials cut by jack-knives in olden ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... to him to give him a greater burden than he was designed to bear," said Pen. "I shall miss the care of him. I am going to miss the demands he made on my best spiritual effort. I'm going to sag like a fiddle string released. If only he has gone on now to a better chance! Poor, poor ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... had it come to this that their preacher had to sleep on the prairie! This was a family of hospitable Kentuckians, who were born to a love of music, and the old gentleman was a fiddler, and next to his Bible he loved his fiddle. Of course, we had a grand, good time, and were all filled with joy; and this was the beginning of the churches on the upper waters of the Kansas River. Twelve miles above St. George was Ashland, where we found Bro. N. B. White, father to A. J. White, who ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... yet let our admiration be [Transcriber's Note: superfluous 'be'] "be screwed to its sticking place," when we think upon the wonderous genius of the aforesaid Thomas Britton; who, in the midst of his coal cellars, could practise upon "fiddle and flute," or collate his curious volumes; and throwing away, with the agility of a harlequin, his sombre suit of business-cloths, could put on his velvet coat and bag-wig, and receive his concert visitors, at the stair-head, with the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... who would a-wooing go Gave a party, you must know; And his bride, dressed all in green, Looked as fine as any queen. Their reception numbered some Of the best in Froggiedom. Four gay froggies played the fiddle,— Hands all ...
— The Nursery, February 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Eph took his fiddle and scraped away to his heart's content in the parlor, while the girls, after a short rest, set the table and made all ready to dish up the dinner when that exciting moment came. It was not at all the sort of table we see now, but would look very plain and countrified to us, with its green-handled ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... climbing. Some boys are peculiarly skilled at casting accounts, others in casting stones. Here we have a boy of a small appetite and many words, there one of a large appetite and few words. Sometimes precocious talent is evinced for playing the fiddle, sometimes for playing a stick; sometimes, again, a strong propensity is discovered for playing the fool. This boy makes verses, as it were, by inspiration; that boy shows an equal capacity in making mouths. The most peculiar talent, however, and the one ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... kept it from the sea-water. This knife, with blade, gimlet, hook, and saw, was a valuable instrument under the circumstances. But besides this tool, Godfrey and his companion had only their two hands; and as the hands of the professor had never been used except in playing his fiddle, and making his gestures, Godfrey concluded that he would have to trust ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... muskets and bayonets, one hundred horses, with new saddles and bridles, all English too, with a good deal of ammunition and baggage. The consternation of the tories was so great that they never dreamt of carrying off anything. Even their fiddles and fiddle bows, and playing cards, were all left strewed around their fires. One of the gamblers, (it is a serious truth) though shot dead, still held the cards hard gripped in his hands. Led by curiosity to inspect this strange ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... were well if nineteen could make a woman to her mind. If tailors were men indeed well furnished, but with more moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like apes by such mimic marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them to spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for futilous women's fancies; which are the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys.... It is no little labor to be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they be not shifted anew once in a few ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... delicacy, born of love, forbade him to ask her what she wanted. Talking of the sky and other matters, thinking how pretty she was looking, he waited for the new, inevitable proof that youth was first, and a mere father only second fiddle now. A note from Stanley had already informed him of the strike. The news had been something of a relief. Strikes, at all events, were respectable and legitimate means of protest, and to hear that one was in progress ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 'cause she said she wanted to work it into that pillow she's makin', so I had to get along with the card as had her number on it. As a consequence I naturally had a very hard time, for I could n't find Mrs. Lupey an' had to fiddle my own canoe from the start clear through to the finish. I can tell you I've had a hard day an' no one need n't ever say Woman's Rights to me never again. I'm too full of Women's Wrongs for my own comfort from now on, an' the way I've been treated ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... and Sam jerked his thumb back to show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse or fix up a watch, an' he does it in about the same way, too; bleeds a horse no matter ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... be perfect if only we had a little better dwelling for summer. You might build us a two-story house, and fetch soil to make a garden. Then you might make a little arbour up there to let us have a sea-view; and we might have a fiddler to fiddle to us of an evening, and a little steamer to take us to church in ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the Somersetshire farmer's son. He had shut his Latin primer and his English grammar when he left Wells, and had never opened a book since, except his prayer book on Sundays, and then he could scarcely spell out the verse of the psalms, and shouted Tate and Brady to the accompaniment of scraping fiddle and trombone in the gallery of the church, with a refreshing disregard of words, though he supplied deficiencies by mystic utterances which filled in doubtful passages and could be interpreted according to the wishes of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... extracting those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their "Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hainburg, happened to be present ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... wild, free life. The Negro songs, those that he has remembered best, are religious and other worldly. "It is a singular fact," says Krehbiel, "that very few secular songs—those which are referred to as 'reel tunes,' 'fiddle songs,' 'corn songs' and 'devil songs,' for which slaves generally expressed a deep abhorrence, though many of them no doubt were used to stimulate them while in the fields—have been preserved while 'shout songs' and other 'speritchils' ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... bending in and out, contrariwise to the fiddle-head (scroll-head). Also, a round piece of wood fixed in the bow or stern of a whale-boat, about which the line is veered when the whale is struck. Synonymous ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... place, Chow tuned up hastily. Then he tucked the fiddle under his chin, stomped out the rhythm, and launched into a lively rendition of "Turkey in the Straw" while he called ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... reconnoitring, cool civilities, and cautious concessions, to yield at length to the never-dying charities; unless, indeed, the latter may happen to be kept in abeyance by a downright quarrel, about midnight carousals, a squeaking fiddle, or ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the property he takes with him is an old sheepskin jacket, in which he finds the wishing-box, which had been, unknown to him, the cause of his father's prosperity. When the "slave" of the box appears, the hero merely asks for a fiddle that when played upon makes everybody who hears it to dance.[FN388] He hires himself to the King, whose daughter gives him, in jest, a written promise to marry him, in exchange for the fiddle. The King, when the hero claims the princess, insists on her keeping her promise, and they are ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... or two. And here was Edward, with a smooth brown leather wallet full of ten- and twenty-dollar bills, which he peeled off without counting, exactly as if money grew on trees, or as if coal came out of the earth and walked into furnaces to the sound of a fiddle and a flute! ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... he said, "I hope you have not been led into buying any instrument by a faith in its antiquity. So many good copies of instruments by famous makers and bearing their labels are now afloat, that the chances of obtaining a genuine fiddle from an unrecognised source are quite remote; of hundreds of violins submitted to me for opinion, I find that scarce one in fifty is actually that which it represents itself to be. In fact the only safe rule," he added as a professional commentary, ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... knight comes through the wood, my sleeping beauty will have another awakening, compared with which this one will seem slight indeed. Then, as a matter of course, I will quietly take my place as 'second fiddle' in the harmony of your life. But no discordant first fiddle, if you please; and love alone can attune its strings. My time is up, and, if I don't return early, go to bed, so that mamma may not say you ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... called Jack, did live in this house. His leg had been shot off in battles with the Indians. After it healed he moved to this place, and lived on the vegetables he could raise in a little garden, besides what people gave him. Every night he came out and sat on the log by the door, playing on an old fiddle. Then the school children would collect around him, and give him pennies, or fruit, and such things. Sometimes he told them stories; for he had travelled in many lands, and knew a great deal about them. ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... mister. Yer'll need to bring her in close ashore and give the Fiddle-sand a wide ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
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