FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Piano' Quotes from Famous Books

... luxuriously furnished drawing-room. Double doors, centre, opening to hall and stairway. Grand piano at right, fireplace next to it, with large easy-chair in front. Centre table; ...

— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair

... embarrassing. One day she announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. "I got two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective." I thought offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. ...

— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... right there in the room, there's a lot doin' that she ain't in on. Trust Vee. Say, she can drum out classical stuff on the piano and fire a snappy line of repartee at me all the while, just loud enough for me to catch and no more, without battin' an eye. Say, I'm gettin' quite a musical education, just helpin' to stall off Auntie that way. And you should see the cute schemes Vee puts over—settin' a framed photo ...

— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... The leading periodicals dealing with farm problems, sociology, and economics, as well as lighter subjects, would be on file. In connection with this building would be an assembly-room suitable for dances, social events, and theatricals, and equipped with a player piano and concert-size talking machine. Arrangements were being made for a weekly exchange of records, for a weekly musical evening by artists from the city, for a semi-monthly vaudeville show, and for Sunday meetings addressed by the best ...

— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... been playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said with the manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He came into my room when he heard the piano, and it was a real pleasure ...

— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... and were wrapped in warm blankets; and to-day they are invited to the farm at the convent of Boerglum. In comfortable rooms they encounter hospitality and friendly faces. They are addressed in the language of their country, and the piano sounds for them with melodies of their native land; and before these have died away, and the chord has been struck, the wire of thought, that reaches to the land of the sufferers, announces that they are ...

— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... exhausted; Eden's curiosity about his friend's projected novel, described so far by negatives only, had apparently subsided, for he managed to turn the conversation to some other subject; and presently Constance was persuaded to sit down to the piano. She played under difficulties on the dismal old lodging-house instrument, but declined to sing, alleging a cold, of which there was no evidence. Merton turned the music for her, and for the first time his friend ...

— Fan • Henry Harford

... we proceed uphill through the region of vines and olives, until we have passed the Punta di Scutolo, where begins our descent into that famous tract of country, the Piano di Sorrento, a plateau above the cliffs, some four miles in length by one in breadth. Poets of antiquity and bards of the Middle Ages alike have sung the delights of the Sorrentine Plain, and have painted in glowing colours of inspired verse ...

— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... on the right, a wide stove of dark porcelain, a high-backed arm-chair, a cushioned foot-rest, and two footstools. A settee, with a small round table in front of it, fills the upper right-hand corner. In front, on the left, a little way from the wall, a sofa. Further back than the glass door, a piano. On either side of the doorway at the back a whatnot with terra-cotta and majolica ornaments.— Against the back wall of the inner room a sofa, with a table, and one or two chairs. Over the sofa hangs the portrait of a handsome elderly man in a General's ...

— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen

... in together and spoiled the prettiest little party that was ever started in Eldara. First was that player piano which Sally got shipped in and paid God-knows-how-much for; the second was this greenhorn ...

— Trailin'! • Max Brand

... everything. The cabinet was carried off. The large library had lost many of its choicest volumes, while the remainder, with heaps of letters, lay thrown in wild confusion about the floor. The pile of sheet music which had been left on the piano by the family, had been culled over and nearly all taken away. In fact such a sad scene of destruction was rare, even in the track of a ...

— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... each other's frat houses while we were haltering the Freshmen. I've seen nine frats, with a total of one hundred and fifty members, sitting up nights for a week at a time working out plans to despoil each other of a runty little fellow in a pancake hat, whose only accomplishment was playing the piano with his feet. One frat wanted him and that started ...

— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... now proceeded to the drawing-room and prepared to take out the piano. They tried it every way. The first way took a piece out of the doorpost, the second made a dint two inches deep in the piano, the third knocked over the grandfather clock, which fell with a resounding crash, breaking its glass, and incidentally a tall china plant stand that happened to ...

— More William • Richmal Crompton

... the gramophone has ceased; but, alas! Captain d'Arcy has begun—on the piano. As I write, the scheme of communication between his right and his left flanks has broken down. Like a prudent officer, he suspends operations, gives the "stand-fast!" and sends out a cautious patrol to reconnoitre the position. He even cedes a little of the ground he ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various

... property, contributed to general use such articles of furniture she possessed as met apartment needs. From one, for example, came a comfortable bed, from another, chairs and a reading lamp, from a third a lounge chair, and from the fourth her piano and couch. Of small rugs, sofa pillows, pictures and miscellaneous small furnishings there were sufficient to make ...

— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various

... stylish gowns and garments the country girl's outfit was deftly concocted. The young wife could sew neatly and rapidly. When all was ready the sum of two hundred dollars lay in her writing desk. Her grand piano, too large for the new quarters, was removed from storage to a dealer's, and was sold for three hundred more. She wrote at once to an uncle in a Western city; told him of her little efforts, and asked what she might do with her ...

— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... was next to Ivanov's study. There still remained out of the ruin a carpet and some armchairs near the large, dirty windows, an old piano stood unmoved, and some portraits still ...

— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... chance of such a thing, I hope you will not refuse a request of mine, which is that you will be so obliging as to apply to some London publisher, and offer him the following works of mine. Grand Trio for piano, violin, and violoncello [Op. 97], 80 ducats. Pianoforte Sonata, with violin accompaniment [Op. 96], 60 ducats. Grand Symphony in A (one of my very best); a short Symphony in F [the 8th]; Quartet for two violins, viola, and violoncello in F minor [Op. 95]; Grand Opera in ...

— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace

... was quickly rewarded. Silver Screenings proffered some fresh views of Beulah Baxter, not in dangerous moments, but revealing certain quieter aspects of her wondrous life. In her kitchen, apron clad, she stirred something. In her lofty music room she was seated at her piano. In her charming library she was shown "Among Her Books." More charmingly she was portrayed with her beautiful arms about the shoulders of her dear old mother. And these accompanied an interview with ...

— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... the ranch. We sat down three at table in a dining-room forty feet long, Aunt Isabel Dwight, Fraeulein Henschel, and myself. Fraeulein was the resident governess. She was a great, soft-hearted, injudicious creature, a mass of German interjections, but she had the grand style on the piano. There had been weeks of such weather as we are having now. Exercise was impossible till after sundown. I had dreamed of a breath of freedom, but instead of the open door I was in straiter bonds ...

— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... written for them. The limited compass of the pianoforte, for example, was certainly the sole reason why Beethoven failed to continue in octaves the entire ascending scale in one of his sonatas. Had the piano in his day possessed its present compass, he would undoubtedly have written the passage throughout in octaves, i.e., as modern pianists play it. If a rigid adherence to the printed letter of ancient music is to be strictly observed, ...

— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... she found herself, with the others, sitting very quiet and listening to two girls playing a duet on the piano. Then one of them sang a Scotch song. There was warmth and richness, the warbling of birds, the melody of brooks, in the rendering, and Bernice heard a ...

— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... way; then he would have her join in the dancing, and bade Ellen Chauncey give her lessons. There was a little backwardness at first, and then Ellen was jumping away with the rest, and thinking it perfectly delightful, as Miss Sophia's piano rattled out merry jigs and tunes, and little feet flew over the floor as light as the hearts they belonged to. At eight o'clock the young ones were dismissed, and bade good-night to their elders; and, pleased with the kind kiss Mrs. Marshman had given her, as well ...

— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... and shook bells with a frenzy that was worth an excellent salary, the silly gentleman from Tooting the while blowing furiously upon his flute, and combining this intemperate indulgence with an occasional assault upon a cottage piano that stood immediately before him, or a wave of the baton that asserted his right to the position of chef d'orchestre. Immediately beyond this shrine of music the Prophet perceived a Moorish nook containing a British buffet, and, in quite the most Moorish corner ...

— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... they used to be. Several cheap oleograph copies of beautiful pictures adorn the walls, and the best parlour, which used to be kept in a condition of deadly propriety for state occasions only, is evidently used in the course of daily life. A brand-new piano, with a pretty little girl seated before it, suggests advancing refinement, and the expression of the child's face, while she attempts the impossible task of stretching an octave, indicates despair. There is another little ...

— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne

... may truly be called natural, as it is that into which the string naturally divides itself when stricken. An attentive ear can readily distinguish the succession of sounds as far as the small seventh. The longer bass strings of any piano of full tone and resonant sounding board will suffice for the experiment. These are also the natural notes as found, with differences in compass, in the simple horn and trumpet, and the phenomenon is visibly shown in the well-known experiment of grains of sand placed ...

— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... a little, there arrived in town a vaulted box, in which the dullest fancy might conjecture a piano. Greatly indeed were heads shaken. If doom were easily invoked, Jane would hardly have lived to unpack the treasure and help to lift it up the ...

— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... lighted on this rainy November night. Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"—the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed by ...

— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Minna the youngest. It was on Easter-day that last I went over to see them; Wearing my best new coat, that is now hanging up in the closet, And having frizzled my hair, like that of the other young fellows. Soon as I entered, they tittered; but that not at me, as I fancied. Minna before the piano was seated; the father was present, Hearing his daughters sing, and full of delight and good-humor. Much I could not understand of all that was said in the singing; But of Pamina I often heard, and oft of Tamino: And ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... relieves the mind from the necessity of paying attention to the details of the successive steps of the act. When piano playing has been completely reduced to habit, the finger movement, the reading of the notes, etc., are all carried on successively ...

— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... music had been given, from Mozart and Beethoven and Handel; and Betty had got into full swing of conversation again, when a pause around her gave notice that another performer was taking her seat at the piano. Betty checked her speech with a little impulse of vexation, and cast her eyes ...

— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... she appeared supremely lovely, and this John Kenyon admitted to himself with a sigh, for her very loveliness seemed to place her further and further away from him. Somebody played something on the piano, and this was, in a way, a respite for John. He felt that nobody was looking at him. Then a young man gave a recitation, which was very well received, and Kenyon began to forget his uneasiness. A German gentleman with long hair sat down ...

— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr

... Creek, rejoicing, on the south, west, north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got inside; while the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot hole. In the middle of this cherished area piano factories—or was it shoe factories?—proudly reared their chimneys, while the population promenaded on a rope walk, saluted at every turn by the benevolent inmates of the Soldiers' Home on ...

— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... apartments where they receive formal company are on the front of the house. Their living rooms, however, are a salon and dining-room at the back, opening upon the garden. Here there are young and old, grandparents and children and dogs all at once, eating, drinking, smoking, piano-playing, and pistol-firing (in the garden), all going on at the same time. It is one of those establishments where every earthly thing that can be eaten or drunk is offered you; porter, soda water, small ...

— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... probably know that sound is produced by rapid motion. Put your finger on a piano wire that is sounding, and you will feel the motion, or touch your front tooth with a tuning-fork that is singing; in the last case you will feel very distinctly the raps made by the vibrating fork. Now, a sounding body will not only jar another body which touches it, ...

— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... n. Abbreviation for 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 ...

— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... have any three thousand dollars," she continued, undisturbed; "all I had was an allowance of a hundred a month, a grand piano, a horse (you remember my, blood mare, Gee-whizz?) a lot ...

— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne

... mother was a servant connected with his father's household. The child was given to my wife to rear, and she accepted the charge. The child bloomed into a perfect beauty, possessed a charming voice, could perform with extraordinary skill on the piano, and seemed to have inherited the mind of her father, whose praises have been ...

— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs

... dinner. Aunt Mary was upstairs, and Beatrice was at the piano. We were waiting for Lowell, who had promised to come up and spend the evening. I was sitting at the centre-table, pretending to read, but watching Beatrice. Her back was turned toward me, so I could stare at her as long as I pleased. The ...

— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... kalejdoskopo. Kangaroo didelfo. Keel kilo. Keen (sharp) akra. Keep teni, gardi. Keep silence silentigxi. Keeper gardanto. Keepsake memorajxo. Keg bareleto. Kennel hundejo. Kernel kerno. Kettle bolilo. Key sxlosilo. Key (of piano, etc.) klavo. Keyboard klavaro. Keystone cxefsxtono. Kick piedfrapo. Kid kaprido. Kidnap forsxteli. Kidney reno. Kill mortigi. Kill (animals) bucxi. Kilogramme kilogramo. Kilolitre kilolitro. ...

— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... our experience of life, their solution is so obvious that they cease to be problems. Thus, the unaided intellect might be puzzled to say how sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. Yet a child can answer the question by sounding an octave on the piano. But this solution is reached by having sensible knowledge of the reality and not by logical argument. Bergson's view, therefore, is that the intellect has been evolved for practical purposes, to deal in a certain way with material things ...

— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... supper I did not know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and see our friends, the ——s; they were at supper. Afterward we went into the salon: mother and daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by Boieldieu. The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which the mother had played on before her marriage, and which has followed and translated into music the varying fortunes of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the ...

— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... form, I placed myself by the young lady and endeavored to at least divide her attention with my Confederate friend. The apple-jack dilated most engagingly on the remarkable beauty of the evening, the pleasantness of the weather generally, and the delightfulness of Shelbyville. There was a piano in the room, and finally, after having occupied her attention jointly with O'Brien for some time, I took the liberty to ask her to favor us with a song; but she pleaded an awful cold, and asked to be excused. The apple-jack excused her. The Storeys ...

— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... some feast lay about the room, scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in ...

— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... toward the music room, for there was one where the blind inmates played and sang, and as Mr. Brown and the children went through the door Lucile uttered a low cry at the sight of a man who was just getting up from the piano. ...

— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope

... understood, as you say," answered Charles, "modern music did not come into existence till after the powers of the violin became known. Corelli himself, who wrote not two hundred years ago, hardly ventures on the shift. The piano, again, I have heard, has almost given ...

— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... of tune, which was all the time, and made bitter remarks of a killingly sarcastic nature to Miss Leech when she stumbled over the accompaniments. On Wednesdays there was a dancing class, where a pinched young lady played the piano with the energy of despair, and a hot and agile master with unduly turned-out toes taught the girls the Lancers, earning his bread in the sweat of his brow. He also was sarcastic, but he clothed his sarcasms ...

— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... in the world is the practice of music more universally extended and at the same time the science so little understood as in America. Almost every house included between the Delaware and Schuylkill has its piano or harpsichord, its violin, its flute, or its clarinet. Almost every young lady and gentleman from the children of the Judge, the banker, and the general, down to those of the constable, the huckster, and the drummer, can make a noise upon some instrument ...

— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various

... elevations a fine wire (piano wire 1/32 inch in diameter) is generally used, but to protect the user against electric shocks the wire must be connected with an "earthed" terminal, on the ...

— Things To Make • Archibald Williams

... messieurs," said Frederick, as he returned to the musicians, "we will take our parts, and you, Quantz, take your place at the piano." ...

— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... post in the billiard-room, or by the cribbage-board, or at the piano which Gervase had got for her. She had some small skill to play and sing to him, and was indefatigable in learning the simple tunes and songs he liked. And night after night she was left alone, unapproached, uncalled for; or else Gervase stumbled in from the dining-room or from an adjournment ...

— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... out of mind, and in its place is the fashionable boarding-house. The skilled housewife is felt to be unappreciated. Men, they tell us, prefer a pretty face to a noble heart, a delicate to a skilled hand, a girl who can play the piano rather than one who can cook a dinner, a pretty doll instead of a glorious woman capable of keeping the house, and of guiding the man with womanly strength. Ah, it is a mistake. America is the land of homes. Our undeveloped territory offers to every man a farm. Men and women need not to be cooped ...

— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... drinking the business of their lives, beginning early and sitting late. They have a varnish of art over their swinishness, and must have music as well as wine. So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism. Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and expresses it by adding to his list of musical instruments 'and wine' as if he would underscore the degradation ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... contents stolen or rendered worthless; the carpets, soaked with a trampled conglomerate of mud and water, oil and filth, the debris left by the feet of the maddened, howling crowd, were entirely ruined; beds and bedding, mirrors, and smaller articles had been carried away, the grand piano had had a fire kindled on the key-board, as had the sofas and chairs upon their velvet seats, fires that were, none knew ...

— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... the finest house in town," said Faith consolingly, "and a piano and a horse and buggy. He is going to have ...

— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... different with us. Our minister now performs the function of the Greek poet at marriages and funerals. Our funeral sermons and newspaper paragraphs have taken the place of the Greek encomiums. Our fiddles or piano do duty instead of the Greek dithyrambs, hyporchems, and other dancing songs. Our warriors are either left unsung, or celebrated in verse that reads much better than it sings. The members of the "Benevolent Pugilistic Association" do not stand so high in the British ...

— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being, in sight. The piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... side was a large stone fireplace; in a corner stood a grand piano; the center was dominated by a simple, flat-topped desk, across which much of the traffic of the American ...

— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... in a whiff. We have daughters too, we have. Good smart American girls, who can adorn a palace or grace a hut on demand, not afraid of poverty, and able to take care of good round dollars. They can play the piano all the morning and cook dinner all the afternoon if they're called on to do it; so your difficulties ain't my difficulties. I'll take the hall at your figures; term, five years; and if the baron'll come down and spend a month with ...

— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... as I sat gloomily in my room, with feet protruding from the window, and body inclined rearward, (the American attitude of despair,) the piano tinkled. It was the same melody which had attracted me a few happy days before. Strengthening myself with a powerful resolution to extricate myself from the bewitching influence which had surrounded me, I arose, and went straightway ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... the first week of the holidays Lorna amused herself as best she might in their little lodgings in Naples. While her father was at the office she read or sewed, or played on a wretched old piano, which had little tune in it but was better than nothing. The evenings were her golden times, for then they would go out together, sometimes into the Italian quarters of the city, or sometimes by tram into the suburbs, where there ...

— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... slurring vowels and wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our English friends believed, undergraduates on ...

— London Films • W.D. Howells

... Clonmel,—beautiful, and with the distinction of knowledge and a clever use of it,—they were a contrast to the ordinary Irish country girl, whose whole equipment of dress and accomplishments was "two washing gowns and a tune on the piano." The girls took part in all the gayeties of the town, and, besides the charm of their conversation, were graceful dancers; and though Marguerite was less beautiful, she was most tasteful in dress, and this became always a noted characteristic of hers. They became the attraction of an English ...

— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing

... the window, looking out into the twilight. Decima stood near the fire in a thoughtful mood. Lucy was downstairs in the drawing-room at the piano. They could hear the faint echo of her soft playing as they sat there in silence. Sibylla was in no humour to talk: she had repulsed Decima rudely—or it may rather be said fractiously—when the latter had ventured on conversation. ...

— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... only the simple airs, but the most difficult exercises usually played by his daughters, were repeated again and again, the touch of the musician being timid, but singularly true and delicate. Going down, they found Tom, who had been left asleep in the hall, seated at the piano in an ecstasy of delight, breaking out at the end of each successful fugue into shouts of laughter, kicking his heels and clapping his hands. This was the first time he ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... were taken aboard the Pioneer. Everything was marvelous to them. The cabin with its complete furnishings, the musical instruments, the phonograph, the piano player, which acted like a wizard, because it gave out the sweet musical tones, as though it were a living thing, and then a moving picture screen, which was the last thing the boys installed before they left New York, ...

— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... change in it was marked. The grand piano had vanished, and in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted into the expressions of all the vices. Some of these faces smiled, others ...

— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the fears that had been drilled into her twanging like piano wires—shrank from the skeletal-seeming shape beside her, held herself ...

— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... play away. It's good to hear the piano going again. And, between ourselves, I'm beginning to feel depressed by the stillness of the house. It's difficult to believe that this is home since we took on hospital work. Between ourselves, I sha'n't be sorry when Ormsby says good-bye. As a strong man and a soldier, I like him; but, as a sick ...

— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... Prue were in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in ...

— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... thunder passed away as I told you. The weather cleared up; the people walked out in their best clothes; the dinners came in from the bakers; I sat dreaming at my wretched little hired piano, nicely dressed and looking my best—and still no Midwinter appeared. It was late in the afternoon, and I was beginning to feel offended, when a letter was brought to me. It had been left by a strange messenger who went away again immediately. I looked at the letter. Midwinter at last—in writing, ...

— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... if there is one thing more grateful to my feelings than another, it is a new house—a large house, with its ceilings embellished with snowy mouldings; its floors glowing with warm-tinted carpets, with cushioned chairs and sofas to sit on, and a piano to listen to; with fires so arranged you can see them, and know there is no humbug about it; with walls garnished with pictures, and above all mirrors, wherein you may gaze and always find something to admire, you know. ...

— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various

... about in handsome carriages. Just in the centre and height of the thoroughfare Mme. Ricard's establishment looked over it. We went in at a stately doorway, and were shown into a very elegant parlour; where at a grand piano a young lady was taking a music lesson. The noise was very disagreeable; but that was the only disagreeable thing in the place. Pictures were on the walls, a soft carpet on the floor; the colours of carpet and furniture were ...

— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... of the bridesmaids, at the request of Lady Belgrade, sat down to the piano and condescended to favor the company with a ...

— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... I remember one such outing we arranged to Loschwitz, where we made a kind of gypsy camp, in which Carl Maria von Weber played his part in the character of cook. At home we also had some music. My sister Rosalie played the piano, and Clara was beginning to sing. Of the various theatrical performances we organised in those early days, often after elaborate preparation, with the view of amusing ourselves on the birthdays of our elders, I can hardly remember one, save a parody on the ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... can, as if in fear of taking cold. Skimming along close to the floor, he reaches the opposite side of the room, and, slowly rising again, peers into the canary's cage. The occupant resents the liberty with erect feathers, and our balloon quickly descends, and takes refuge under the piano. Recovering his presence of mind, presently he peeps cautiously out, and begins to ascend again. Here he comes toward us—slowly, majestically! Strike at him with a fan, and lo! he retreats in great disorder to a remote corner of the ...

— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... are the same frosty mists, and there is the same intensely cold convent with its menagerie smell, and the same breed of dogs fast dying out, and the same breed of jolly young monks whom I mourn to know as humbugs, and the same convent parlour with its piano and the sitting round the fire, and the same supper, and the same lone night in a cell, and the same bright fresh morning when going out into the highly rarefied air was like a plunge into an icy bath. Now, see here what ...

— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... at last gave up her book, and took her work-box instead. We were no longer moping and dull around the table. And bye and bye Henrietta, much alarmed, was sent to the piano, and her poor little music certainly sounded very meagre when Mr. ...

— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris

... in the reading-room's affairs. There was the matter of a new piano for the Sunday-school room. The instrument in use had been a second-hand one when the Sunday School obtained it; and it was forever ...

— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long

... became frequent and friendly. There were horseback rides together in the mornings, sails in the afternoons, and duets on the piano in the evenings. Then her Parisian toilets made poor Sophy's Largo dresses look funnily dowdy, and her sharp questions and affected ignorances of Sophy's meanings and answers were cleverly aided by Madame's cold silences, lifted brows, and hopeless acceptance of ...

— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr

... At our own restaurant, two Negro women made the best corn-fritters we had ever tasted; a green parrot and a monkey squawked and chattered on the balustrade; a Filipino boy played marches on a cracked piano-forte. ...

— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... well. I believe I could do an hour's practice if there was only a piano here," Violet answered, as she glanced wistfully at her music-roll, which lay on ...

— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... had time enough for such things, though we lost many a free hour in music lessons. Ludo was learning to play on the piano, but I had chosen another instrument. Among our best friends, the three fine sons of Privy-Councillor Oesterreich and others, there was a pleasant boy named Victor Rubens, whose parents were likewise ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Hermia mounted the platform (a piano box turned on its side) and began to thump the drum and cymbals. Her position was conspicuous and she began a little uncertainly, for it was one thing to choose one's audience among the simple folk of the countryside, another to face the kind of crowd which now gathered ...

— Madcap • George Gibbs

... event, modifying or throwing light upon the principal matter without affecting its essential character; an accompaniment is something that unites with the principal matter, tho not necessary to it; as, the piano accompaniment to a song; a concomitant goes with a thing in natural connection, but in a subordinate capacity, or perhaps in contrast; as, cheerfulness is a concomitant of virtue. A circumstance is not strictly, nor usually, an occasion, condition, effect, or result. (See these ...

— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... down his spotless wristbands, laid himself back on the soft sofa, soothed by the elegant surroundings no less than by the coolness of the atmosphere. Having no better comparison at hand, he compared this luxurious room, with its soft couches, brilliant flowers, and opened piano, to the chamber in the house of a West India planter, where all was glare and heat and barbarism without, and all soft and cool and luxurious within. He was so charmed with this comparison—he had a knack of being easily pleased with his own thoughts—that he commenced to turn a fresh sentence ...

— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... over, Miss Stubbs said graciously: "Mr. Barton, if you are not pressed for time, will you linger a while? I play a little on the piano, and if you are fond of music, I will play for you. Usually I have to be in the store, but this ...

— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger

... the same use as the study of writing, grammar, or piano-playing. In learning to write we have to think precisely how each letter is formed, how one letter is connected with another, where to use capitals, where to punctuate and the like. But after we have become proficient in writing, we do all this without once ...

— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... ask yourself, why did I not send a polite note to Johnny's father asking him to restrain his little boy from over-composition, begging him not to force the child's musical genius too quickly, imploring him (in short) to lock up the piano and lose the key? What kept me from this course? The answer is "Patriotism." Those deep feelings for his country which one man will express glibly by rising nine times during the morning at the sound of the National Anthem, another will direct to more solid uses. ...

— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne

... to play the pianola to accompany the hymns, but, since the rolls were scored rather for musical effect than for church services, the pianola was suddenly found to be playing something quite different from what was being sung. All through the expedition the want of some one who could play the piano was felt, and such a man is certainly a great asset in a life so far removed from all the pleasures of civilization. As Scott wrote in The Voyage of the Discovery, where one of the officers used to play each evening: "This hour of music has become an institution which ...

— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... secure a tete-a-tete in the house of Connor. On this particular evening, Trix was practising scales on the piano in the drawing-room, while Mollie read a novel, and Betty lolled on the rug; the three boys were busy at lessons, or, as they eloquently described it, "stewing," round the dining-room table. Mr Connor was smoking his pipe and reading ...

— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... ladies to the drawing-room, and then Maurice lured Madeleine to the piano, and was soon in raptures over the wild, sweet melodies which she sung with untutored pathos. His grandmother could scarcely conceal her vexation. Approaching the singer, she took an opportunity, while ...

— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... him shortly before how I had boarded the Calais boat at Dover in the form and semblance of a piano, snugly housed in one of Messrs. Erard's cases, while my servant engaged in pleasant converse on the quay the bailiff who had been set to watch for me: this, while they were actually slinging me on board. The picture of the ...

— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman

... theatre with Florry Tressilian. Oh that Nick would only do something of that sort now! This desire, quickened by the presence of the strange, expressive woman, by the way she scattered sweet syllables as if she were touching the piano-keys, combined with other things to make our young lady's head swim—other things too mingled to name, admiration and fear and dim divination and purposeless pride and curiosity and resistance, the impulse to go away ...

— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... ample work to do in the form of playing for the people. Their instruments are the fiddle, 'cello, viola, clarinet, tarogato (a Hungarian specialty), and, above all, the cymbal. The tarogato looks like a grand piano with the top off. It stands on four legs like a table and has wires drawn across it; on these wires the player performs with two little sticks, that are padded at the ends with cotton-wool. The sound is wild and weird, but if well played very beautiful indeed. ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... the poverty, the untidiness, the want of system and thrift, that existed about the cabin, notwithstanding his knowledge of French and other academic subjects. Another time, when riding on the outer edges of a town in the South, I heard the sound of a piano coming from a cabin of the same kind. Contriving some excuse, I entered, and began a conversation with the young colored woman who was playing, and who had recently returned from a boarding-school, where she had been ...

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... to receive "beaux" and addicted to the piano-forte accomplishment, was at that time practicing across the hall an instrumental composition, entitled, "La Reve." Under the title, printed in very small letters, was the English translation; but I never thought to look at it. An elocutionist ...

— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... an artist who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of a piano,—who seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears. Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may,—coarse or refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions in the keeping ...

— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... never mind. Perhaps you have fallen to Miss Pennycuick's piano? Did you hear it going as we passed ...

— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... pleasure in the fashionable modern composers. It seemed to him "playing tricks with music—like nonsense verses—music to please me," added he, "must have a subject." Our friend appeared struck with this observation, "I understand you, sir," she replied, and immediately seated herself at the piano. "Have the kindness to listen to the three following airs, which I played on a certain occasion extempore, as substitutes for words. Will you try to guess the meaning I wished to convey, and I shall then ascertain the extent of my success." She instantly gave us ...

— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... caper a bit, musically, roaring in basso profundo a morning song of its own. The result is grotesque in the extreme. I once heard a big-chested man sing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," while his accompanist jigged out an accompaniment on the highest octave to be found on the keyboard of the piano. The pond and the fishermen seem to be doing something ...

— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... a neighbour in later life that few letters passed between them. 'He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one of his or Beethoven's Operas. ...

— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... call that thing artistic, Mrs. Hewson, if you mean the thing that's over the piano in ...

— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... exuberance of life and affection, which the chilling atmosphere of that New England home somewhat suppressed, and with an increasing love for books and cultured people. "I rise a little before five," she writes, "walk an hour, and then practise on the piano till seven, when we breakfast. Next, I read French—Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe—till eight; then two or three lectures in Brown's Philosophy. About half past nine I go to Mr. Perkins's school, and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, ...

— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... but little room in Hester's life for music. Her days were an endless round of dish-washing and baby-tending—first for her mother, later for herself. There had been no money for music lessons, no time for piano practice. Hester's childish heart had swelled with bitter envy whenever she saw the coveted music roll swinging from some playmate's hand. At that time her favorite "make-believe" had been to play at going for a music lesson, with a carefully modeled roll of brown paper suspended ...

— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... close to the fire by his side. Here she was silent for a few moments, letting the comfort of the whole scene sink in to his brain—and then, when the maid came in to clear away the dinner-table, she got up and went to the piano, where she played some soft, but not sentimental tunes. Music of a certain sort would be the worst thing for him, but a light air while Marie was in the room could do no harm. Though, when she went over close to him again, she saw that even this pause had allowed him time to ...

— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn

... herself to be elected perpetual President, she will leave the Presidential arm-chair at the beginning of every debate, in order to demolish by anticipation all who may venture to speak after her. She will play various kinds of music upon the piano with a uniform vigour that would serve well for the beating of carpets, and will express much scorn for the feeble beings who use the soft pedal, or indulge in the ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various

... adopt it enthusiastically; but that he was still puzzled over the very necessary word to fit the strongly marked refrain. However, he was not going to give it up. Next morning, when Grieg was in his room peacefully giving a piano lesson to a young lady, a furious ringing was heard at his front-door bell, as if the ringer would tear the bell from its wires, followed by a wild shout of "'Fremad! Fremad!' Hurrah, I have got it! 'Fremad!'" Bjornson, for of course the intruder was he, rushed ...

— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... been a concert pianist; now she had such large arthritic knobs on all of her knuckles that her hands had become claws. Though there was still that very same fine upright in the cabin that I had learned to play as a child, she had long since given up the piano. Her knees also had large arthritic knobs; this proud woman with a straight back and long, flowing strides was bent over, limping along with a cane. She was also 30 pounds overweight and her blood pressure was ...

— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... play a duet, on which Athalie said, modestly, that she had forgotten her music—the only instrument she could play on now was the chopping-board. Since the great catastrophe, Athalie only played the piano when she knew ...

— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew nothing of the piano,—Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy with regard to this part of modern education, when he said ...

— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... that their flat was well-provisioned, well-furnished, heated and lighted. There were a few books and magazines, a piano, a writing desk, even a pack of ...

— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... established in that house, the stepmother of those children, she found it impossible. Despite the fact that her attention had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play. She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... mischief. I told you I'd give you something better than the Journal would give you, and I am going to give you a happy day in the country. We're now on our way to this lady's house. You are my guest, and you can play golf, and bridge, and the piano, and eat and drink until the polls close, and after that you can go to the devil. If you jump out at this speed, you will break your neck. And, if I have to slow up for anything, and you try to get away, I'll go after you—it ...

— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... classmates are to make their careers—three as physicians, two as pharmacists, two as teachers, one as a business man, the other as a lawyer. The young woman graduate received two diplomas, the second being in music, her industry and ability being evidenced in the fact that her long hours with the piano did not prevent her receiving high honors in the classroom. One of the men had walked fourteen miles each day, summer and winter, besides doing the "chores" morning and night; another has had a chair in a barber shop every evening; others have ...

— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various

... A piano-organ was pouring the metallic music through our open windows, while a voice of brass brayed the words, which I have since obtained, and print above for identification by such as know their Italy better than ...

— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... place where she worked and has never been able to stand up since. On her birthday her friends give her a party that she may have a bit of brightness. I went over to play that they might dance. She is fond of music and an old piano has recently been given her by—by some ...

— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... them, you would feel what a divine consolation is music! And they shout for joy, they beam with happiness when a teacher says to them, "You will become an artist." The one who is first in music, who succeeds the best on the violin or piano, is like a king to them; they love, they venerate him. If a quarrel arises between two of them, they go to him; if two friends fall out, it is he who reconciles them. The smallest pupils, whom he teaches to play, regard him as a father. Then all go to bid him good night before retiring ...

— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... woman, or one who can do little save strum on the piano or make embroidery as intricate as it is useless, means divorce or murder. For him, sweetness, gentleness, self-control, sound common sense, shrewdness, and domestic virtues are incomparably superior to any mental brilliance or physical comeliness. He needs a "homely" woman, and should remember ...

— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... is a boudoir upholstered in light gray silk damask, with bouquets of flowers. This is Madame Desvarennes's favorite room. A splendid Erard piano occupies one side of the apartment. Facing it is a sideboard in sculptured ebony, enriched with bronze, by Gouthieres. There are only two pictures on the walls: "The Departure of the Newly Married Couple," exquisitely painted by Lancret; ...

— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... corner of this room was a piano, and the piece of modern music above the key-board showed that someone had been recently playing. A lamp of neat design hung from the wainscoted ceiling, while another with a soft shade stood upon a centre-table. ...

— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody

... purity of principle the prejudice of education has left upon their intellect. In our more fashionable hells, wine and choice liqueurs are the stimulants 321to vice; here, the seduction consists in the strumming of an ill-toned piano, to the squeaking of some poor discordant whom poverty compels to public exposure; and who, generally being of the softer sex, pity protects from the severity of critical remark. I need not say our report to the Dalmaines was unfavourable; and the divine little countess, frustrated ...

— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... because her chest is delicate, and she has come home to be coddled. She don't like it a bit—leaving school, I mean—so it seems that none of us are contented. She's clever, in music especially; plays both violin and piano uncommonly well for ...

— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... greatly, in the attiring of women, the desire of approbation overrides the desire for warmth and convenience. And similarly in their education, the immense preponderance of "accomplishments" proves how here, too, use is subordinated to display. Dancing, deportment, the piano, singing, drawing—-what a large space do these occupy! If you ask why Italian and German are learned, you will find that, under all the sham reasons given, the real reason is, that a knowledge of those tongues is thought ladylike. It is not that the books ...

— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... rather later to breakfast, and they seemed not to go to school; some of them had piano lessons in their rooms. Their mothers did not go out much; sometimes they went to church or the theatre, and they went shopping. But they had apparently no more social than domestic life. Now and then they had a friend to lunch or dinner; if a lady was absent, ...

— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... in Pittsburgh passed rapidly. For Jean it was a happy year despite much hard work at school, German lessons with Fraeulein, and long hours of piano practising. It seemed as if the scales and finger exercises were endless and sometimes the girl wondered which had the more miserable fate—she who was forced to drum the same old things over and over, or poor Uncle Tom who had to listen when she was doing it. And yet as she looked back ...

— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett

... Summer Homeward came the fair Miranda. How the village people wonder'd At her fashions, and her movements, How she made the new piano Tremble to its inmost centre With andante, and bravura, What a piece she had to show them Of Andromache the Trojan, Wrought in silks of every color, And 'twas said a foreign language Such as princes use in Paris, ...

— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... presently long for something a little better—unless your development has been arrested. It makes small difference in this respect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen to own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automatic piano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master pianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you with technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul into the music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. ...

— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... the Kendall home, something he had not done for some time. As he came up to the front walk, between the arbor-vitae hedges, he saw that the parlor windows were alight. The window shade was but partially drawn and beneath it he could see into the room. Helen was seated at the piano and Edwin Raymond was standing beside her, ready to turn the page of ...

— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... light breaking into a vault a few notes of prelude were struck upon the piano in the parlor below, and a sweet voice, ...

— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... we had time enough for such things, though we lost many a free hour in music lessons. Ludo was learning to play on the piano, but I had chosen another instrument. Among our best friends, the three fine sons of Privy-Councillor Oesterreich and others, there was a pleasant boy named Victor Rubens, whose parents were likewise friends of my mother. In the hospitable house of this agreeable family I had heard the composer ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... had slipped in to enjoy his triumph. The next day Minoret, who had always refused to let Ursula learn music, sent to Paris for a piano, made arrangements at Fontainebleau for a teacher, and submitted to the annoyance that her constant practicing was to him. One of poor Jordy's predictions was fulfilled,—the girl became an excellent musician. The doctor, proud of her talent, had lately sent to Paris for a master, ...

— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... to employ a governess, Elsie preferred teaching her darlings her self. There was a large, airy room set apart for the purpose, and furnished with every suitable appliance, books, maps, globes, pictures, an orrery, a piano, etc., etc. There were pretty rosewood desks and chairs, the floor was a mosaic of beautifully grained and polished woods, the walls, adorned with a few rare engravings, were of a delicate neutral tint, and tasteful curtains ...

— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... speaking, somebody in the next room has begun to play the finale of Beethoven's Sonata in D-minor (Op. 31, No. 3). The allegretto is first played piano, then more forte, and at last passionately, violently, ...

— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... sociology, and economics, as well as lighter subjects, would be on file. In connection with this building would be an assembly-room suitable for dances, social events, and theatricals, and equipped with a player piano and concert-size talking machine. Arrangements were being made for a weekly exchange of records, for a weekly musical evening by artists from the city, for a semi-monthly vaudeville show, and for Sunday meetings addressed by the best ...

— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... would furnish the audience. The evening came, and the parlors were crowded with guests and villagers, but no performers. After waiting until expectancy and curiosity had almost toppled over from tiptoe to disgust and indignation, Field stepped to the piano with preternatural gravity and attacked it with all the grand airs of a foreign virtuoso. Critics would have denied that Field was a pianist, and, technically considered, they would have been right. ...

— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... fairly well-educated, up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind—the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake—a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to see ...

— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... soldier and is expecting a war baby. But I don't know how to do without her. I've tried my very best; but somehow it doesn't answer: everybody cheats me; and in the end it isn't any saving. So I've made up my mind to sell my piano and have a maid. That will be a real saving, because I really don't care a bit for music, though of course one has to pretend to. Don't ...

— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw

... been servants somewhere. The living-room into which she conducted him was spacious and a little bare, though not bare for the Midi—a plain white room, high in the ceiling, with chairs of good line. Here was a big piano, here a fireplace, here a few paintings, colorful landscapes, on the wall. ...

— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... affairs prospered; he had become bookkeeper in Bernhard's business. His biographer Kayserling tells us that at this period he was in a fair way to develop into "a true bel esprit"; he took lessons on the piano, went to the theatre and to concerts, and wrote poems. During the winter he was at his desk at the office from eight in the morning until nine in the evening. In the summer of 1756, his work was lightened; after two in the afternoon he was ...

— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... out so to be, for the affair went through without a hitch. The night of October 16th I spend at Raffles's apartments. He was as calm as though nothing unusual were on hand. He sang songs, played the piano, and up to midnight was as gay and skittish as a school-boy on vacation. As twelve o'clock struck, however, he sobered down, put on his hat and coat, and, bidding me remain where I was, departed ...

— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs

... music there was none, though once an old couple wailing a plaintive duet passed under our windows. Britain is not esteemed a melodious nation, yet the unclassical piano is ever with us, and even in the smallest provincial towns one is rarely out of hearing of the insistent note of some itinerant musician. And no matter how far one penetrates into the recesses of the country, he is always within reach of ...

— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... of a quaint little house uptown, a great bronzed-faced man sat at a piano, a dead pipe between his teeth, and absently played the most difficult of Beethoven's sonatas. Though he played it divinely, the three men who sat smoking and talking in a near-by corner paid not the least attention to him. The player, it seemed, did not expect them to: ...

— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... works of art which surround them, and in splendid Chinese cages, birds of gorgeous plumage have learned to caress the rosy lips of their young mistress, or perch triumphantly on her snowy finger. Here are books, too, and music—a harp—a piano—while through a half open door leading from a little recess over which a multaflora is taught to twine its graceful tendrils, a glimpse may be caught of rosy silken hangings shading the couch where the queen of this little realm nightly sinks to ...

— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... tastefully, but not extravagantly. At the back, a door to the right leads to the entrance-hall, another to the left leads to Helmer's study. Between the doors stands a piano. In the middle of the left-hand wall is a door, and beyond it a window. Near the window are a round table, armchairs and a small sofa. In the right-hand wall, at the farther end, another door; and on the same side, nearer the ...

— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen

... people were passing over it, that a part of all the toll which they paid, would, in the end, come to her. She thus took the same kind of pleasure in having purchased a house, and shares in a bridge, that any lady in a city would take in an expensive new carpet, or a rosewood piano, which would cost about the same sum; and then she had all the profit, in the shape of the annual ...

— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott

... his arms despairingly, went to the piano and played a long, sad phrase of Borodin, the one which is sung by the recumbent woman just before Prince Igor's dances. Before Aurelle's eyes floated Northern landscapes, muddy fields and bleeding faces, mingling with the women's bare shoulders ...

— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... moon. I never dreamed of getting it. And you surprised me by selling the farm, and coming nearer the town to live. Just because I had an ear for music, and could pick out tunes on the old melodeon, I must have a piano and take lessons. Just because my music teacher happened to be French and I showed an aptitude for studying, that must be gratified. Can you really blame me if I want to see more of the wide world that opened up to me? Did you really think French novels and music were likely to make a woman of my ...

— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... albums filled presumably in the same way as was the other. She had no mind to look at these, being already surfeited with beauty; also, she was more than ever aware of the sense of disquiet which had troubled her before. To escape once more from this, she walked to the piano, opened it, and let her fingers stray over the keys. She had not touched a piano for many weeks, consequently her fingers were stiff and awkward; but in a few minutes they got back something of their old proficiency: almost unconsciously, she ...

— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... parlour, and crawled into a dark corner under the piano, feeling that there was no place to go for comfort, since the one who had always kissed away her little ...

— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston

... help, because she hasn't been nice to any of the Phi Sigma Tau, but we asked Miss Tebbs and Miss Kane, two of the teachers who are helping with this, to ask Eleanor to do something. You know she plays so well, both on the violin and piano, then, too, the greater part of her life has been spent abroad, so she surely must have lots of ...

— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower

... many. Almost every evening after dinner Frances sat down at the old-fashioned piano, with the candle brackets at each side of the music rack, and sang. Occasionally we were her only auditors, but more often one or both of the curates or Doctor and Mrs. Bayliss or Bayliss, Junior, dropped in. We made other acquaintances—Mrs. Griggson, the widow ...

— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... bad of Betty, and as Karen stood before them, looking from one to the other, Gregory saw that she suspected them. Her face hardened. "A great artist needs to be robust," she said. "My guardian works every day at her piano ...

— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder him from jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the other side of the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father's desire, that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically performing "Cherry Ripe!" with one hand. Able men who have passed their examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than ...

— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... Sunday evening in Hamilton, Bermuda, is an alluring time. There is just enough of whispering breeze, fragrance of flowers, and sense of repose to raise one's thoughts heavenward; and just enough amateur piano music to keep him reminded of the other place. There are many venerable pianos in Hamilton, and they all play at twilight. Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments—notably those ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Somers was by the fire, darning fine napkins, winking over her task, maintaining in her aspect the determination to avert any danger of a midnight interview with Desmond. That gentleman was at present sleeping on a sofa. I seated myself before the piano, wondering whether he slept from wine, ennui, or to while away the time till I should come. I touched the keys softly, waiting for an interpreting voice, and half unconsciously sang the ...

— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled ...

— The Price • Francis Lynde

... under escort of a young man who had just been appointed Secretary of the Foreign Office in the provincial capital by the new revolutionary party. His qualifications for the post consisted chiefly in the fact that, having been employed by a foreign firm as piano-tuner, he could make himself understood in the English tongue ...

— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... to help, was very tactful, the lame girl very lovable, and in a few minutes all the objections had been swept aside and harmony reigned supreme. Then they settled down to hard work, and how they did practise! Aunt Pen played the piano, Giuseppe took up the refrain on his violin, and the great stone house fairly rang with the chorus of the hundred or more voices. Indifference melted into interest, and interest into enthusiasm. Before the afternoon had drawn to a close, every heart ...

— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown

... his love. Her skin was snow white, delicately tinted with red; her hair was black as ebony, and she had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. She made an impression on me. Her father had given her an excellent education; she spoke French perfectly, played the piano admirably, and was passionately ...

— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... tender-hearted, sympathetic woman, and what an admirable musician! She composed nearly all the music for her husband's plays. Every Sunday there was music at Lavender Sweep—quartet playing with Madame Schumann at the piano. ...

— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... planks, was upheaved in several places; the gangways leading to the sleeping-cabins at the sides were shot away; the handrails were gone, and the elegant carpet was concealed beneath a chaos of fragments of finery. The books on the shelves of the library remained unmoved; the piano was thrown on one side; and the floor presented huge upheaved and rent chasms, through which might be seen the still greater ruin in the lower cabin. Below the saloon, or drawing-room, is the saloon of the lower deck, ...

— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... playing it that very evening. After the Count and Countess had sung several operatic selections, the father turned to his children, saying: "Let us hear what you can do." Albert seated himself at the piano and played, while Marguerite modestly ...

— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne

... have been devoted to this question. People have sought to paint in counterpoint. Also unmusical children have been successfully helped to play the piano by quoting a parallel in colour (e.g., of flowers). On these lines Frau A. Sacharjin-Unkowsky has worked for several years and has evolved a method of "so describing sounds by natural colours, and colours by natural sounds, that colour ...

— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... and trepidation I entered yet another room on the same floor, but it was dusty and neglected—a kind of sitting-room, or perhaps boudoir, for there was an old-fashioned high-backed piano in it. Yet there was no sign that anybody had entered there for weeks—perhaps for months. In the sunlight, I saw that there were cobwebs everywhere. Surely it was a very strange house. It struck me that ...

— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux

... spirit of fair play, however, I must mention that my wife does not endorse all this. On the contrary, she tells me (she has a terse way of speaking) that it is "rank bosh." She declares that the Dirzee is the bane of her life, that he is worse than a fly, that she cannot sit down to the piano for five minutes but he comes buzzing round for black thread, or white thread, or mother-o-pearl buttons, or hooks and eyes, that every evening for the last month he has watched her getting ready for to drive, and just as her foot was on the carriage step, has reminded her, ...

— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... ascending three steps, they went through a curtained recess into Angela Sovrani's studio,—a large and lofty apartment made beautiful by the picturesque disorder and charm common to a great artist's surroundings. Here, at a grand piano sat Angela herself, her song finished, her white hands straying idly over the keys,—and near her stood the gentleman whom the Abbe Vergniaud had called "a terrible reformer and Socialist" and who was generally admitted to be something of a remarkable ...

— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Honor's scales that day were anything but a satisfaction to Fraeulein Bernhardt, the piano teacher. Her mind was so abstracted that she kept continually playing wrong fingering, or even an occasional wrong note in the harmonic minors. Her study was little better, and her piece a dead failure. The mistress, with characteristic German patience, set her to work ...

— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... aim of our landlord to make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand sala, he introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which they received each other's names carried to our landlord's bosom a dismay never before felt by a good-natured ...

— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and there were several of these—were capacious and of divers descriptions. A well-worn sofa was stowed away in an obscure angle, and a piano with a rose-silk front and fretwork occupied another of the many dark corners which the ...

— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... more than settled down comfortably when the Chief found it necessary to make another trip down. When he mentioned going I played the piano so loud I couldn't hear him. I had no desire to go. Not while I could sit in my warm house and read and sew in my comfortable rocking chair. It was without a single qualm that I waved him a floury adieu from the midst of cookie-making. I closed the door and went back to ...

— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... love her because she goes to the altar with her head full of book learning, her hands of no earthly use, save for the piano and brush; because she has no conception of the duties and responsibilities of a wife; because she hates housework, hates its everlasting routine and ever recurring duties; because she hates children and will adopt every means to evade motherhood; because she loves ...

— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... passed up from the stomach to the brain, and there ramifying into small branches, communicated a sort of jarring or vibrating sensation to each particular nerve. This is a perfect musical case of a dyspeptic, who has a sort of piano-forte stomach; we might fancy him exclaiming ...

— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... was brought home to her, although she made fun of it and pretended she didn't care. Music had been her young heart's dream. It was the only art for which she showed a genuine regard. And two of her pet grievances were that she didn't have a piano, and that, if she had one, she could not ...

— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... come to himself, and stared around into the fire as if wondering where he was, and he did not see the tear that rolled down his wife's cheek and fell upon her two hands clasped in her lap. She arose and went over to the piano, which stood in the shadow, and sitting down, with her back to her husband, she played fragments of music nervously. Mr. Hardy lay down on the lounge again. After a while Mrs. Hardy wheeled about on ...

— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon

... always been fond of roaming the country, and he continued to nourish that love of the pleasant earth which forced him to keep up the habit all his life and resulted in the glorious pictorial music of the Ring. He struggled in vain to conquer the piano-keys, and, indifferent to the fable of the fox and the grapes, came to the satisfying conclusion that the instrument was not worth mastering. We must remember that through Louise he was in constant touch with the theatre, and it is evident that ...

— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... father died in 1872. His mother in 1908. He went to private schools in Dublin and in Bray, but being seldom well, left school when about fourteen and then studied with a tutor; was fond of wandering alone in the country, noticing birds and wild life, and later took up music, piano, flute and violin. All through his youth, he passed his summer holidays in Annamoe, Co. Wicklow, a ...

— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield

... Gothic windows; the massive curtains of orange-colored satin that, veiled with lace, pend in undulating folds over them; the cloudlike canopy that overhangs a dias at the further end of the parlor; the gorgeously-carved piano, with keys of pearl, that stands in dumb show beneath the drapery; the curiously-carved eagles, in gilt, that perch over each window, and hold daintily in their beaks the amber-colored drapery; the chastely-designed tapestry of sumptuously-carved lounges, ...

— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... Siberia. She shares my bitter lot with me,' said he, 'and I must give her all the pleasure I can for it....' To make his wife happier he took up with the officials and any kind of rubbish. And they couldn't have company without giving food and drink, and they must have a piano and a fluffy little dog on the sofa—bad cess to it.... Luxury, in a word, all kinds of tricks. My lady did not stay with him long. How could she? Clay, water, cold, no vegetables, no fruit; uneducated people and drunkards, ...

— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... the successor of Chopin, when his wife began to talk, quite low at first, then a little louder. By degrees the fire of conversation spread. At the end of a minute I was the only listener. Then he shut the piano, and said to me with a heart-rent smile: "It is always like this here—my wife does not care for music." Can you imagine anything more terrible than to marry a woman who does not care for your art? Take my word for it, my friend, and don't ...

— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet

... furnished in the easy unpretentiousness that prevailed in the South in other days. Cool matting covered all the floors, the hallways, and bedchambers. The dining-room opened into a drawing-room, where Kate and Olympia took turns at the big piano. The day was divided, English fashion, into breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper, the latter as late as nine o'clock in the night. Jack being unprovided with regimentals, Vincent wore civilian garb, to spare the "prisoner" (as Jack jocosely ...

— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... raillery as delighted her husband and mother. The idea however started by her, was immediately pursued by Colonel Brandon, who was on every occasion mindful of the feelings of others; and much was said on the subject of rain by both of them. Willoughby opened the piano-forte, and asked Marianne to sit down to it; and thus amidst the various endeavours of different people to quit the topic, it fell to the ground. But not so easily did Elinor recover from the alarm into which ...

— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... away. It's good to hear the piano going again. And, between ourselves, I'm beginning to feel depressed by the stillness of the house. It's difficult to believe that this is home since we took on hospital work. Between ourselves, I sha'n't be ...

— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... a peculiar bright and sweet smile, which came and went suddenly on his face. He drew up a chair with his knee, sat down to the piano, and striking a few chords began to sing, articulating the words clearly, ...

— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... look as would have turned a mahogany piano leg into a mound of smoking ashes, and slammed ...

— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... atmosphere of reserve. As I have already said, in another chapter, I never knew a member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a death-bed. And our village was not a kissing community. The kissing and caressing ended with courtship—along with the deadly piano-playing of that day. ...

— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... heart thumped against his side—it had been great fun to dance with Frida. He had swung her round several times in the booth adjoining a restaurant, in which a man sat strumming on a piano, and had done the same to a couple of other girls, who had looked longingly at the boisterous dancer. What a pleasure it had been. He still felt the effects of it, his chest rose and fell tumultuously—oh, what a pleasure it was to swing a girl ...

— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig

... laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play." And when she gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the outpouring of the ...

— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... brain," she said, and began to pace about the room, up and down, up and down. Her mother watched her anxiously. Angelica closed the piano. Dr. Galbraith and the bishop came in from the dining room, and then Edith declared that driving in the open air had made her so sleepy she must ...

— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... sir, but I don't know where to find any one that would attract my James. Except for political meetings, and a literary lecture or two, with a magic-lantern and a piano, we have not much social relaxation at Bulcester. We object to promiscuous dancing, on grounds of conscience. Also, of course, ...

— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... very erect and ready for argument, watched her steadily from the piano stool of their joint sitting ...

— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... Japanese scene outdoors I passed indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake—Yanagi has written a big book on Blake which is in a second edition—hung within sight of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music[108]. Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history ...

— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... frocks, swirling, floating, delicate shades of rose, mauve, periwinkle-blue, accents of black, graceful bodies, slender legs and ankles ... not all so slender, she amended presently, becoming more critical. There were lower extremities of the grand-piano type, and short, fat feet with a look of ...

— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... work to do; the second day, a little less; the third, nothing at all. So he moped about the great house, lonesome as a forgotten dog. He wrote a sonnet on being lonesome, tore it up and flung the scraps into the waste-basket. Once, he seated himself at the piano and picked out with clumsy forefinger Walking Down the Old Kent Road. Kitty could play. Often in the mornings, while at his desk, he had heard her; and oddly enough, he seemed to sense her moods by what she played. (That's the poet.) When she played Chopin or Chaminade ...

— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... old row, shady locksmiths with a tendency toward skeleton keys; ingenious upholsterers who indulged in paper-hanging on the sly; shoemakers who did half-soling and heeling, their day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo, or harp, as well as the wig and dress makers who lightened the ...

— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith

... came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on his banjo and played a hymn tune. He played "Abide with me," thinking that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England's summer time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano might flash into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank and draw him as with cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune and played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly ...

— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... of the old piano was raised, a spinet, really, and one of the girls began running her fingers over the keys; and later on it was agreed that the first dance was to be the Virginia reel, with all the hospitable chairs and the fire screen and the ...

— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith

... civilization, for he would have her to live for. He would build a home for her, with a garden and dogs and birds and flowers. With his silver-claim money he had fifteen thousand dollars laid away, and she would never know what it meant to be poor. He would educate her and buy her a piano and she would have no end of pretty dresses and things to make her a lady. They would be together and inseparable always, and when she grew up he prayed deep down in his soul that she would be like the older ...

— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... bookcase, so high that there was a spiral flight of library steps to give access to the upper shelves. Opposite were four large windows, now hidden by their ample curtains; and near them was at one end of the room a piano, at the other a drawing-desk. The walls were wainscoted with polished black oak, the panels reflecting the red fire-light like mirrors. Over the chimney-piece hung a portrait, by Vandyke, of a pale, dark cavalier, of noble mien, and with arched eyebrows, called by Lilias, in defiance of dates, ...

— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge

... sneering chap, with a single eye-glass and immense self-conceit. He called me a cad in his paper once, but I am above personal feeling, and do not cut the man off from his income. Then, you have Herr Diddlej, the great Norwegian pianist, who will shatter your piano in half an hour; and, finally, Sydney, the wit, who, by the way, has disappointed me greatly, as he has not made a repartee in a twelvemonth, nor has he set the table in a roar. I reasoned with him the other day on the subject, and gave him fair warning that this visit ...

— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... to have the best performance. Miss Van Alstine from New York is going to sing, and some long-haired fellow at one of the hotels is going to play the piano—they say he's great; and, oh! say, Arch, did you ever hear of a great ...

— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... is the gent who gets ahead of that old silver tip—takin' the word from Peets in advance, sends over to Tucson for a coffin as fine as the dance-hall piano, an' it comes along in the stage ahead of Billy's mother. When she does get thar, Billy's all laid out handsome an' tranquil in the dinin'-room of the O. K. Restauraw, an' the rest of us is eatin' supper in the street. It looks selfish to ...

— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... with delighted surprise. "Oh, Dick, if you should find a piano, please—please bring it ashore for me. I am passionately fond of music, and a piano would be such a solace ...

— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... which might have required but thirteen movements, as shown in the above analysis, unless some variety of musical note was to be added to the vocality produced in the larynx; all of which movements might communicate with the keys of a harpsichord or forte piano, and perform the song as well as the accompaniment; or which if built in a gigantic form, might speak so loud as to command an army ...

— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... to the hotel. There were several hours for Lin to wait. He walked up and down the platform till the stars came out and the bright lights of the town shone in the saloon windows. Over across the way piano-music sounded through one ...

— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... of the knife severed the remaining rope, already drawn as taut as a piano wire. But, as Jack's knife fell, the place became filled ...

— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... afforded by a gift is contained in the way it is given. There is an exquisite art in giving. Many people choose a present just because they happen to like the thing themselves, whereas a gift should be selected entirely with a view to the pleasure or use it will afford to its future owner. A grand piano is no good to a girl who will not have {79} a room large enough to hold it and herself. Costly china is only an encumbrance to a woman who is going to follow the fortunes of her soldier husband, and who will not have a settled home for years. There must ...

— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux

... familiarly called by black and white, was fond of having his own way; and, as long as it did not conflict with that of his imperious father, he was indulged to the fullest extent. Miss Edith was fond of repose, and could not even speak French or play upon the piano, because it was too much trouble to obtain these accomplishments, though private tutors had labored sedulously for several years to meet the ...

— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic

... and childish again; and now," pausing for a deep breath, "will you please explain to me just my position? When must I go, and—and can I take away the things that Uncle Walter has given to me from time to time? The pictures in my own rooms were given to me on certain birthdays and holidays; the piano he gave me new last Christmas, and I have a watch and ...

— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... on this rainy November night. Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"—the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed ...

— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... medicine, music: our best friend. See him there! My Jenny will spin a thread from us to him over the millions of miles, with one touch of the chords, as quick as he shoots a beam on us. Ay! on her wretched tinkler called a piano, which tries at the whole orchestra and murders every instrument in the attempt. But it's convenient, like our modern civilization—a taming and a diminishing of individuals for ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness ...

— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... the Count de Vaudreuil, who was sitting at the piano and practising a new piece of music. "The queen is the womanly Orestes: the Furies are the three royal aunts; and the serpents—pardon me, ladies—are, with the exception of yourselves, most ...

— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... when and where they were to be found." As a man, he could easily have mastered the note of every human being, as in addition to his knowledge of ancient languages, he seems to have become proficient in German, French, and Italian with singular speed and ease. He was an excellent performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to ...

— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... a string of twenty neckties (borrowed from Uncle Guy's room) dangling around her waist, over a combination of pink crepe and bluebird pajamas. At the back of her neck, in savage glee, was propped the piano feather duster, the same being somewhat supported by another necktie of Kelly green hue, that banded her ...

— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis

... change is seen, owing to the rapidity of the vibrations, although a scale of an octave may be sung; in the lower notes, however, the vocal cords are seen not so closely approximated as in the very high notes. This may account for the difficulty experienced in singing high notes piano. Sir Felix Semon in a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution showed some remarkable photographs, by Dr. French, of the larynx of two great singers, a contralto and a high soprano, during vocalisation, which exhibit ...

— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... accomplishments as music and drawing is useless and undesirable. They should not be attempted unless there is taste, talent, and time enough to attain excellence. I have frequently heard young women of moderate fortune say, 'I have not opened my piano these five years. I wish I had the money expended upon it. If I had employed as much time in learning useful things, I should have been better fitted for the cares ...

— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child

... to determine just what name to give the residence of Mr. Thomas Cadge. It would hardly be called a cottage, though not because it was more spacious than the name implied; nor was it a piano-box, in spite of the fact that a piano would have fitted snugly within its walls, for no manufacturer would have trusted a valuable instrument in so flimsy a shell. It was not a real-estate office, as the sign which decorated its entire front proclaimed it to be, for through a jagged ...

— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... saw on every hand evidences of the young life in the old home. There was just a pleasant touch of disorder in the rooms he had always seen kept with such precision: here a bit of unfinished embroidery; there a book open, face down, just where the fair reader had left it; the piano was open and sheets of music lay scattered over it. From every side came the fragrance of flowers, and in the usually sombre dining-room Darrell noted the fireplace nearly concealed by palms and potted plants, the chandelier trimmed with trailing vines, the epergne of roses and ...

— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... of harmony between our two eyes, which makes them act in unison. Likewise there is an unbreakable continuity of relation in the physical world between heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, as between the bass and treble notes of a piano. That is why these opposites do not bring confusion in the universe, but harmony. If creation were but a chaos, we should have to imagine the two opposing principles as trying to get the better of each other. But the universe is not ...

— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... the greater space and light and with the winter sunshine. For the first time since his illness he asked for music, "a fine chorale." A piano was brought into the room, and his daughter played two hymns—one of them "Ein fester burg ist unser Gott" to which he listened ...

— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... for the sake of pin money, been giving a few alleged lessons in piano, voice, water-colors, bridge whist, fancy stitching, brass-hammering, and things like that. She answered Prue ...

— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... Clare, getting up quickly; "what do you know about us?" And he sat down to the piano, and rattled a lively piece of music. St. Clare had a decided genius for music. His touch was brilliant and firm, and his fingers flew over the keys with a rapid and bird-like motion, airy, and yet decided. He played piece after piece, like a man who is trying to play himself into a good humor. ...

— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... their places on the funny little place back of a brass rail. Then came the delicious thrills of the squeaking violins as they were tuned, the tap-tap of the drum, the tinkle of a piano, and the soft, low notes ...

— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope

... with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then, indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano, with her long hair flying loose, and her soul ...

— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... the outskirts of the red brick town of Belfast, Mrs. Dennis McCullough, daughter of the south of Ireland, gave testimony that the goodheartedness of her neighbors prevails over their prejudice even in time of crisis. Her husband, a piano merchant, has been in some seven prisons for his political activities. He had told of plank beds, of food he could not eat, of the quelling of prison outbreaks by hosing the prisoners and then letting them lie in their wet clothes on cold floors. He had spoken of evading prison at ...

— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... they walked round the plantation and park for the last time. Mrs Campbell and the girls went round the rooms of the Hall to ascertain that everything was left tidy, neat, and clean. The poor girls sighed as they passed by the harp and piano in the drawing-room, ...

— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... drawing room; a lofty saloon, the woodwork of which is entirely of cedar, richly wrought; probably another of the author's favorite poetic fancies. It is adorned with a set of splendid antique ebony furniture; cabinet, chairs, and piano—the gift of George IV. to ...

— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... of middle age,—then, as ever, "the poet of all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to hear him, was a boon of magnitude. It was, indeed, a treat, when, seated at the piano, he gave voice to the glorious "Melodies" that are justly regarded as the most valuable of his legacies to mankind. I can recall that evening as vividly as if it were not a sennight old: the graceful man, small and slim in figure, his upturned eyes and eloquent features giving force to ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... Miss Nugent, who in some feminine fashion regarded the move as a triumph for her family, passed by several times. It might have been chance, it might have been design, but the boy could not help noticing that when the piano, the wardrobe, and other fine pieces were being placed in the van, she was at the other end of the road a position from which such curios as a broken washstand or a two-legged chair never ...

— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... sent them a piano, and many fine pictures ornamented the walls from famous persons. An old English lady who spends her summers up there seemed much amused at the prank of the girls, and evidently wondered ...

— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... it's all right," Clara Belle replied soberly. "I'll have a good home and father can't keep us all; but it's kind of dreadful to be given away, like a piano or ...

— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... ladies and gentlemen were sent to bed to get a good sleep for the good of their health, and the keepers and keeperesses took their place and romped, and made such a row, sleep was not easy within hearing of them. They sat on the piano, they sang songs to a drum accompaniment played on the table, they danced, drank, flirted, and enjoyed themselves like schoolboys. Hayes alone was gloomy and morose: so the Robin and Garrett consoled him, drank with ...

— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... there, and sang divinely. She sings her husband's songs; he accompanies her. It is awfully fine to see the light on his blind face as he listens, while her glorious voice comes pouring forth. When the song is over, he gets up from the piano, gives her his arm, and apparently leads her off. Very few people realise that, as a matter of fact, she is guiding him. She gave, as an encore, a jolly little new thing of his—quite simple—but everybody wanted it twice over; an air like summer wind blowing through a pine wood, with an accompaniment ...

— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the process going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness—or sat down to the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy ennui. Her melancholy had become so marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual silent reproach, ...

— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... of chairs has got to be moved—there he is, in the wings—see the piano ain't dragged down too far! Leon, got your mute on your pocket? Please Mr. Ginsberg—you must excuse—Here, Leon, is your glass of water. Drink it, I say. Shut that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draft in the wings. Here, Leon, your violin. Got neckerchief? ...

— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... was so real!" she sobbed. "I can see it now. We were back in the old house, in the library, don't you remember it? and Walter was at the piano, and Louis had just asked me how to finish his last story. Did I answer out loud? Oh, which is the dream, for that ...

— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... teams and people were passing over it, that a part of all the toll which they paid, would, in the end, come to her. She thus took the same kind of pleasure in having purchased a house, and shares in a bridge, that any lady in a city would take in an expensive new carpet, or a rosewood piano, which would cost about the same sum; and then she had all the profit, in the shape of ...

— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott

... successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness — the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople — for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better — as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of ...

— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow

... you ought, you must," said Sir Tancred. "But one thing I do beg of you; do not have her taught the piano—the barrel-organ if you ...

— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... his shell to the proper size and thickness and determines its ridges and whorls. Some kinds of shells take two to five years to reach maturity. Others keep growing all their lives. Color tubes are spaced like holes on a player piano roll allowing pigments to tint the shell at the right spots in the growing design. Many shells are covered with a self-made brown ...

— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company

... learnt how to behave like a real gentleman, and can hold a cup of afternoon tea on his knee without spillin' it all over himself, then he may aspire to higher things, and want a wife who can play the violin as well as the piano, and speak all the languages ...

— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien

... mode of treatment may arrest the attention of some minds which are apt to be frightened at a learned method, and may induce them to take more heed of the judgments which they are hourly passing on a great variety of subjects. If we still persist in saying when some one jingles some jig upon the piano that it is "charming," if we say of every daub in the Academy that it is "lovely," if every new building or statue is pronounced "awfully jolly," if the fastidious rubbish of the last volume of poetry is "grand," if the slip-shod grammar of the last new novel is "quite ...

— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... be afraid of it. It is only being alone with a man whom you have bewitched. You would be mistress of the situation if you only knew how to manage a lover. It is far easier than managing a horse, or skating, or playing the piano, or half a dozen other feats of ...

— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,—a harpsichord. Almost ...

— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... admirably built, leaving nothing whatever to be desired. The cabins are roomy, and comfortably fitted up; there is an excellent library, containing the classics of European literature; various musical instruments, from a beautiful grand-piano [24] to flutes and guitars; then chess, draughts, etc.—all for the recreation of ...

— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... any harm here," he declared indignantly. "And we'll get out, but we're not afraid of you, even if you have got piano legs!" ...

— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... gait, and to himself he was in terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled from side to side between the various objects and multiplied the hazards that in reality lodged only in his mind. Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high with books was space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation. His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides. He did not know what to do with those arms and hands, and when, to his excited ...

— Martin Eden • Jack London

... truth, painfully and anxiously occupied by the illness of her mother. Mr. Percy, aware of her engagement for the evening, had ridden over early in the afternoon and spent an hour or two lounging beside her, at the piano or on the verandah. At last, when it grew nearly time for her to start for Mrs. Scott's, he rose ...

— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... some of whom afterwards became eminent musicians. Among these were Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles and Josef Weigl (1766-1846). Albrechtsberger died in Vienna on the 7th of March 1809. His published compositions consist of preludes, fugues and sonatas for the piano and organ, string quartets, &c.; but the greater proportion of his works, vocal and instrumental, exists only in manuscript. They are in the library of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Probably the most valuable service he rendered to music was in his theoretical Works. In ...

— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... house for a great many years, and a little girl grew up there, the daughter of my landlady. She used to slide down the bannisters very well, and she used to play the piano very badly. These two things worried me many a time. She used to bring me my meals in the morning and the evening, and often enough she'd stop to talk with me while I was eating. She was a very chatty girl and I was ...

— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... she knew the way, would just show Lord Magellan the piano nobile, dismiss him at the grand staircase, and return. Lord Magellan made ...

— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... mere fun, followed them—thus they insisted on their mother hearing them their daily tasks; they insisted on going regularly twice a week to a certain old Miss Martineau, who gave them lessons on an antiquated piano, and taught them obsolete French. Primrose was considered by her sisters very wise indeed but Primrose also thought Jasmine wise, and wise with a wisdom which she could appreciate without touching; for Jasmine had got some gifts from a fairy wand, she was touched with the spirit of Romance, ...

— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... tradition of their generation, considered that a room was not quite 'nice' unless it was 'properly' furnished. It held, therefore, eleven chairs, a sofa, three tables, two cabinets, innumerable knicknacks, and part of a large grand piano. And now, occupied by Mrs. Small, Aunt Hester, by Swithin, James, Rachel, Winifred, Euphemia, who had come in again to return 'Passion and Paregoric' which she had read at lunch, and her chum Frances, Roger's daughter (the musical Forsyte, the one who ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... her fingers were moving softly over the piano keys; melodies in minor, sad and haunting and elusive, melodies that had never been put on paper and would always be her own: in them she might leap from comedy to tragedy, from laughter to tears, and only she would know. The midnight adventure was ...

— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... Aunt Jan's playing, the piano seems alive, With all the notes as busy as the bees are in a hive; And when it's time for Bedfordshire, as sweetly as a lark She sings that God is waiting to protect ...

— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... stories of your early days that you have told us, you have not yet described your life in Pennsylvania," said Ida one evening, when we were gathered about the piano. "Do tell us about it. You have once or twice merely alluded to living in the woods, and my curiosity is quite excited. Were they veritable forests? I do not remember hearing ...

— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland

... melodies with the slurring vowels and wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our English friends believed, ...

— London Films • W.D. Howells

... head, and, opening the piano, struck a light chord. After a moment he sat down and played softly, and the air he played came straight from the high rocks that guard the Afghan frontier. Like a breeze that springs up at evening, the little love-song lilted and whispered under his compelling ...

— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... taken everything. How can I get along now! My piano is gone and how can I give lessons without it! I will have to go back ...

— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... you may have heard of. Take a block of ice. Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that the ice block ...

— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett

... late acquisition of Eulalie's made observation, compassionately, one evening, seeing Elvira nod over her uncongenial Battenberg-ing by the piano lamp. ...

— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... want your company this afternoon for a drive," she said to Dawn; "this morning the library, piano and garden are at your disposal, to use at your pleasure. I have domestic duties to perform, and hope you will make yourself as ...

— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... same as at the pensions, viz 200 francs, or 8 pounds per month, which includes everything but wine and fuel. The establishment is certainly very well conducted. There is a salon, next to the table d'hote, large enough to hold 200 people, well warmed and lighted, handsomely carpeted, with piano, books, prints, newspapers, card tables, etcetera. Indeed, there is everything you wish for, and you are all independent of each other, I was there for two or three days, and found it very pleasant; I was amused with a circumstance ...

— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... his son-in-law, coloured violently with something of a frightened look. He told Talboys that only a few months after his departure he and Helen came to live at Southampton, where she had obtained a few pupils for the piano; but her health failed, and she fell into a decline, of which she died. Broken-hearted, Talboys started for Liverpool to take ship for Australia, but failed to catch the steamer; returned to London, and accompanied Robert Audley on a long ...

— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Blue could talk of nothing but the King, and how glad he was to have seen him. In the evening, however, one of the young ladies began to play a hornpipe, the music of which Sir Henry, not without difficulty, had procured for her. True Blue pricked up his ears, and then, running to the piano, exclaimed, "You play it very well indeed, Miss Julia—that you do; but I wish that you could just hear Sam Smatch with his fiddle—he'd take the shine out of you, I think you'd say. Howsomdever, my lady, if you and the young ladies and Sir Henry ...

— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... the grand piano that stood in the back drawing-room. He went up to her (meeting with a nervous smile Flossie's inquiring look as he passed). He stood a moment with one arm on the chimney-piece, and waited, looking down at Lucia. Presently ...

— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... habits and who are determined you shall not force religion down their throats. How are we to capture the attention of this mass of men and hold them? Will they bolt or stand fire? The time has come to begin the meeting and we plunge in. "Come on, boys, let's have a sing-song; gather round the piano and let's sing some of the old camp songs." Out come the little camp song books, and we start in on a few favorite choruses. A dozen voices call for "John Brown's Body," "Tennessee," "Kentucky Home," "A Long, Long Trail," etc. Soon we have several hundred men ...

— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... take a note on the piano enunciating the vowels in their natural order ([a], ay, ee, o, oo) on this note. Then proceed to the next note; the whole of the octave may thus be gone over. Choose an octave most consonant with the range of ...

— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... throat while the other hand felt the movements of my lips. I was pleased with anything that made a noise and liked to feel the cat purr and the dog bark. I also liked to keep my hand on a singer's throat, or on a piano when it was being played. Before I lost my sight and hearing, I was fast learning to talk, but after my illness it was found that I had ceased to speak because I could not hear. I used to sit in my mother's lap all day long and keep my ...

— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... saucers, she would improvise a gallant line of march from the kitchen table to the pantry, heading an imaginary procession, and whistling a fife-tune that would stir your blood. Then she would trippingly return, rippling her rosy fingers up and down the keys of an imaginary portable piano, or stammering flat-soled across the floor, chuffing and tooting like a locomotive. And she would gravely propound to herself the most intricate riddles—ponder thoughtfully and in silence over them—hazard the most ridiculous answers, ...

— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... and forlorn in the drawing-room, and Lady Martindale tried to make conversation. Did she play, or draw? Matilda played, Caroline drew, she had been learning; and in horror of a request for music, she turned her eyes from the grand piano. Was she fond of flowers? O, yes! Of botany? Caroline was. A beautifully illustrated magazine of horticulture was laid before her, and somewhat relieved her, whilst the elder ladies talked about their fernery, in scientific terms, that sounded ...

— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... beheld two unkempt Italians having a piano-organ and a violin. The music was not fine, but it touched a chord in Ayrault's breast, for he had waltzed with Sylvia to that air, and it ...

— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... California we're not so up and down as you are here. If you were used to spending your days in the shade of yellow walls, with your choice of hammocks, and with nothing to do but feed the parrot and play the piano, why, I guess you'd—" ...

— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... We glanced at our programme and saw that the play was the "Moon Princess," and that Afrid, a genie, figured in the cast. It was then, at least, Oriental, though it could hardly be Malay, and our spirits rose. But the orchestra quickly damped them; there was a piano, a violin, a 'cello, a clarionet, and a cornet, and from beginning to end of the performance they were never in tune with themselves or with the singers. And the music? It was sometimes Italian, sometimes Spanish, never, as far as I could ...

— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... River, the towns of Everett and Revere, and East Boston Creek, rejoicing, on the south, west, north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got inside; while the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot hole. In the middle of this cherished area piano factories—or was it shoe factories?—proudly reared their chimneys, while the population promenaded on a rope walk, saluted at every turn by the benevolent inmates of the Soldiers' Home on ...

— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... wilderness, and on the maps a blank. Striking the famous "sand-papered roads " at Framingham - which, by the by, ought to be pumice-stoned a little to make them as good for cycling as stretches of gravelled road near Springfield, Sandwich, and Piano, Ill.; La Porte, and South Bend, Ind.; Mentor, and Willoughby, O.; Girard, Penn.; several places on the ridge road between Erie and Buffalo, and the alkali flats of the Rocky Mountain territories. Soon the blue intellectual haze hovering over " the Hub ...

— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... caterer's art, had been transformed into a kind of jewel-box glowing with flowers, silver, gold, tinted glass, and the snowy whiteness of linen. It reminded her of an opal flashing all its soft fires. She went into the general reception-room, where was a grand piano finished in pink and gold, upon which, with due thought to her one accomplishment—her playing—she had arranged the songs and instrumental pieces she did best. Aileen was really not a brilliant musician. For the ...

— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... Karpovna announced suddenly in her German Russian, 'music greatly loves, and herself very beautifully plays the piano, only she likes not to play the piano when she is greatly pressed ...

— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... reasonable. I received the birds, and they were the heroes, in their boudoir under the piano, ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... western addition. He was star boarder, and as such made free with Mrs. Meagher's little private parlor. A fire always burned there on cool evenings, and moreover, he escaped the ragtime that nightly filled the community room where the piano was, the interminable arguments anent the European war, and the coy advances ...

— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... post-prandial promenade on the poop until the latter hour, when, the air getting cool, the whole party would adjourn to the saloon, and, Dr and Mrs Henderson producing their violins and Mr Gaunt his flute, Mrs Gaunt or Miss Stanhope would open the piano which formed part of the saloon furniture, and the sounds of a very capital chamber concert would float out upon the evening air, to the great delectation of Captain Blyth, the officer of the watch, the helmsman, and—in a lesser degree, because less perfectly ...

— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... are times when soft music hath not charms; when it is put to as base uses as Imperial Caesar's dust and is taken to fill horrid pauses. Angelica Forey thumped the piano, and sang: "I'm a laughing Gitana, ha-ha! ha-ha!" Matilda Forey and her cousin Mary Branksburne wedded their voices, and songfully incited all young people to Haste to the bower that love has built, and defy the wise ones of the world; but the wise ones of the world were in a majority ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... ask her to help, because she hasn't been nice to any of the Phi Sigma Tau, but we asked Miss Tebbs and Miss Kane, two of the teachers who are helping with this, to ask Eleanor to do something. You know she plays so well, both on the violin and piano, then, too, the greater part of her life has been spent abroad, so she surely must have lots of ...

— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower

... similar in form to the piano were in use several hundred years ago. The virginal, shaped like an old-fashioned square piano, was a favorite instrument at the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, and by some authorities is supposed to have been named in honor of the Virgin Queen, as she was called. The harpsichord, much in ...

— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... his elbows on the grand piano, facing her, was devouring her with his eyes and saying in an ...

— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... confessors had decided that music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,—it is part of ...

— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... at all," she said, laying the paper aside and returning to her former place near the piano. Her face was drawn and white, and there was a hard, metallic note perceptible ...

— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... scoffers Given by Turkey in this year of grace, The unexpected homage that she offers To the piano holds the foremost place. ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... house, the stepmother of those children, she found it impossible. Despite the fact that her attention had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play. She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, than the ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... were in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in a different color, ...

— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... at her in a strange way, as if he liked her terse creed, and would fain have heard it a second time. Then suddenly he leant back with his head against a corner of the piano. The fronds of a maidenhair fern hanging in delicate profusion almost hid his face. He was essentially muscular in his thoughts, and did not make the most of his dramatic effects. The next remark was made by a pair ...

— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... the way of invention was his machinery for making steel wire for pianos,—a branch of the business which was urged upon him by the late Jonas Chickering, piano manufacturer, of Boston. The most careless glance at the strings of a piano shows us that the wire must be exquisitely tempered and most thoroughly wrought, in order to remain in tune, subjected as they are to a steady pull of ...

— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... windows of the V.A.D. hospital were brilliantly lighted up, and through them floated the strains of a piano and occasional bursts of laughter. Number One Ward, however, was quite empty except for my friend, Private McPhee, stalking majestically up and down as if on sentry go, wearing a "fit of the blues" several sizes too large for him and an expression which would, I ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various

... They were toil-worn and stained; their clothing was in rags. But beneath their sandy hair more than one pair of eyes gleamed from time to time with a sudden anger, with an intelligence made for higher things than spade and oar. As they sat there they were like the notes of a piano, and Kosmaroff played the instrument with a sure touch that brought the fullest vibration out of each chord. He was a born leader; an organizer not untouched perchance by that light of genius which enables some to organize the ...

— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. ...

— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... five years old the 21st of January, and I had such a happy birthday. In the morning when I got up I found at the foot of my crib six books of natural history full of pictures for little folks, a piano, a box of colors, and two dancing bears, one black and one brown. And when I went down to the dining-room, on my tray was a beautiful cup and saucer, and on the cup, in gold letters, "A Gift." And in my chair was a box with twenty-five things in it from my auntie Lou; and in the afternoon ...

— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... this one wants a little "animation," that one "sings out of tune." Miss So-and-So plays the piano "with faultless manipulation, the only drawback being a slight preponderance of pedal," and so on. He generally has as good an ear for music as a parish priest who only knew two tunes: one of which ...

— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren

... stamped velvet was two shades richer in tone than the pale dead-red of the floorcloth. Small pictures in light frames harmonized with a green paper of long interlacing leaves. On the right, the grand piano and the slender brass lamps; and the impression of refinement and taste was continued, for between the blue chintz curtains the river lay soft as a picture of old Venice. The beauty of the water, full of the shadows of hay and sails, many forms of chimneys, ...

— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... in a general way to every state and every home. Look about, where you are sitting now. How many things are there in the room just where you are,—there is a table, a chair, a shoe, a coat, a necktie, a cigar, a lampshade, a piano, a basket—for all of these ...

— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson

... forth with conveying and disponing all and whole the estate and lands of Singleside and others, with the lands of Loverless, Liealone, Spinster's Knowe, and heaven knows what beside, 'to and in favours of (here the reader softened his voice to a gentle and modest piano) Peter Protocol, clerk to the signet, having the fullest confidence in his capacity and integrity—these are the very words which my worthy deceased friend insisted upon my inserting—but in TRUST always (here the reader recovered his voice and style, and the visages of several of the hearers, ...

— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the Student's Song Book, and they had had several glasses of Stone's Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a wonderful ...

— The Judge • Rebecca West

... popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, ...

— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... shall these Thy pearly teeth grow like piano keys Yellow and long; while thou, all skin and bone, Angles and morals, in a sky-blue veil, Shalt hosts of children to the sermon hale, Blare hymns, read chapters, ...

— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang

... in short, a woman of character. There you are, Miss Blunt, at full length,—emphatically the portrait of a lady. After tea, she gave us some music in the parlor. I confess that I was more taken with the picture of the dusky little room, lighted by the single candle on the piano, and by the effect of Miss Blunt's performance, than with its meaning. She appears to possess a ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, spacious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club ...

— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... we bought an upright grand piano, and after we had had it a few months we noticed that one of the keys would stay down when touched, unless struck very quickly and lightly, and the next day another acted in the same way. That evening, after the boys had gone to bed, father and myself were sitting by the ...

— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... and then Mary went over to the piano and played. It was a rather welcome relief, under ...

— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... the cafe in Paris, a chanson, entitled Coffee, reproduced here, was set to music with accompaniment for the piano by M.H. Colet, a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. Printed in the form of a placard, and put up in cafes, it received the approbation of, and was signed by, de Voyer d'Argenson, at that time (1711) lieutenant of police. The poetry is not irreproachable. ...

— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... times, she was accustomed to talk over household affairs with the maid, and after breakfast would visit the kitchen and make a tour of the grounds and garden. The remainder of her day would be spent in reading, in playing the piano, in doing little household tasks, or in walking about the grounds with her father. Yes, sometimes the yogi would join them, and there would be long discussions. After dinner, in the library, there would also be long discussions, but the girl ...

— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson

... room in the parish house resounded to the twenty voices of the choir. The choir master at the piano kept time with his head. Earnest and intent, they filled the building with the Festival Te Deum of Dudley Buck, Opus 63, ...

— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... dangerous dark, he went about the library at home in his thought and placed each familiar belonging where he had known it all his life. And as he finished, his mother's head shone darkly golden by the piano; her fingers swept over the keys; he heard all their voices, the dear never-forgotten voices. Hark! They were singing his hymn— little Alice's reedy note lifted above the others—"God shall ...

— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... prima" (UZIELLl).]; the second is that two third ones above are over the two third ones below [Footnote 10: terze di sotto: "Intende qui senza dubbio parlare di foglie decussate, in cui il terzo verticello e nel piano del primo" (UZIELLI).]; and the third way is that the third above is over the third below [Footnote 11: 3a di sotto: ...

— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... the conservatory and making his way towards the piano, as though irresistibly fascinated. For her encore the singer was giving a simple ballad that had been very popular some years before. The last time Peveril heard it was when cruising along ...

— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe

... the perfect polish of that table! It's like the finish of a rosewood piano." He touched ...

— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon

... Victor—his hand trembled—hers was steady. Captain Hammond asked her for a Scotch song. She went to the piano and sang, never more clearly and sweetly in ...

— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... the sounds, the brightness, the buzz of conversation and laughter surrounding her. In one section of the parlor floor was the dining-room, and from the clink of dishes one could tell that supper was being prepared. In another was the parlor proper, and there some one came to play on the piano. That feeling of rest and relaxation which comes before the evening meal pervaded the place. It touched the heart of the innocent working-girl with hope, for hers were the years, and poverty could not ...

— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... it!" he exclaimed. "Cross your fingers everybody," and once more he did the street-piano act, as Ed termed it. The engine only ...

— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose

... "Bless my piano keys!" exclaimed Mr. Damon, "if I can get just one elephant, and pull out his big ivory teeth, I'll be satisfied. I want a nice pair of tusks to set up on either side of ...

— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton

... a rich contralto voice which had been carefully cultivated. Every evening in the twilight, with only the flickering of the wood fire in the room, she would sit at the piano and sing. Lane would close his eyes and let the mellow voice charm his every sense. It called up his highest feelings; it lingered in his soul, thrilled along his heart and played on the chords of love and hope. It dispelled the heavy gloom that so often pressed down upon him; it vanquished ...

— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... day long, there is a retinue of mouldy gigs and chaise-carts in the street; and herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, over-run the house, sounding the plate-glass minors with their knuckles, striking discordant octaves on the Grand Piano, drawing wet forefingers over the pictures, breathing on the blades of the best dinner-knives, punching the squabs of chairs and sofas with their dirty fists, touzling the feather beds, opening and shutting all the ...

— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... little house and garden in the country all to himself. His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced, is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that by co-operation the material side of life can be ...

— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... boy aged eighteen is not too old to learn how to play the piano, violin or any other musical instrument. There are thousands of stenographers who did not take up that profession until they were twenty-five or thirty years of age. They were firm believers in the adage, "It is never too late to learn." 2. Munson's appears to be the most popular system ...

— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various

... more easily one's possessions carry in that fashion; as if it were indeed that automatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated inventing—I set off to the neighboring mine of "Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed to carry anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain at this half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. Being drawn out, he grew quite cheery on this new fashion of carrying—"when the load is not much." In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone sweeping across ...

— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... walked with him to the landing, where she kept him for about ten minutes complaining of the awful worry she had had about the under-housemaid, and of the sickening impossibility of getting a piano-tuner to attend to the instrument properly without ...

— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... is lovely, but it sounds particularly soft and true out in the open air this way, and without a piano to accompany her. Mine doesn't—I'm all right to sing in a crowd, but when I try to sing by myself, it's just a sort of screech. There isn't any beauty to my tones at all, and I know it and don't ...

— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart

... the dining room. The tables had been moved to one end where they were piled on top of one another; the chairs were arranged in a row along the wall; the floor, newly waxed, shone like glass. A small upright piano manipulated by an elderly female in glasses; a tremendous bass viol in charge of a small man, and a violin played by a ...

— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... have a fell purpose, and when you learn what it is I expect you to move the piano out—that's what always happens in the play when the heroine is dispossessed. Well, then, I've been sent by The Review to bare all the disgraceful secrets ...

— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... not alone interested in the reading-room's affairs. There was the matter of a new piano for the Sunday-school room. The instrument in use had been a second-hand one when the Sunday School obtained it; and it ...

— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long

... ... Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand, Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound— The jangle and throb of a piano ... tum-ti-tum ... Drawn by a lamp, they come Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, ...

— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... advances during the first few days after his arrival at Houston Mansion. Despite Miss Husted's oft-repeated inquiries after the professor's health (the title had been conferred on him by virtue of his possessing a violin and on the arrival of a piano for his room), despite her endeavours to direct conversation into a channel which might lead to a discussion of his personal affairs, Herr Von Barwig remained tacit; hence a mystery attached itself to the personality ...

— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... one, believes all earth privy to his soul—was put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the ...

— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... la Compagnie!'" said Telford, seating himself at the piano, and playing the first bars of that well-known air, to which, in our meetings, we were accustomed to ...

— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... up in alarm, but met Mrs. Clyde's reassuring glance. "Not this time, dear," she returned to Blue Bonnet. "So far you have had all play and no work. The piano hasn't ...

— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs

... George. "I myself know a child of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever having been taught, or knowing in the ...

— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... systematically."[78] From the psychological point of view, perhaps, Mason is justified in looking upon the great inventor as "an epitome of the genius of the world." To develop a Krag-Joergensen from a bow and arrow, a "velvet-tipped" lucifer match from the primitive fire-stick, or a modern piano from the first crude, stringed, musical instrument has involved much the same intellectual processes as have been operative in transforming fetishism and magic into religion and philosophy, or scattered fragments of ...

— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... fronts south by north, qualifications of, lessening, wooden leg (and head) useful to. Cape Cod clergyman, what, Sabbath-breakers, perhaps, reproved by. Captains, choice of, important. Carolina, foolish act of. Caroline, case of. Carpini, Father John de Piano, among the Tartars. Cartier, Jacques, commendable zeal of. Cass, General, clearness of his merit, limited popularity at 'Bellers's.' Castles, Spanish, comfortable accommodations in. Cato, letters of, so called, suspended naso adunco. C.D., friends of, can hear of him. Century, nineteenth. ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... game will be intrusted; the others will have to try to guess it. I shall remain in the room with the rest of you, and my assistant will go out. During her absence I shall place my hand on the shoulder of some girl, or upon the piano, or on my own shoulder, and when she returns she shall tell you who has ...

— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... bandage, and shouting with merriment. It was a pleasanter sight, later in the evening, to see him leading out Hildegarde for a quadrille, and taking his place at the head of the figure with stately, old-fashioned grace. Mrs. Grahame, turning round a moment from her place at the piano, saw his fine face aglow with pleasure, and felt a corresponding warmth at her own heart. She thought of the gloomy, solitary man he had been a year ago, living alone with his servants, scarcely seeing or speaking to a soul ...

— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... giving to the gloom a mysterious, palpitating effect. The room beyond was the dining-room, richly paneled in wine-colored mahogany. This was better; it was cheerful. A log crackled in the fireplace. There were plenty of candles. There was a piano, too. This belonged to the castle; a heavy tarpaulin covering lay heaped at one side. There was a mahogany sideboard that would have sent a collector of antiques into raptures, and a table upon which lay the remains of a fine supper. My mouth watered. I counted over the good things: ...

— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... there is no piano," said Loiseau as a crowning point to the situation, "we might have finished up ...

— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... showed them that their flat was well-provisioned, well-furnished, heated and lighted. There were a few books and magazines, a piano, a writing desk, even a pack of ...

— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his chamber of horrors Madame Tussaud's is nothing. With proud, prosperous, healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a cracked piano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms. All this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praise I am writing. I read "The Minister's Black Veil," and find it the first sketch of "The Scarlet ...

— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... was ajar. She called for him to come in, as he halted in the hall. Beth came forth from the little room, after a moment, and stood before him, leaning against the piano. Her face was grayish-white, but ...

— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... would take a very large corner for him to back into. And he is so big and heavy that not even ten men could lift up his front legs. So they just hitch a rope around his head, and then men, hauling on the rope and pulleys, lift the front of the elephant, as men hoist up a piano. ...

— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis

... to our hearts is that old Sabbath schoolroom, Which each Sunday morning presents to our view; The seats, the piano, the portrait that's near it, And ev'ry loved thing which our memory knew. Our dearly-loved pastor, his wife who comes with him, Our Superintendent, and dear Mrs. G., The teachers, the pupils, and faithful Librarians, ...

— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... see from the white, set look of her face as the monotonous months dragged on that she was no nearer to accomplishing that task than on the day of her arrival. Nothing that Knight could do made any difference. When an upright cottage piano appeared one day, the girl seemed distressed rather ...

— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... metal and crystal bowls, word of their brothers in the dusk without. The room was quiet, save for the hissing of the logs; remote, delicately lighted, filled with the subtle odor of books and flowers; reminiscent of the suave personalities of those who frequented it. On the diminutive piano in one corner, a large silver frame, holding the photograph of a man in French uniform, caught here and there on its surface high lights from the shaded wall-lamp above. In the shelter of white bookcases, the backs of volumes in red and tawny and brown gave the effect of tapestry cunningly woven. ...

— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... gladioli? He ought to have noted it down. "Vincent," he asked, "do you remember the address of that Mr. Schwatzkummerer who grew nothing but gladioli?" Vincent was looking with an expression of extreme astonishment at the sheet of music on the piano. He started at the question, stared, recollected himself, laughed, and said, "Heavens, no, Mr. Welles!" and went back into his own world. There were lots of things, Mr. Welles reflected, that Vincent did not care about just as hard as he ...

— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... Hop. and I lighted our cigars and "railroaded" for awhile, then "Her Eyes" went to the piano and sang a dozen songs as only a trained singer can. Her voice was wonderfully sweet and low. They were old songs, but they seemed the better for that, and while she sang Hopkins's cigar went out and he just gazed ...

— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... room, very lofty, and charmingly furnished, with a Persian carpet, tiny tables, low lounging chairs, innumerable knick-knacks of all kinds, ferns, winter flowers of every sort, screens and palms. A great fire of pine-logs is roaring up the chimney. The piano is draped with Bokhara plush, and everywhere the latest magazines, ...

— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black

... the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... remembered, for not only had Bob the pleasure of explaining to his mother and father the work they had been doing all summer and telling them of their plans for the coming year, but during the afternoon a large auto truck arrived at the house and unloaded a fine piano and victrola, the latter with a dozen ...

— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson

... pang every time it was brought home to her, although she made fun of it and pretended she didn't care. Music had been her young heart's dream. It was the only art for which she showed a genuine regard. And two of her pet grievances were that she didn't have a piano, and that, if she had one, she could not ...

— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... a sort of half-whisper, asked Mrs. DICKENS where her piano was, she smiled, and turned her face towards her baby, that was sitting on her knee; as much as to say, 'This little fellow has beaten the piano;' and, if what I am now writing should ever have the honour to be read by her, let it be the bearer of a renewed expression of my admiration of her conduct, and of that regard for her kind and sensible husband, ...

— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... than the lean Prince de Gatinais. The latest gossip of Versailles was delivered, with discreet emendations; he laughed gayly; and he ate with an appetite. There was a blight among the cattle hereabouts? How deplorable! witchcraft, beyond doubt. And Louis passed as a piano-tuner?—because there were no pianos in Manneville. Excellent! he had always given Louis credit for a surpassing cleverness; now it was demonstrated. In fine, the Prince de Gatinais became so jovial that Nelchen was quite at ease, and Louis de Soyecourt ...

— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... response to these suggestions, but followed Mrs. Van Reypen to the great drawing-room, at one end of which was a grand piano. ...

— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells

... that stately and sombre-looking dame open her arms, when Najib plucks a flower and, after smelling it, presents it to her? What makes that reticent, meditative, hard-favoured ancient, who is I believe a psychologist, what makes him so interested in observing Najib when he stands near the piano pointing anxiously to the keyboard? For the child enjoys not every kind of music: play a march or a melody and he will keep time, listing joyously from side to side and waving his hand in an arch like a maestro; play something ...

— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... secret, for Mr. Bultitude disapproved of such dissipations) to hear the Opera in the holidays, and now the piano conjured the whole scene up for him again—there would be no more theatre-going for him for a very ...

— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... cheerfulness and tries to promote kind thoughts, simply because it has been found that these things are transmuted into good, and come out again at the finger-tips of the workers in beautiful results. So we have pictures, statuary, flowers, ferns, palms, birds, and a piano in every room. We have the best sanitary appliances that money can buy; we have bathrooms, shower-baths, library, rest-rooms. Every week we have ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... Belle on a brocaded chair and going to the piano, played the melody of the Spring Song. She could perform only a few measures, but there were no false notes in the little chromatic passages, and her grandfather's eyes sought Julia's ...

— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham

... a Mahatma, and save your postage expenses. But you must be discreet; and you must be exceeding vague. A Mahatma is nothing if he is not vague. You must also be elusive. Can you elude? It is no light matter to prove one's spiritual capacity by materialising a cigarette inside a grand piano. ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various

... was glitter and fire in each eye, For two living coals were the symbols; His teeth were calcined, and his tongue was so dry, It rattled against them, as though you should try To play the piano in thimbles. ...

— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... already ten minutes past four, and the Ardingly motors must have been there by this time, if there was anything "doing" by the 4.15. But positively the only vehicle there was an open trolly laden with a piano in a sack. Apart from knowing all about that piano, for Mrs. Poppit had talked about little else than her new upright Bluthner before her visit to Buckingham Palace, a moment's reflection convinced Miss Mapp that this was a very unlikely mode of conveyance for any guest.... She watched for ...

— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... and then ho, for bed," said Mr. Maynard. So when they had recovered their breath, Mrs. Maynard and Grandma returned, Rosy Posy having already gone to her little crib. Mrs. Maynard sat at the piano, and they all gathered round ...

— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... us in borrowed attire. In the Boer War ammunition was carried out in piano cases, and military advices were transmitted in the skins of melons. And that is the way of the enemy of our souls. He makes us think we are receiving music when he is sending explosives; he promises life, but his gift is laden with the seeds of death. He offers us liberty, ...

— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... was something about him that she couldn't understand. Some feminine instinct was waking. But Una's cheerfulness and interest in all things was unabated. We three men smoked—I, too, for I had lately fallen from grace—with the ladies' permission in the drawing-room where Una played upon the piano and sang. I don't think that Jerry had known about her music for he had said nothing of it to me, and when ...

— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... Sorrows of Werther. (N.B. This Piece was damned at Covent Garden Theatre.) [Caste follows.] Brothers and Sisters of Charlotte, by six Cherubims got for the occasion. Orchestra. Leader of the Band, Mr. Knight, Conductor, Mr. E. Knight. Piano Forte, Mr. Knight, Jun. Harpsichord, Master Knight (that was). Clavecin, by the Father of the Knights, to come. Vivat Rex! No Money returned (because none will be taken). On account of the above surprising Novelty, not ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the "good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone. Where the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. ...

— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... many ways that will at once occur to the intelligent reader this little hand would be helpful in our complex modern civilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at the piano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shake hands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slap the coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutely perfect for waving farewell. Nor ...

— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren

... Oriole, by sight at least, even if unfamiliar with all the notes of his cheery and resounding song. The Red-Eyed Flycatcher, heard even more constantly, is less generally identified by name; but his note sounds all day among the elms of our streets, and seems a sort of piano-adaptation, popularized for the million, of the rich notes of the Thrushes. He is not mentioned by Audubon among his favorites, and has no right to complain of the exclusion. Yet the birds which most endear summer are not necessarily the finest performers; and certainly there ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... and was an agent of terror to the excellent priest who taught her and the other children, for she frequently confounded him in open class by questions which have vexed persons of maturest years. She was taught the harp, the piano, the guitar, and the violin. She was proficient in dancing. Such was her astonishing aptitude in all studies that she says, "I had not a single master who did not appear as much flattered by teaching me as I was ...

— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... pocket, or rettycule; and fetched and carried her handkercher, or her smell-bottle, like a well-bred spaniel. All night, at her ladyship's swarries, she thumped kidrills (nobody ever thought of asking HER to dance!); when Miss Griffing sung, she played the piano, and was scolded because the singer was out of tune; abommanating dogs, she never drove out without her ladyship's puddle in her lap; and, reglarly unwell in a carriage, she never got anything but the back seat. Poar Jemima! I can see her now in my lady's SECKND-BEST old ...

— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and bade her good night. Hesper returned her adieu kindly, but neither shook hands with her nor rang the bell to have her shown out Mary found her own way, however, and presently was breathing the fresh air of the twilight fields on her way home to her piano and ...

— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... the love of your wife, and a new piano's tune— Which of the three will you trust at the end of an ...

— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... much temptation to enter, nor is the conversation of a kind one would care to join in; and there is but this, and the noisy, almost riotous, reception after the opera, where a dozen people are contending at "Lansquenet," while one or perhaps two thump the piano, and some three or four shout rather than sing the last popular melody of the season, din being accepted as gaiety, and a clamour that would make deafness a blessing being taken for the delight ...

— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... velvet sofa of early English design was littered with proofs and copies of the Pilgrim, and the stamped velvet was two shades richer in tone than the pale dead-red of the floorcloth. Small pictures in light frames harmonized with a green paper of long interlacing leaves. On the right, the grand piano and the slender brass lamps; and the impression of refinement and taste was continued, for between the blue chintz curtains the river lay soft as a picture of old Venice. The beauty of the water, full of the shadows of ...

— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... JERRYMAN, "why, there's nothing you can't send by post in Switzerland, from a house full of furniture, down to a grand piano or cage of canaries. You've only got to clap a postage-stamp on it, and there you are!" And the arrival of the Bath-chair certainly seemed to indicate that he was telling something very like ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various

... a moment. There is an experiment, first made by Wheatstone, where the music of a piano is transferred from its sound-board, through a thin wooden rod, across several silent rooms in succession, and poured out at a distance from the instrument. The strings of the piano vibrate, not singly, but ten at a time. Every string subdivides, yielding not one note, but a dozen. ...

— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... work, was the source of all wealth. That was to say, whether it was a sack of potatoes, a grand piano, or a seven-passenger touring car, it came into being only by the performance of work. Where the bunco came in was in the distribution of these things after labor had created them. He failed to see the horny-handed sons of toil enjoying grand pianos or ...

— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... whether you are listening to him or not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing— Longrush never. No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month to suit the popular ...

— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome

... struck, Edward and I were still leaning out of the open window in our nightshirts, watching the play of the cedar-branch shadows on the moonlit lawn, and planning schemes of fresh devilry for the sunshiny morrow. From below, strains of the jocund piano declared that the Olympians were enjoying themselves in their listless, impotent way; for the new curate had been bidden to dinner that night, and was at the moment unclerically proclaiming to all the world that he feared no foe. His discordant vociferations ...

— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... corral, reasoning that if he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across ...

— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower

... little too much for the tired brain in the small room. Either that, or the incessant noises in the street outside, which have now been enriched by the strains of a broken-down street piano, causes him to lay aside his pen and lean back in a weary ...

— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford

... at a corner pub and asked each other in to have a drink while waiting for the hearse. They passed away some of the time dancing jigs to a piano in the bar parlour. They passed away the rest of the time ...

— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... he talked with her upon them, and so far as he was able spoke seriously and conscientiously about them. She seized upon his suggestion, and got Miss Franklin, one of the teachers of the schools, to come in now and again of an evening to help her, and, being fond of music, she bought a piano and began to take lessons. All of which (Lee Congdon would have said) threatened to render her commonplace and uninteresting; but Alice Heath felt ...

— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... you mean. These country binges are all the same. A piano, one fiddle, and a floor like sandpaper. Is Anatole going? Angela ...

— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... is, after he had read as much as his strength would allow, and before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection, his love of a good ...

— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... Esther's rules for the care of animals was "Never frighten an animal for sport." I remember that I had a little white kitten, of which I was very fond, and one day I was amusing myself with making her walk up and down the key-board of the piano, and laughing to see her fright at the strange noises which came up under her feet. It never occurred to me that there was any cruelty in it, till Aunt Esther said to me: "My dear, you must never frighten an animal. I have suffered enough ...

— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy

... of the evening with some little equanimity in patiently trying to learn this game, in which she had no interest whatever, but her thoughts and fancies were soon drawn away from cribbage. Her husband returned. Mrs. Lorraine had been for some little time at the big piano at the other side of the room, amusing herself by playing snatches of anything she happened to remember, but when Mr. Lavender returned she seemed to wake up. He went over to her and sat down ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano, playing a rhapsody of Raff's, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side by side. Frank thrilled at seeing his wife's hand in his mother's. Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... &c., for the use of members. At the West end of this flat the rooms both front and back are parlours, with folding doors between, so that while one may be used for conversational purposes or such like, the other may be fitted with a piano and also with games, such as chess, draughts, &c. The upper flat, which contains also very handsome rooms, beautifully finished, is divided into two portions, one to be occupied exclusively by the Secretary, ...

— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... is vulgar," said Irais languidly; "but it isn't, it is very good." She got up and walked to the piano, and, sitting down, began, after a little wandering over ...

— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... sings, it's a shame I haven't got a piano," Miss Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It came back to her that the ...

— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... Mr Sim in the index of the work. Sim died in the West Indies before this period;[33] and, in the belief that the song had been composed by him, Mr Purdie, music-seller in Edinburgh, made purchase of the copyright from his representatives, and published the words, with music arranged for the piano by Robert Archibald Smith. Mr Lyle now asserted his title to the authorship, and on Mr Sim's letter regarding the alterations being submitted to Messrs Motherwell and Smith, a decision in favour of his claim was pronounced by these ...

— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... resounded with animated talk, laughter, and music, that was at the same time as refined as informal. Mrs. Vosburgh would seat herself at the piano, that a new dancing-step or a new song might be tried. The gentlemen were at liberty to light their cigars and form groups among themselves, so free from stiffness was Marian's little salon. Brief time elapsed, however, ...

— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... perfection of form and invariable smallness of the hands of Gypsies, who have inherited their hands from high-cast Hindoos, and the so-called racial hands of real aristocrats. That hard work, even tumbling, piano playing, etc., should alter the form of a hand is self-evident, since muscles grow stronger with practice and the skin becomes coarser and drawn through friction, sharp wind and insufficient care. As is well known, physical properties are hereditary and observable ...

— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... late in autumn, a large, black hunting spider (Lycosa) dwelt in my piano. When I played andante movements softly, she would come out on the music rack and seem to listen intently. Her palpi would vibrate with almost inconceivable rapidity, while every now and then she would lift her anterior pair of legs and wave them to and fro, and up and down. Just ...

— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... study than a sermon, or a disputation, or any other change of intellectual exercise. Still more is the study of music, and the practice necessary to acquire command over so difficult an instrument as the piano, a very great tax upon the nervous strength of our young people. Many mothers consider the music lesson only as the using up of so many minutes of time, and think it may rightfully be put into any hour of holiday or rest. I have heard music ...

— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... little forest of flags and the Governor's daughter danced a Spanish dance for us after it was over. Miss Buckle, Cust's fiancee, dances almost as well as Carmencita, all the girls here learn it as other girls do the piano. On Tuesday Cust and Miss B. and another girl and I went over into Spain to see the meet and we had a short run after a fox who went to earth, much to my relief, in about three minutes and before I had been thrown off. There are no ...

— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... rather nice in a hammock on a hot summer day. But that is all I can say for you. You have not given me the wifely devotion I expected. Only last week, when I came home feeling miserable, you sat at the piano playing extracts from some beastly revue, when a true wife would have been singing "Parted" or even "Roses of Picardy." Again, you invariably put our child in front of me in all things, such as the last piece of cake or having an egg for tea. I am not jealous ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various

... things are jolly and funny, even though you can't understand the words. Makes you want to dance or sing yourself." Aleck groaned, but Melanie began to sing, with Jones hovering around the piano. By the time Melanie had sung everybody's favorites, excluding Aleck's, Mr. Chamberlain rose to depart. He was an Englishman, a serious, heavy gentleman, very loyal to old friends and very slow in making new ones. He made an engagement to dine with Aleck on the ...

— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... don't "dear" me; I won't have it. You're the only dear thing around here—you're dear at any price. I tell you once for all that I don't get any new piano, and Mary Jane don't take singing lessons as long as I'm her father. There! If you don't understand that I'll say it over again. And now stop your clatter and go to sleep; I'm tired ...

— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should really perfectly possess," his mother wrote, "that I spare no pains"; neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence "heart-rending groans" and saw "anguished claspings of hands" as he lost his way among their ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... great glare of Gothic windows; the massive curtains of orange-colored satin that, veiled with lace, pend in undulating folds over them; the cloudlike canopy that overhangs a dias at the further end of the parlor; the gorgeously-carved piano, with keys of pearl, that stands in dumb show beneath the drapery; the curiously-carved eagles, in gilt, that perch over each window, and hold daintily in their beaks the amber-colored drapery; the chastely-designed ...

— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... my fingers all at once, pressed her palms together hard, and sat up very straight, settling her eyes upon Mr. Frank's. When she spoke, the metallic ring was that of a taut piano-string. ...

— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... P. M., the sub-normal grades entertained their friends. Promptly at 12 m., they filed into the chapel to a march from the piano. Music, recitations, gesture and sewing songs pleasantly filled an hour and a half. A composition, "The New Colony," weaving in, in a humming fashion, the surnames of some of the teachers and pupils, was highly appreciated by the crowded house of ...

— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various

... for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis is ...

— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... les Juifs. 'Conspuez Coco.' In less than five minutes the organ was disintegrated, and the luckless minstrel flying with torn trousers down a side street. For the next few days la haute gomme promenaded with fragments of the piano organ suspended from watch chains as trophies of victory. But this was not all. Paris broke out into poetry over l'affaire Narcisse, and here is a journal sent to me by my friend which contains ...

— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters

... worn off the home which had once been so bright and beautiful. The children had bruised and dented their mother's wedding presents, spoiled the beds and kicked the legs of the furniture. The stuffing of the sofa was plainly visible here and there, and the piano had not been opened for years. The noise made by the children had drowned the music and the voices had become harsh. The words of endearment had been cast off with the baby clothes, caresses had deteriorated into a sort of massage. ...

— Married • August Strindberg

... early days of his rule, Simon made his pupil the present of a Jew's harp, at the same time saying, "Your she-wolf of a mother plays on the piano, and you must learn to accompany her on the Jew's harp!" The dauphin steadily refused to touch the instrument; whereupon the new tutor, in a passion, flew upon him and beat him severely. Still he ...

— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only one or two seemed indifferent to the ...

— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... blanks, stationery. Nothing seemed forgotten. Clover said that it reminded her of the mother of the Swiss Family Robinson and that wonderful bag out of which everything was produced that could be thought of, from a grand piano to a bottle of pickles; and after that "Mrs. Robinson" became Mrs. Dayton's pet name among her fellow-travellers. She adopted it cheerfully; and her "wonderful bag" proving quite as unfailing and trustworthy as that of her ...

— Clover • Susan Coolidge

... his old home and let his whiskers grow. Twice a day he made reg'lar trips back and forth from the postoffice, lookin' at nobody, speakin' to nobody. Mrs. Pedders held her usual fall and spring openin's of freak millinery, while Luella taught in the fourth grade of the grammar school and gave a few piano lessons on the side. They didn't act like a fam'ly that ...

— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... looked thoughtfully round the room—at the little square piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table, and finally at the inverted face of Lucetta Templeman, whose large lustrous eyes had such an odd ...

— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... and he went into the drawing-room by themselves, and while she took a seat near the brightly-lit fire-place, he opened the piano at once and sat down. He turned up his cuffs, he took a look at the pedals, he threw back his head, shaking his long brown hair; and then, with a crash like thunder, his two hands struck the keys. He had forgotten all about that ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... shudder running through him. His daughter, the only creature in the wide world who had awakened in him the springs of unknown joy, who alone had reconciled him to life, tore herself away from his heart, and he—he suffered the terrible trial to take place. B—— sat down to the piano; Antonia sang; Krespel fiddled away merrily, until the two red spots showed themselves on Antonia's cheeks. Then he bade her stop; and as B was taking leave of his betrothed, she suddenly fell to the floor with a loud scream. "I thought," continued Krespel in his narration, "I thought that she ...

— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition. Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand, that he gave a grand piano to ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... disenchantment was soon to begin, though. The first difficulty was to find lodgings, and the second to get furniture. There was no wood to burn and there was no linen to be had. It took two months to have a pair of tongs made, and it cost twenty-eight pounds at the customs for a piano to enter the country. With great difficulty, the forlorn travellers found a country-house belonging to a man named Gomez, which they were able to rent. It was called the "Windy House." The wind did not inconvenience them like the rain, which now commenced. Chopin could not endure the heat and ...

— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... Mrs. Dr. Van Buren and Frank and the fashionable world all away, Richard's faults were not so perceptible, and Ethelyn even began to look forward with considerable interest to the time when she should be able to start for her Western home, about which she had built many delusive castles. Her piano had already been sent on in advance, she saying to Susie Granger, who came in while it was being boxed, that as they were not to keep house till spring she should not take furniture now. Possibly they could find what they needed in Chicago; ...

— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes

... heard act and sing and play the fool is no more nervous than a bishop among curates. Nevertheless they are wrong; and your humble servant entirely right. B.-P., like the other members of his family, suffers from nervousness, and when he goes on the stage to act, and sits down at the piano to "vamp," it is a sheer triumph of will over nerves. He is not nervous under the wide and starry sky, not bashful when he pricks his horse into the long grass of the veldt and bears down upon a bunch ...

— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his little wife as they sat together in the snug little Brompton lodgings. She had been trying the new piano all the morning. The new gloves fitted her to a nicety. The new shawl became her wonderfully. The new rings glittered on her little hands, and the new watch ticked at ...

— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... folio under his arm and said, "I am going to play you one of Beethoven's sonatas, for I think you will like it." Mrs. Thaxter was not quite sure that she would, but listened attentively. There had been a good deal of music before, in a small way; pupils of Eichberg playing on the violin with piano accompaniment, and even Eichberg himself,—which was quite a treat, though a single violin can never express a wide range of musical ideas. Beethoven's music she had also heard indifferently performed by young lady amateurs; but ...

— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... was in romping with him in the long galleries of a piano manufactory behind our house. What bliss it was to mount one of the cars on which the workmen rolled heavy loads from room to room, and to go thundering down the inclined plains, regardless of the crash that usually awaited us at the bottom! If I could have played foot-ball ...

— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... the pleasures of dancing. "If it is a fault to love it," said Charlotte, "I am ready to confess that I prize it above all other amusements. If anything disturbs me, I go to the piano, play an air to which I have danced, and ...

— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... "Why, he's simply a prodigy! You shall hear him play the piano? And he walked to the window. "Ug—I mean my boy! Come in for a minute, and bring the music-master with you! To turn over the music for him," he added as ...

— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... who had been up to the great house at a spring cleaning, astonished the natives by declaring that it was a piano. ...

— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... drawing-room success, our hero preferred to immerse himself in his books on hunting or spend the evening at the club rather than join in a sing-song round a Nimes piano, between two Tarascon candles. He felt that musical evenings ...

— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet

... the bridesmaids, at the request of Lady Belgrade, sat down to the piano and condescended to favor the company with a very fine ...

— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... True, the furniture is of old-fashioned mahogany, the sofa of hair, the curtains of chintz, and all that appertains to the master and mistress of the house, of solid but ancient make. But the square piano, the endless succession of baskets, card-racks, etc., the footstools with the worsted-work dog and cat thereon emblazoned, the album and other books, so neatly and regularly placed round the table, and above all, three heads in very bad water-colours ...

— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... drawing-room, a Pompadour writing-table carved and gilt, brocade window curtains, and a Japanese bowl full of flowers on the round table among a selection of the newest books; when they heard the fair Dinah playing at sight, without making the smallest demur before seating herself at the piano, the idea they conceived of her superiority assumed vast proportions. That she might never allow herself to become careless or the victim of bad taste, Dinah had determined to keep herself up to the mark as to the fashions and latest developments of luxury by an active ...

— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... glance traveled from her listener's face to the small piano in the corner of the room. "And it never seemed to me that things, were divided quite fairly in this world, but now that I know about the Camp Fire Girls I am ...

— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook

... at the top of the ladder, holding the heavy jar. He looked round. What was he to do with it? He waited for Merle to return—but she did not appear. Someone was playing the piano in the next room. Should he call for help? He waited on, getting redder and redder in the face. And still ...

— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... could only do one thing besides mischief. He could sing all kinds of tunes—quick tunes, slow tunes, and merry tunes. He had been able to sing tunes ever since he was quite a tiny baby, and his father and mother often talked together of how, in about a year, he should be taught to play on the piano, or perhaps on the violin, if he liked it better. You might hear his sharp, shrill little voice, singing about the house and the garden all day long. John the gardener called it "squealin'," and told Olly his songs were "capital good" for ...

— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... at all to her mind. Observe your favourite pussy curled up in the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a titbit from you. You may play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not shout in answer ...

— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... I arrived at this knowledge. Beyond doubt, the piano would be a difficult obstacle, if not a complete barrier, to my further progress in that direction. It was evidently one of the grandest of "grand pianos," far larger than the one I remembered to have stood in my mother's cottage parlour. Its upper side, ...

— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... chance. Agatha went to the piano and played one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." The difference between the pure, sweet, high-bred English girl and the brilliant, seductive French woman never appeared to me so great as when they ...

— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme

... sunbeams it could be painted in, I am not earthly colourman enough to say; but I did not think it had been in the possibility of things. Then, a music-piece by Titian—a thousand-pound picture—five figures standing behind a piano, the sixth playing; none of the heads, as M. observed, indicating great men, or affecting it, but so sweetly disposed; all leaning separate ways, but so easy—like a flock of some divine shepherd; the ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... would seem to be, I have seen it ignored time and time again, usually with the same unhappy result. I have in mind the case of a couple whom we shall call the Browns. Doris Brown supplemented her husband's salary by giving piano lessons at home. They planned to have a baby and could well have managed to do so with but a short interruption to Doris' teaching activity. But—and this is what so many couples contemplating children overlook—complications set in which made ...

— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... the disreputability was cheerful, and cheerfully acknowledged with lights and noise, here of a broken piano, there of a wheezy accordion, and, beyond, of a half-drunken man singing or shouting a ribald song. Elsewhere it was sullen and dark,—the lights, where there were lights, glittering through chinks, or showing the ...

— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... morning costume, she was perfectly lovely in evening dress. She wore her frock cut so low in the neck that the contours of her lovely bust could be plainly seen. In fact, while she was performing on the piano I bent over her for the purpose of turning the leaves of her music, and as she bent forward I had a most distinct view of the two white semiglobes of her bosom. They were separated by a white valley which led to other hidden charms. The sight of ...

— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival

... and eleven passed all too slowly. Mrs. Smith and Barracombe played cribbage; Kate was restless, opening a book, laying it down, touching the piano, going to the window and peering out ...

— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... stuffily glorified in the bourgeois manner by a white marble mantel-piece, several pieces of mahogany furniture upholstered in haircloth, a table on which reposed a number of gift books in celluloid and other fancy bindings, an old-fashioned piano with a doily and a bit of china statuary, a cabinet or so containing such things as ore specimens, dried seaweed and coins, and a spindle-legged table or two upholding glass cases garnished with stuffed birds and wax flowers. The ceiling ...

— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... "Yes—she's moved across the district I remember now. Well, anyway, Henry, you're to drive into Prospect Township this evening and produce one large, luscious brunette contralto for choir practice at General Nesbit's piano at eight o'clock sharp." He stood facing Fenn whose eyes were glowing. The lurking devil seemed to slink away from him. Brotherton, seeing the change, again burst into his laugh and bringing Fenn to the front of the store roared: "Well, say—Hennery—are there any flies ...

— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... she said, but at my request went to the piano in the next room and gave vent to a strong, clear mezzo. It was a good voice—undoubtedly so. There are many such to be heard all over Australia—girls singing at country concerts without instruction, or the ignorant instruction more injurious than helpful. ...

— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... times. The most prominent people of Europe eagerly sought her work, while socially she was welcomed everywhere. Her famous suppers and entertainments in her modestly furnished hotel, at which Garat sang, Gretry played the piano, and Viotti and Prince Henry of Prussia assisted, were the events of the day. Her reputation as a painter of the great ladies and gentlemen of nobility, and her entertainments, naturally associated her with the nobility; hence, she ...

— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... pleasantly and prettily, though quite inexpensively, furnished. To the left, at angles with the distempered wall, is a baby-grand piano; the fireplace, in which a fire is burning merrily, is on the same side, full centre. To the right of the door leading to the dining-room is a small side-table, on which there is a tray with decanter and glasses; in front of this, a card-table, open, with two packs ...

— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro

... two stories in height. The rooms were large and lofty; perhaps at first they looked rather bare of furniture, but in hot climates people generally keep their rooms more bare than they do in colder ones. I missed also the sight of a grand piano or some similar instrument, there being no means of producing music in any of the rooms save the larger drawing-room, where there were half a dozen large bronze gongs, which the ladies used occasionally to beat about at random. It was not pleasant to hear them, but ...

— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... Music appealed to her, for Toni was emotional, with the quick, facile emotionalism of the South; but she was no musician herself, and the grand piano in the drawing-room was silent through these sunshiny days. She had rather a talent for housekeeping, and in a smaller establishment would doubtless have been a success; but at Greenriver there was little for her to do, and she knew ...

— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... completely changed. Flowers had been put in the china vases upon the tables—two handsome lamps, shaded with gauzes, stood upon the consoles —illustrated books, prints, and caricatures, were scattered about. A piano-forte had also, by some witchcraft, insinuated itself into a recess near the sofa—a handsome little tea service, of old Dresden china, graced a marquetry table—and a little picquet table stood most invitingly beside the fire. I had scarcely time to turn ...

— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... its best. My cleaner's visit is always very delightful, because she makes the garden seem at least four times its usual size by sheer admiration; but this year, just as she was getting into her stride, it began to rain, and we had to seek refuge by the piano. ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various

... a long sitting-room, low-ceilinged and white-walled, with window-seats, geraniums on the sills, brass andirons on the hearth, an eight-day clock, a small old fashioned piano, an oak desk, a chintz- covered grandmother's chair, a gate-legged table, and a braided rag hearth-rug. Her hands ...

— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... jostled against the furniture, which was heaped together. But the sound of voices and of music guided him. He opened a door, and tumbled into the middle of a rout. Standing up before a piano, which a young lady in spectacles was fingering, Delmar, as serious as a pontiff, was declaiming a humanitarian poem on prostitution; and his hollow voice rolled to the accompaniment of the metallic ...

— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... Cropped hair watered down, humdrum neckties, composing away from the piano, no animals—it's all against me except the ...

— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... as graceful as a Roe Slips from the mountain in the month of June, And opening her Piano 'gan to play Forthwith—"It was a Friar of Orders ...

— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... voice rose suddenly to a shriek again, and the sound of his fury rang out weirdly in the garden. "Weren't they deceiving us, eh? I'd like to know—weren't they cheats? Was I an assassin? Was I a ruffian? Didn't I suit her when I sat at the piano playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate! Considerate! And all at once, because the fashion changed, they had to have murderers. Do you ...

— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... tells how, after some classical or fashionable music had been played, Landor would come closer to the piano and ask for an old English ballad, and when "Auld Robin Gray," his favourite of all, was sung, the tears would stream down his face. "Ah, you don't know what thoughts you are recalling to ...

— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... approaches will be reconnoitred thoroughly and as many friends as possible made in the neighbourhood. Every opportunity of reconnoitring the house itself, either through friendship or by substitution for legitimate plumbers, window-cleaners, piano-tuners, etc., ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various

... they went. Frank Headley had been asked up to tea; and he stood at the piano, listening to ...

— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or from ...

— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... doubt that he enjoyed the sweet sounds from one end to the other of those beautiful long flaps. Well, he very often had an opportunity of enjoying himself, for the lady of the house was a fine musician, and she used to sing and play upon the piano nearly every day. And as soon as he heard the sweet sounds which thrilled his soul, the Donkey would come to the ...

— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... on Wednesday morning, August 21, 1850. She was accompanied by Messrs. Benedict and Belletti, Mr. Wilton, her two cousins, and three or four servants. She also brought with her a piano for her use. Mr. Barnum had engaged the necessary accommodations for the company on the steamship Atlantic, and their departure from England was an event of great public interest. In America their coming was looked upon much as the visit of a royal personage ...

— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... powder gun to shoot right at my sister Annie, and a big trumpet I can toot just awful loud at granny. I want a dreffle big false face to scare in fits our ba- by. I want a pony I can race around the parlor, maybe. I want a little hatchet, too, so I can do some chopping upon our grand piano new, when mamma goes a-shopping. I want a nice hard rub- ber ball to smash all into flinders, the great big mirror in the hall an' lots an' lots of winders. An' candy that'll make me sick, so ma all night will hold me an' make pa get the doctor quick ...

— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... make her hands fly as fast as though she were playing the piano, always using the right bobbin, no matter how many of them there may be. In making the pattern of a piece of nice lace from two hundred to eight hundred bobbins are sometimes used. In such a case it takes more than one person—sometimes as ...

— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... wore on: still the shining floor palpitated to the feet of the dancers; still the piano-forte pealed, and still the violins sang,—and the sound of their singing shrilled through the darkness, in gasps of the gale, to the ears of Captain Smith, as he strove to keep his footing on the spray-drenched deck ...

— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... gone—an' the Major's moccasin track ain't never seen in Wolfville no more, he's gone that good—the next we-alls hears of the deal, this yere Deef Woman's playin' the piano at ...

— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis

... acquired only in boarding schools, and boarding schools, as we know, hold the three principal subjects which constitute the basis of human virtue to be the French language (a thing indispensable to the happiness of married life), piano-playing (a thing wherewith to beguile a husband's leisure moments), and that particular department of housewifery which is comprised in the knitting of purses and other "surprises." Nevertheless changes and improvements have ...

— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... only necessary that you should be able to play your pieces on the instrument, but you should also be able to hum the air without the piano. Strengthen your imagination so, that you may not only retain the melody of a composition, but even the harmony ...

— Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln • Robert Schumann

... people in the gallery, and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle. An attendant shouted, 'Hats off!' and the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it. The curtain rose, and the entertainment began at once. It was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of conscience ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... spirits," said Mr. Jaffrey sententiously, "should n't saw off the legs of the piano in Tobias's best parlor. I don't know what Tobias will say when ...

— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... lovely little villas and summer houses, these all hurriedly deserted by the necessities of war—the furniture and fixtures left all in place as the owners took their hastened departure. In one house we visited was left a handsome piano, on which those who could perform gave ...

— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... doctor's song. I turned to Miss Boulderstone, from whom I had borrowed a piano, and asked her to play a country dance for us. But first I said—not getting up ...

— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... father's dressing-gown and slippers didn't get scorched," said Prudy; "and the piano sounds as sweetly as ever it did. It sounds to me just as if there was a family in ...

— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May

... kindly added, that money so earned should bring some pleasure in its expenditure to those who had obtained it by industry, and that he did not see why their parlour should not in time be graced by a pair of globes, or even a piano, honourably obtained by their own exertions. This was a splendid prospect, and an animating one for these good girls, and they determined to set to work again, as soon as the holidays should afford them leisure. ...

— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau

... began to grow painful, no one daring to ask a question, and Mrs. Cathcart had resumed her knitting, Adela suddenly rose, and going to the piano, struck a few chords, and began to sing. The song was one of Heine's strange, ghost-dreams, so unreal in everything but feeling, and therefore, as dreams, so true. Why did she choose such a song after what we had been listening to? I accounted for it by the supposition that, being ...

— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald

... the fable of the Centaur; drove a four-in-hand with grace; was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb, but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of savate or cudgels; moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have enabled him to become an artist should he fall on calamity, and owned a voice which would have been worth to Barbaja fifty thousand francs a season. Alas, that all these fine qualities, these pretty faults, ...

— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... the drawing room. She heard the bell, she heard the steps in the hall, and the emphatic thud of the supporting cane. She had risen from her chair and was leaning against the piano, pressing her left hand against the violent beating of her heart. The door opened and the Colonel entered, standing in the full light of the opposite window. Laura was more in the shadow and stood for an instant, long enough for ...

— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... should be very glad to learn that Valentine studies as much as the young Countess, who, besides all her other studies, practices daily at her piano. The success of this education is owing to hard work, which Miss Valentine shuns a little too much. Now, I say to my dear niece that to do nothing except what we feel inclined to do is the origin of all deterioration, especially in women. Rules obeyed and duties ...

— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd

... coffee, or Rhine wine, or Tokay, or perhaps something stronger," asked Raffles Haw, stretching out his hand to what looked like a piano-board projecting from the wall. "I can recommend the Tokay. I have it from the man who supplies the Emperor of Austria, though I think I may say that I ...

— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle

... remove, and which the occupying soldiers have found no use for. The most notable of these articles is a musical instrument, which may be described as a compound harp-organ. It is, in fact, an upright harp, played by keys which strike the wires by a pianoforte action, which has an ordinary piano keyboard. This is, in fact, the earliest form of the modern pianoforte. Then, in the same instrument is an organ bellows and pipes, the music from which is evoked by means of a separate keyboard, the bellows is worked by a foot treadle, like that most detestable abomination known to moderns ...

— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... shown, at his own request, into a private room furnished with a carpet, table, chairs, sideboard and sofa, and ornamented with a looking-glass, and various old prints. Here he had the advantage of hearing Mrs. Namby's performance on a square piano overhead, while the breakfast was getting ready; when it came, Mr. Perker ...

— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... and aiding the leaders in their preparation for and conduct of their meetings on Sabbath evenings, in which all the students were required to participate. Mr. Buchanan served as organist for the Sunday school and accompanist on the piano at the other meetings. ...

— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs. Mackie's dye-works, ...

— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... given so perfectly and conscientiously as at Dresden. Patteson's chief delight was the Midsummer Night's Dream, with Mendelssohn's music. He had a tuneful baritone voice and a correct ear for music. We hired a piano for our sitting-room; and, though I failed to induce him to cultivate his voice, and join me in taking lessons, he sang some of Mendelssohn's Lieder very pleasingly, and knew most of the bass music from the Messiah by heart. ...

— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Norway would adopt it enthusiastically; but that he was still puzzled over the very necessary word to fit the strongly marked refrain. However, he was not going to give it up. Next morning, when Grieg was in his room peacefully giving a piano lesson to a young lady, a furious ringing was heard at his front-door bell, as if the ringer would tear the bell from its wires, followed by a wild shout of "'Fremad! Fremad!' Hurrah, I have got it! 'Fremad!'" Bjornson, for of course the intruder was he, rushed into the house ...

— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... pygmies, Tebo and Chairallah, who were the first to reach Europe. They were subsequently adopted by and lived for some years under the care of Count Miniscalchi Erizzo. They were very intelligent, and learnt to read and to write well, and to play difficult music on the piano, with feeling and appreciation. We were especially concerned to determine by the stage of growth of their teeth and other indications whether they were merely ordinary young negroes, as some anthropologists ...

— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... ten years old when she joined her parents in Paris, where she was placed under the care of masters. She played with skill on the harp and piano, and being passionately fond of music, it became her solace and amusement at an advanced age. In her youth dancing was equally a passion with her. The grace with which she executed the shawl-dance suggested to Madame de Stael the ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... "nice brothers," canvassed with many pros and cons over neglected French exercises, she had the promise of plenty of it for a long evening, and her dark eyes glowed and cheeks flamed at the prospect. Impatiently tapping the floor with her foot, she looked toward her sister, who was seated at the piano. ...

— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous Indictment was reading, continued calm; 'she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the Piano.' You discern, not without interest, across that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself queenlike. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ...

— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... [1809-68. Director of the Prague Conservatorium.] opera some years ago in a piano arrangement, and, between ourselves, I do not think the work will last. Kittl is a personal friend of mine, and I should have been glad to be able to give his work here; ...

— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... Wilkinses in Boston, I'm pretty sure to find Mr. Wilkins all smiles and Sunshine, or Mrs. Wilkins all gentleness and politeness. I am entertained delightfully, and after tea little Miss Wilkins shows me her photograph album, and plays the march from "Faust" on the piano for me. I go away highly pleased with my visit; and yet the Wilkinses may fight like cats and dogs in private. I may no sooner have struck the sidewalk than Mr. W. will be reaching for Mrs. ...

— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne

... young lady who played well on the piano, and was very ready to weep over any fictitious tale of suffering. I was present when one of her slaves lay on the floor in a high fever, and we feared she might not recover. I saw that young lady stamp upon ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... in rather a large way of business, who (to judge finally by her cultivated voice, her knowledge of languages, and her generally distinguished air) has spared no expense in the matter of her education. I shouldn't wonder a bit if she could even play the piano." ...

— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... The ladies were grouped together at one end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a sofa at some distance, and sank ...

— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... crept away stealthily downstairs into the drawing-room, and through the window at the far end out into the courtyard, where he had sat that day by the hydrangea, listening to the piano-organ. Very dark and cold and eerie it was there, and he hurried across to his studio. There, too, it was cold, and dark, and eerie, with its ghostly plaster presences, stale scent of cigarettes, and just one glowing ember of the fire he had left when ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... case is that of an unmarried woman of twenty-eight, who walked in her sleep first in her sixth year and the second time when she was nine years old. "I got up when the full moon was shining, climbed over a chair upon the piano and intended to go to the window to unfasten it. Just then my father awoke and struck me hard on my buttocks, upon which I went back and again fell asleep. I often arose, went to each bed, that of the parents and those of the brothers and sisters, looked at them and went back again. Between ...

— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... a boudoir upholstered in light gray silk damask, with bouquets of flowers. This is Madame Desvarennes's favorite room. A splendid Erard piano occupies one side of the apartment. Facing it is a sideboard in sculptured ebony, enriched with bronze, by Gouthieres. There are only two pictures on the walls: "The Departure of the Newly Married Couple," exquisitely painted by ...

— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her that is audible, bleating out of the field by the ...

— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... girls. Some were cooking the dinner, some ironing, others reading English aloud; but each occupation seemed a pastime, and whenever they spoke to the Sisters they clung about them as if they were their mothers. I heard them read the Bible and an historical lesson, as well as play on a piano and sing, and they wrote some very difficult passages from dictation without any errors, and in a flowing, legible handwriting that I am disposed to envy. Their accent and intonation were pleasing, and there was a briskness and emulation about their style of answering questions, rarely found ...

— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... house and the stairs and the girl with the large hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless, and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel—a kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with actually a bed! ...

— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... me," replied Allie, as they started to skate slowly up the creek towards home, and Howard and Marjorie dropped a little in the rear. "He was thirteen last summer, and papa says he's a real, true musician. He'll bring his own piano with him; but I don't know where he'll find room to put it, for our house is full as can be, now. Then he sings, too,—at least, he used to,—in a boy choir. Haven't you seen his picture, Ned? It's homely, but it looks as if he might ...

— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray

... be of no interest on this side; but events have shown that in that conclusion we were mistaken. At all events, we have also arrived at the conclusion that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. As it is, we have realized by the sale of the book and the piano score in London about $7,500 apiece, and under those circumstances I do not think we need to be pitied. [Laughter.] For myself, I certainly do not pose as an ...

— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... and the violin Quivered and shook with the strain it bore, While the swelling forth of the sounds within Rose with a sweetness unknown before, And the chords fell soft and low. Piano! ...

— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... work, in whatsoever line that might lie. "Alas!" said a widow, speaking of her brilliant but careless son, "he has not the gift of continuance." Wanting in perseverance, such volatile natures are outstripped in the race of life by the diligent and even the dull. "Che va piano, va longano, e va lontano," says the Italian proverb: Who goes slowly, ...

— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... that one learns without surprise that she is a strict Anglican. She lives in the neighbourhood of Cadogan Square, and has five daughters, of whom two are married, to a well-known surgeon and a minor canon respectively. The beauty of the family is Joan, who plays the piano and is considered intellectual and artistic. She spent a year at the Conservatoire in Brussels, and often uses French words in conversation. Effie, the youngest, is an adept at games, and rather alarms her mother by her ...

— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson

... garrulous, "neighbourly" woman, or one who can do little save strum on the piano or make embroidery as intricate as it is useless, means divorce or murder. For him, sweetness, gentleness, self-control, sound common sense, shrewdness, and domestic virtues are incomparably superior ...

— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... withdrawing room, used when there was so small a party, Mrs. Winlow had gone to the piano and was playing to herself, for Lady Casterley, Lady Valleys, and her two daughters had drawn together as though united ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis ...

— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... the hail, opened the door of the room to which he had been directed, and made his way towards the piano. Esther was there, playing softly to herself with eyes half closed. He came and stood by her side, and she stopped abruptly. Her eyes questioned him. Then her fingers stole once more over the keys, more ...

— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... knew what "practice" meant, for a girl whom they knew took music lessons, and she had to go in and practice playing on the piano every day. ...

— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-A-While • Laura Lee Hope

... the lead, and suddenly coming over a ridge above a steep ice-fall, I caught sight of the Mackellar Islets and the old "Piano" berg. Just at the same instant the spur of ice on which I was standing collapsed, and down I went into a crevasse. The others quickly had me out, and, as soon as I was in the upper air, I gave them the news: "There are the Islands!" Being twenty feet farther back on the rope they had ...

— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... angry with him," said Mr. Dinsmore; "I was the culprit. You cannot have forgotten your fall from the piano-stool which came so near making me childless? It was he who ran in first, lifted you, and laid you on the sofa with the blood streaming from the wounded temple over your curls and your white dress. Ah, I can never forget the sad sight, or the pang that shot through my heart with the thought ...

— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley

... a look at him through those green, luminous, devilish eyes of hers, she had taken her seat at the piano and begun one of her divine songs, as if she thought the magic of her art might ...

— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... was in Cork Street. As soon as they entered it the man remarked on its warmth and its cosiness, so agreeable after the November streets. Christine only smiled. It was a long, narrow flat—a small sitting-room with a piano and a sideboard, opening into a larger bedroom shaped like a thick L. The short top of the L, not cut off from the rest of the room, was installed as a cabinet de toilette, but it had a divan. From the divan, behind which was a heavily curtained window, you could ...

— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... a good voice-that. I see her face, for there is a candle on the piano. I come close and closter to the house. There is big maple-trees —I am well hid. A man is beside her. He lean hover her an' put his hand on her shoulder. 'Sing it again, Kat'leen,' he say. 'I cannot to ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... parlor, including piano, with front and back bedrooms on second floor; front basement; gas, bath, hot and cold water, stationary tubs; rent ...

— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger

... several forms of punka, all made to the same size, and, for purposes of comparison, we shall drive them all at the same speed. And in order that their effects may be visible to you, I have prepared an indicator which resembles more than anything else the keyboard of a piano. It consists of a series of balanced levers with blades or keys attached, forming a keyboard four feet long. The levers, each three feet long, are delicately hung on fine brass centers, and each lever is counterbalanced by a weight hung in a vessel ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... such of them as were old enough to hope and discuss their hopes—talked over their golden future. The tall grown girls whispered to each other of possible Barchester parties, of possible allowances for dress, of a possible piano—the one they had in the vicarage was so weather-beaten with the storms of years and children as to be no longer worthy of the name—of the pretty garden, and the pretty house. 'Twas of such things it most behoved them ...

— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... me at the outset. You see, out in California we're not so up and down as you are here. If you were used to spending your days in the shade of yellow walls, with your choice of hammocks, and with nothing to do but feed the parrot and play the piano, why, I guess you'd—" ...

— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock ...

— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of the room stood an American piano, and beside it a harp of surpassing richness. Here Carlton and Florinda were seated at this time in all the confidence and enjoyment ...

— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray

... of him. When she is twenty-one her aunt will tell her about him. If she knew he was the great Savelli, she would rush off and join him to-morrow, she is so impulsive. She has the music madness of both father and mother. Her aunt tells me she is a remarkable performer on both violin and piano." ...

— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower

... from the platform and some applause, and then a dark-looking man emerged from the sloping gangway underneath the organ and sat down at the piano. He played Mascagni's Pavana delle Maschere, and while he played it, John took some writing paper from his pocket and prepared to note down his opinions ...

— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine

... of Hermitage, was a single man. He was old, feeble, and notoriously grasping, yet the dirty, ill-smelling room which Religion entered was strewn with choicest books, sheets of music lay on the table and chairs, and several rare violins lay on a piano, whose mother-of-pearl keys glowed in ...

— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... tenor in his bath before dinner. We all know the reason, but we don't take the obvious remedy. The only thing to do is to take all the furniture out of the drawing-room and put it in the bathroom—all except the piano and a few cane chairs. Then we shouldn't have those terrible noises in the early morning, and in the evening everybody would be a singer. I suppose that is what ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various

... upon their attention. Here is a generalization that explains the reason why many things, harmless in themselves are unpleasant to and offend the taste of cultivated people. No really cultivated young girl will, for instance, open and play upon a piano in a hotel parlor or any other parlor at inappropriate times or when it is occupied by strangers. She will never perform in public any of the duties of the toilet, such as cleaning her nails or using a tooth-pick. She will not eat peanuts or ...

— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett

... I'll do my best; but tell Nora to be sure and get the fiddler from Hollymount. It's so stupid for her to be sitting there at the piano ...

— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... youth of Norway would adopt it enthusiastically; but that he was still puzzled over the very necessary word to fit the strongly marked refrain. However, he was not going to give it up. Next morning, when Grieg was in his room peacefully giving a piano lesson to a young lady, a furious ringing was heard at his front-door bell, as if the ringer would tear the bell from its wires, followed by a wild shout of "'Fremad! Fremad!' Hurrah, I have got it! 'Fremad!'" Bjornson, for of course the intruder was he, rushed into ...

— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... now, and has to leave school because her chest is delicate, and she has come home to be coddled. She don't like it a bit—leaving school, I mean—so it seems that none of us are contented. She's clever, in music especially; plays both violin and piano uncommonly well for a girl of ...

— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... around the saloon. On one side is the bar, at which several persons are standing, drinking with some of the sweet-voiced houris. The barkeeper and proprietor, both in their shirt sleeves, are behind it. On one side of the bar is a slightly-raised platform, upon which is a piano-player, a violinist and a shrill fifer. This is the music that charms and attracts. Around the room are men of all kinds, sailors, laboring men, seedy individuals, lovers, thieves, a few poor gamblers, fellows ...

— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... seen them. I went along briskly, and in a few minutes came to the tavern. The door was shut, the weather being cold, but I knew by the lights shining through the windows that a hospitable fire was burning on the hearth. There was no need to knock at the door. I heard the jangling piano playing an accompaniment to the flute-like whistling of Harry Herndon's negro. Remembering his carelessness, I felt like going into the tavern and giving him a frailing. The inclination was so strong that I held my hand on the door-knob until the first flush of anger had subsided. ...

— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris

... Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything! Let the piano's martial blast Rouse the Echoes of the Past, For of AGIB, ...

— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... two daughters, 'Both creatures ', Schiller wrote, 'are attractive, without being beautiful and please me much. You find here considerable acquaintance with recent literature, also refinement, feeling and intelligence. They play the piano well, which gave me a delightful evening.' The elder daughter, Karoline, was married unhappily to a Herr von Beulwitz, from whom she afterwards separated to marry Wilhelm von Wolzogen. She was a woman of much literary talent, which found employment later in a novel, 'Agnes von Lilien', ...

— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... in through the door of the Pagoda. A bedlam of noise surged out at him—a tin-pan piano and a mandolin were going furiously from a little raised platform at the rear; in the centre of the room a dozen couples were in the throes of the tango and the bunny-hug; around the sides, at little tables, men and women laughed and applauded and thumped time on the tabletops with their ...

— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise ...

— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... should love her—love her so dearly as to die for her, was to her romantic imagination strange as it was beautiful. Adelaide Lyster could play upon her feelings and emotions skilfully as she played upon the chords of a piano. ...

— Marion Arleigh's Penance - Everyday Life Library No. 5 • Charlotte M. Braeme

... have to wait very long. These people are beggars for punishment and like to start early. It is customary to lead off the program with a selection on the piano by a distinguished lady graduate of somebody-with-an-Italian-name's school of piano expression. Under no circumstances is it expected that this lady will play anything that you can understand or that I could understand. ...

— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... reserve. Hilliard had no choice but to converse with Patty, who was as gay and entertaining as ever. In the course of their gossip he learnt that Miss Ringrose was employed at a music-shop, kept by her uncle, where she sold the latest songs and dances, and "tried over" on a piano any unfamiliar piece which a customer might think of purchasing. It was not easy to understand how these two girls came to be so intimate, for they seemed to have very little in common. Compared with ...

— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... could now do without it. To the Great House accordingly they went, to sit the full half hour in the old-fashioned square parlour, with a small carpet and shining floor, to which the present daughters of the house were gradually giving the proper air of confusion by a grand piano-forte and a harp, flower-stands and little tables placed in every direction. Oh! could the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, could the gentlemen in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin have seen what was going on, have been conscious of such an overthrow ...

— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... standing over near the piano when the leading lady galloped in. Believe me the dog she put on would make you think that she had every other star looking like a twinkle, and before she landed where she is now she was leading lady ...

— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey

... lights in the heavy crystal chandelier and the green-shaded electric lamps in their gilt sconces on the plain white-panelled walls coldly lit up the formal, little-used room with its gilt furniture, painted piano, and ...

— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine

... and slippers didn't get scorched," said Prudy; "and the piano sounds as sweetly as ever it did. It sounds to me just as if there was a ...

— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May

... we need a piano!" she exclaimed. "I wonder if we can't get up an entertainment and raise money to buy one. How many ...

— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... at Saluda Seminary took place on Friday evening, May 1. Visitors overflowed the schoolrooms before the appointed hour. After the introductory march had been rendered by one of the music pupils on the beautiful Estey piano which adorned the platform, there was not a standing place left for seeing nor hearing. The young people kept everybody interested and pleased for three hours, by readings, recitations, instrumental ...

— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various

... near, the girls were singing their quaint wild songs. Thus heard, the rondinella sounds well: it is of the woods and deserts; strange, barbaric, oriental, bacchantic, what you please, save dawdling drawing-room and piano-ic. ...

— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of the pleasures of dancing. "If it is a fault to love it," said Charlotte, "I am ready to confess that I prize it above all other amusements. If anything disturbs me, I go to the piano, play an air to which I have danced, and all goes ...

— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... astronomical meditations, and thinking more about the celestial than the terrestrial world, when a distant sound aroused him from his reverie. He listened attentively, and to his great amaze, fancied he heard the sounds of a piano. He could not be mistaken, for he distinctly ...

— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... woods with Jim; she had beauty and a curious primitive strength. Jim leaned forward, smiling as he talked to her; they talked confidentially, like tried comrades. Evelyn was moved to something near anger and went to the old grand piano Jim had brought from the drawing-room when he found that Carrie could play ragtime airs. Evelyn had a talent for music and meant to make an experiment. If Jim was what she thought, ...

— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... it. His doctor had been visiting him for years; but he didn't seem to get any better, and he thought he should have to give him up, or lose all the money he had. O dear! the room was too warm, he could not breathe; that door must be opened; that singing distracted him; he loved the piano once—now his nerves could not stand it. He thought it became young people to be very serious and devout in the prospect of an affliction which might be as melancholy as his was. But he could not remain any longer; he was afraid of stopping out nights, ...

— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... dear Count, you have understood nothing of that stupendous musical drama," said Gambara, airily, as standing in front of Andrea's piano he struck the keys, listened to the tone, and then seated himself, meditating for a few minutes as if ...

— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... then, at the rear of the house, to watch the high-jinks going on in front. Standish had ousted the three-piece orchestra, and taken over the piano; two other volunteers had flanked him, and the revelry began with a favourite ditty to proclaim that all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Henry was style all the while, ...

— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... how glad he was to have seen him. In the evening, however, one of the young ladies began to play a hornpipe, the music of which Sir Henry, not without difficulty, had procured for her. True Blue pricked up his ears, and then, running to the piano, exclaimed, "You play it very well indeed, Miss Julia—that you do; but I wish that you could just hear Sam Smatch with his fiddle—he'd take the shine out of you, I think you'd say. Howsomdever, my lady, if you and the young ladies and Sir Henry please, ...

— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand, Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound— The jangle and throb of a piano ... tum-ti-tum ... Drawn by a lamp, they come Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, ...

— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... delighted surprise. "Oh, Dick, if you should find a piano, please—please bring it ashore for me. I am passionately fond of music, and a piano would be such ...

— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... was broken, however, on week days. Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular melodies. Between the two brothers there was from the first the most beautiful relation, as throughout the rest of their lives: comrades in boyhood, comrades during the War, comrades in their first literary work, and to the end. ...

— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... down pleasantly, and then ho, for bed," said Mr. Maynard. So when they had recovered their breath, Mrs. Maynard and Grandma returned, Rosy Posy having already gone to her little crib. Mrs. Maynard sat at the piano, and they all gathered round ...

— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... of influence, by sympathetic action, may also be seen in another direction; consider the fact that if we are in a room with a piano and we sing a certain note, say E flat, we not only hear that note coming back from the piano, but, if we examine the strings, we find that all the E flats are actually vibrating in sympathy, because they are in perfect harmony with the note ...

— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... pair of property bloomers she found herself one of a party of girls advancing, retreating, and wheeling at the arbitrary command of an excitable little man in his shirt-sleeves, who hammered out the time on a rattling piano. ...

— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... later, magnificent chords sounded through the house. The piano was old, but tuned to the middle of the note, and the keys were swept by a master hand. The wires were not hammered; they were touched knowingly as by the player's own fingers, and so they sang—and from ...

— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... struck softly the chords of the piano and thought how foolish she was to feel as she did. Suppose Morris had loved her once, he probably did not now, and even if he did, it could do no good, for she was the same as dead to all that kind of thing. She had tried matrimony, and found it—she did not say what. She ...

— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... illustration of the latter trouble is showing itself in a young Indian boy, who is at present undergoing an examination of his vision as a probable cause for his headaches. This boy is studying music; one year ago he practiced two hours daily on the piano and studied from three to five hours besides. This year his work has been increased; he is now troubled with severe headaches, and after continued near work for some time letters become blurred and run together. This boy is far sighted and astigmatic; ...

— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... old piano in my sitting-room. It is a masterpiece of an instrument, I can tell you; for one of the legs is gone and I propped it up with two empty boxes, and the keys are all black except those that have lost the ivory—and those are green. ...

— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford

... me, my dear. I have n't heard it this many a day." Polly did n't like to sing before strangers, for she had had no teaching but such as her busy mother could give her; but she had been taught the utmost respect for old people, and having no reason for refusing, she directly went to the piano, and did as she ...

— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... peculiar qualities of each piece were explained to them afterwards. Little Mary Susan also received encouragement in the practice of her music, for I see this entry on March 7, 1875: "My little daughter and I played piano and violin together to-day for the ...

— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... frequently to serenade their friends in the cool and brilliant moonlit evenings of the dry season, playing French and Italian marches and dance music with very good effect. The guitar was the favourite instrument with both sexes, as at Para; the piano, however, is now fast superseding it. The ballads sung to the accompaniment of the guitar were not learned from written or printed music, but communicated orally from one friend to another. They were never spoken of as songs, ...

— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... hairs which have to do with the production of sound answered to the notes of the tuning-fork, and these vibrated at the rate of five hundred and twelve vibrations per second. Other hairs vibrated to other notes, which were those of the middle octave of the piano and the next above it. Mayer also found that certain of these vibrations corresponded with the notes produced by the 'song' of the female mosquito. Consequently, when she begins to 'sing,' her tune, like the tuning-fork, sets in motion those hairs on the antennae of the male which are tuned to ...

— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... cool and dark, and sometimes when the garden is hot and sunny, I go to the parlor, and try to amuse myself, but oh, I wish I had someone to play with. When I try to pick out a tune on the piano, the notes sound so loud, I turn around to see if Aunt Rose is provokt, but she never folows me. There's a portrate of a funny old man that hangs at the end of the parlor, and I always think he's watching me. When I smile, he seems to smile, ...

— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks

... (obstinately). I do not care about the cause, I only look to the result—the rich are divided from the poor. It is ridiculous that an orange-girl should play the piano, and a ploughman ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various

... of. The boys of Battery D collected the sum of $175 for the purchase of a piano for barrack 019. Phil Cusick, of Parsons, Penna., was the one generally sought out to keep the ivories busy. November 19th witnessed the first gathering together of the regiment on the parade grounds for a big song ...

— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... Yetts," which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house ...

— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... you! She might have saved herself the trouble, for Miss Blake simply set things going without any bother at all, and before Nan realized what was happening, she saw the governess and big John Gardiner leading in a lively game, while the music of a piano and some violins, which were hidden away out of sight, fell upon her delighted ear. She followed the sound, and it took her to the glass extension, which, to her astonishment, was all alight, and fragrant with flowering plants and towering palms. The "old ...

— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... even as late as the last quarter of a century, there were strait-laced Baptist preachers (my own blood kin among them) who would not permit an organ in the church. But today it is quite the vogue for young evangelistic couples to hold forth with piano-accordion and guitar. "It peps up the joiners," the evangelist says. On the other hand, in remote churches, where preachers still hold that note-singing and hymn books with notes are the works of the Devil, these same fellows will play up the hysteria of the audience with the "Holy Bark," the "And-ah," ...

— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... to time the buzz of voices was temporarily broken by the crash of the piano, but always before the end of each performance it rose again, and steadily swelled in volume. In truth, the excellence of the performance was no great inducement to listen, and Mrs Willoughby's forehead showed a pucker of anxiety. She drifted ...

— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... friends at the time made record of his admiration in writing,—"Tutor Lanier is the finest flute-player you or I ever saw. It is perfectly splendid—his playing. He is far-famed for it. His flute cost fifty dollars, and he runs the notes as easily as any one on the piano." ...

— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... fixed, and the response certain and automatic. For example, we sit at the table, and the response of eating follows, with all its complex acts, as a matter of course. We lie down in bed, and the response of sleep comes. We take our place at the piano, and our ...

— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free. There ...

— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... later to breakfast, and they seemed not to go to school; some of them had piano lessons in their rooms. Their mothers did not go out much; sometimes they went to church or the theatre, and they went shopping. But they had apparently no more social than domestic life. Now and then they had a friend to lunch or dinner; if a lady was absent, it was known to Mrs. Harmon, ...

— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... dinner knives, decanters, chimney ornaments, books, purses, lead pencils, corkscrews, my silver-mounted flute, with all the mounts gone, and the cruets minus their silver tops. Also all the silver spoons, the electros being turned out upon the heap as "non-negotiables." The piano had been split open and gutted—it was an unredeemed Grand—the burglar or burglars having been seized with the suspicion that I had secreted articles of value in the body of the instrument. And so I had! one valuable in particular being a ...

— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... back of the house, to which the jingle of the boarding-house piano could yet penetrate, she sat for a time in deep thought. The past had held a few friends, folk who had been kind to her. Pride had held her back; she had never asked help of any of them. She thought of the Australian uncle ...

— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... returned to her place, and sat down in her favourite pose—Turkish fashion. Both kept silent. In the distance, several rooms away, a broken-down grand piano was tinkling; somebody's vibrating laughter floated in; while from the other side—a little song, and rapid, merry talking. The words could not be heard. A cabby was rumbling by ...

— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... rate. Now try again with Oswald while I play. Ossie, I'm proud of you! Last Christmas you were a perfect duffer at it. Don't you remember how you sat out at the Warings'? You've improved immensely. Now go on!" and Ulyth began to play, with her eyes alternately on the piano and on ...

— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... covered by a lace scarf upon which are to be seen glasses, bric-a-brac and family mementos of various kinds. On the wall above hang family photographs. Between the oven and the door that leads to the outer hall stands an old-fashioned grand piano and an embroidered piano-stool. The keyboard of the instrument is turned toward the tile oven. Above the piano there are glass cases containing a collection of butterflies. In the foreground, to the ...

— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann

... of change and variety, rudely outspoken, lively, and original, producing laughter with her own good-humour and affection. She was her father's pet child. He delighted in hearing her sing, telling her to go to the piano, with his ...

— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... comfortable in this lodging. There are lovely flowers in the garden, and the birds wake me in the morning delightfully. I have hired a reasonably good piano. The only man I care two straws about—don't be alarmed; he was laid in his grave many a long year ago, under the name of BEETHOVEN—keeps me company, in my lonely hours. The landlady would keep me company, too, if I would only let her. I hate women. ...

— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... the well-known song with greater sweetness than usual—she was decidedly in good voice; both Charlie and Harry listened with great pleasure as they stood by her side; Jane was also sitting near the piano, and seemed more interested in the music than usual; it was a song which the young widow had so often heard, in what she now looked back to as the happy days of her girlhood. More than one individual in the room thought it charming to listen to Elinor and look ...

— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... my brain," she said, and began to pace about the room, up and down, up and down. Her mother watched her anxiously. Angelica closed the piano. Dr. Galbraith and the bishop came in from the dining room, and then Edith declared that driving in the open air had made her so sleepy ...

— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... furnishing—leopard-skins from Bechuanaland; lion-skins from Matabeleland; silver-mounted tusks of elephants from Eastern Cape Colony and Portuguese East Africa; statues and statuettes of classical subjects; two or three Holbeins, a Rembrandt, and an El Greco on the walls; a piano, a banjo, and a cornet; and, in the corner, a little roulette-table. It was a strange medley, in keeping, perhaps, with the incongruously furnished mind of the master of it all; it was expressive of tastes and habits not yet settled ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Pathetic Drama, in One Act, called The Sorrows of Werther. (N.B. This Piece was damned at Covent Garden Theatre.) [Caste follows.] Brothers and Sisters of Charlotte, by six Cherubims got for the occasion. Orchestra. Leader of the Band, Mr. Knight, Conductor, Mr. E. Knight. Piano Forte, Mr. Knight, Jun. Harpsichord, Master Knight (that was). Clavecin, by the Father of the Knights, to come. Vivat Rex! No Money returned (because none will be taken). On account of the above surprising Novelty, not an ORDER can possibly be admitted:— ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... of playing the piano as an example of the kind of action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed, while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet he will play accurately ...

— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... no sign of me;—but now my heart beat so thickly, when I thought of him passing me in the dance, that, could I sit there still, I feared 'twould of itself betray me, and that warned me to question if the hour were not ready for the dances, and I rose and stole to the piano and sat awaiting my mother's word. But scarcely was I there when one came quietly behind me, and a head bent and almost swept my shoulder; then he stood ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... unpleasant by the pernicious '106' fuzes, with which the enemy's artillery was well supplied. From Robecq, which was steadily being shelled to ruins and through which one passed with reluctance, a disinterested salvage party, consisting of Stanley and the officers of B Company, brought a piano, which was destined to be an historic instrument. On more than one occasion the Battalion returned from its spell in the front line to the St. Venant Asylum, a large institution said to be the second largest of the kind in France. Its protesting inmates ...

— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... Street in New York City there is a piano dealer by the name of Wise. On every window of his store he ...

— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy

... entrance, while he himself made a tour of the ground-floor windows. For half an hour the empty house was loud with strange sounds. McGuffog, who was a giant in strength, filled the passage at the verandah end with an assortment of furniture ranging from a grand piano to a vast mahogany sofa, while Saskia and Sir Archie pillaged the bedrooms and packed up the interstices with mattresses in lieu of sandbags. Dougal on his turn saw fit ...

— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... of butt or glued jointing to the building up of the core of a piano fall previous ...

— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham

... cried. "You don' know? I'm goin' buy beeg stan'! Candy! Peanut! Banan'! Make some-a-time four dollar a day! 'Tis a greata countra! Bimaby git a store! Ride a buggy! Smoke a cigar! You play piano! Vote a Republican!" ...

— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at no end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new piano for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock—beautiful! As to languages—speaks anything. We've had a Frenchman here in his time, and it's my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. ...

— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... into which my feet sank as though it were moss, and a tall silver and crystal vase, full of gorgeous roses, was placed at the foot of a standing mirror framed in silver, so that the blossoms were reflected double. The sitting-room was provided with easy chairs, a writing-table, and a small piano, and here, too, masses of roses showed their fair faces from every corner. It was all so charming that I could not help uttering an exclamation of delight, and the maid who was unpacking my things ...

— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... from the white, set look of her face as the monotonous months dragged on that she was no nearer to accomplishing that task than on the day of her arrival. Nothing that Knight could do made any difference. When an upright cottage piano appeared one day, the girl seemed ...

— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... There was a piano in the room, and she sat down and sang to her own accompaniment, with a sweet, low voice, one of the soft, sad ...

— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... circumstances do, without a thought of using my knowledge for any practical purpose. I could speak very fair English; but how I did it, or why, I didn't know,—all the technical rules of grammar had passed from my head like a dream. I could play a little on the piano, and sing a few songs; but I did not know enough of music to venture to propose myself as a teacher; and so with every other study. All the situations of profit in the profession of teaching are now crowded and blocked by girls who have been studying ...

— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Tannis was what she seemed to be—a fairly well-educated, up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind—the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake—a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to see the ...

— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... must be contented to know that there was a magnificent reception-room, and in this reception-room a piano, whose chords were permeating the mansion's warm atmosphere when ...

— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne

... Kinderscenen, were inspired by Clara; and it is well known that his love became the incentive to the composition, in one year, of over a hundred wonderful songs—his previous compositions, up to 1840, having all been for the piano alone. In the last letter of this collection he says: "Sometimes it appears to me as if I were treading entirely new paths in music;" and there are many other passages showing that he realized well that the very things ...

— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... funeral of a great friend of his. As Cecil (his real name was Blount) was having his bath, he was suddenly inspired with some idea for a song; so, pulling his sponge-bath into the adjoining sitting-room closer to the piano, he placed a chair in it, and sat down to try it over. A friend, rushing in to fetch him to the funeral, found him so seated, singing and playing, balancing the dripping sponge on the top ...

— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... replied, "music has always been my chief companion. The dreams that other girls confide in chums, I have told to my piano." ...

— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne

... for a moment upon the keyboard of the piano before which she was seated, awaiting Lessingham's arrival. Then she glanced at the clock. It was ten minutes ...

— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... before the piano, ran his fingers through his long hair, and was soon weeping over a sonata ...

— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... rose from the piano with unexpected suddenness remarking SOTTO VOCE that if he had known he was to play on a spinet he would have brought some Lulli with him. He was beaming all over, none the less, and soon making arrangements with other guests for a series of picnics and boating excursions—getting on ...

— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... playing with her children (and she had two lovely ones—the eldest six years old), or teasing her calm and meditative husband, or pouring out extempore verses, or rattling over airs which she never finished, on the guitar or piano—or making excursions on the lake—or, in short, in whatever occupation she appeared as the Cynthia of the minute, she was always gay and mobile—never out of humour, never acknowledging a single care or cross ...

— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sumptuously-dressed worshippers, have on our feelings. The great glare of Gothic windows; the massive curtains of orange-colored satin that, veiled with lace, pend in undulating folds over them; the cloudlike canopy that overhangs a dias at the further end of the parlor; the gorgeously-carved piano, with keys of pearl, that stands in dumb show beneath the drapery; the curiously-carved eagles, in gilt, that perch over each window, and hold daintily in their beaks the amber-colored drapery; the chastely-designed tapestry of sumptuously-carved ...

— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... was to receive the rest of her education from her sisters, and Mr Barker thought that what was left could not be better applied than in the purchase of furniture for the parlour and school-room. The twenty-five guineas which the girls had themselves earned was the means of procuring them a good piano-forte; a thing which was quite necessary in their new establishment, but which could not at present have been afforded if their own industry had ...

— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau

... 1/5. Leonardo osservo probabilmente soltanto la prima" (UZIELLl).]; the second is that two third ones above are over the two third ones below [Footnote 10: terze di sotto: "Intende qui senza dubbio parlare di foglie decussate, in cui il terzo verticello e nel piano del primo" (UZIELLI).]; and the third way is that the third above is over the third below [Footnote 11: 3a di ...

— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... he said, "needs to recuperate. To feed on such a night as this in some low-down hostelry on the level of the street, with German waiters breathing heavily down the back of one's neck and two fiddles and a piano hitting up ragtime about three feet from one's tympanum, would be false economy. Here, fanned by cool breezes and surrounded by passably fair women and brave men, one may do a certain amount of tissue-restoring. Moreover, there is little danger up here of being slugged by our moth-eaten acquaintance ...

— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... on the following morning we reached Moldeoen, where the steamer landed us on a rock on which were a few acres of grass and half a dozen wooden houses. We had a good deal of luggage with us, also some casks, cases, and barrels of provisions, and a piano-forte, as our place of sojourn is somewhat out of the way and far removed from civilised markets. A few poverty-stricken natives stood on the rude stone pier as we landed, and slowly assisted us to unload. At ...

— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... leading-note of a minor scale. La is always the dominant of a minor scale or the sixth of a major scale. Thus the letters indicate fixed terms in our system of music, and the syllables indicate terms homologous to the similar relations in different keys. The letters show the keys on the piano, and the syllables the degrees in the scale. French musicians have made a strange muddle of this. They have confused the meaning of the syllables with that of the letters, and while they have unnecessarily given us two sets of symbols for the keys of the piano, they have left none for ...

— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... a great bunch of the fragrant roses, and hurried down to the parlor, where she found the others waiting, Mrs. Ellsworth alone in an easy-chair, Olive and Love at the piano with Ela, who was playing the accompaniment for a sentimental song that Olive sang ...

— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... the platform to the window whose latch he had loosened, he softly raised it, listened, and climbing through, dropped noiselessly to the floor. Feeling his way in the darkness amid the bales and boxes, he reached a nook behind a piano-case he had previously noted, and settling down, prepared to await ...

— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs

... in a waiter stood by a tuneless piano, upon which a bloated "professor" was beating a tattoo of cheap syncopation accompaniment of the advantages of "Bobbin' Up An' Down," which was warbled with that peculiarly raucous, nasal tenor so popular in Tenderloin resorts. The musical ...

— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour,—on his return he was pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... came in now with the box. Secret springs released the drawers and in these were cards, large and gilded, such as one never sees now. Then he opened the piano. It had landscapes painted on the inside of the lid. It was very hoarse but the old man could play on it and he sang ...

— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

... was killed and robbed, and in spite of his venerable age, he was nailed up in a box and sent from Petersburg to Moscow in the luggage van, and while they were nailing him up, the harlots sang songs and played the harp, that is to say, the piano. So this is that very von Sohn. He has risen from the dead, hasn't ...

— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... one of the wildest spots imaginable. It was very cold. To-day it pours so that I hardly know if we shall be able to get out, or home even. We are not snowed, but rained up. Our little Shiel is very snug and comfortable, and we have got a little piano in it. ...

— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... friends were sitting at the piano, and Ticellini marked several songs and duets, ...

— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... I saw one happy day, And more than now I care to name; Here, lately shut, that workbox lay, There stood your own embroidery frame. And over this piano bent A Form, from some pure ...

— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker

... and with a couple of "Annuals" besides, which flank it on the same table, represents the art of the house; perhaps there is a portrait of the master of the house in the dining-room, grim-glancing from above the mantel-piece; and of the mistress over the piano up stairs; add to these some odious miniatures of the sons and daughters, on each side of the chimney-glass; and here, commonly (we appeal to the reader if this is an overcharged picture), the collection ends. The family goes to the Exhibition once a year, to the National Gallery once in ten years: ...

— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... books of yellow-paged music, containing, 'The Battle of the Prague,' 'The Maiden's Prayer,' 'Cherry Ripe,' and 'The Canary Bird's Quadrilles.' Such tinkling melodies had been the delight of Miss Whichello's youth, and—as she had a fine finger for the piano (her own observation)—she sometimes tinkled them now on the jingling old piano when old friends came to see her. Also there were Chippendale cupboards with glass doors, filled with a most wonderful collection of old china—older even than their owner; Chinese jars heaped up with dried rose ...

— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... The piano was heard. Dr. Middleton laid his hand on the banisters, and remarked: "The ladies ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Working Association of Piano Forte Makers, not far from Drury Lane. These men were not long since working for an employer on the old plan, when he failed, threw them all out of employment, and deprived a portion of them of the savings of past years ...

— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... Schwabacher gathered about the piano those well enough to be about (after the storm had been raging for two days and nights), playing old-fashioned songs, to try to raise ...

— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer

... construction of this machine; which might have required but thirteen movements, as shown in the above analysis, unless some variety of musical note was to be added to the vocality produced in the larynx; all of which movements might communicate with the keys of a harpsichord or forte piano, and perform the song as well as the accompaniment; or which if built in a gigantic form, might speak so loud as to command an army ...

— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... no lesser or greater fete day can pass without the gipsy band having ample work to do in the form of playing for the people. Their instruments are the fiddle, 'cello, viola, clarinet, tarogato (a Hungarian specialty), and, above all, the cymbal. The tarogato looks like a grand piano with the top off. It stands on four legs like a table and has wires drawn across it; on these wires the player performs with two little sticks, that are padded at the ends with cotton-wool. The sound ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... There were a player-piano and a fine phonograph in the big drawing-room. The windows of this room opened down to the floor, and the cowboys from the bunk house, the Mexicans, and even Ah Foon, gathered on the side porch to ...

— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr

... appears that such articles were not a necessity, if the wife has objected to the purchase and notified the seller that she will not pay for the same. "Expenses of the family," are not limited to necessary expenses, but whatever is kept or used in the family is included in the term. A piano, an organ, a watch and other jewelry, a cook stove and fixtures, have all been held to come within the term "family expense," for which the property of the wife is liable. But a reaping machine, ...

— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson

... enough, I hope, to tell the Board to get rid of their latest craze. You'll hardly believe it," she went on, turning to 'Bias, "but I happened to pass the Girls' School the other day, and if there wasn't a piano going!—yes, actually a piano! When you come to think that the parents of some of those children don't earn ...

— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... I can sing, and play on the piano, and write valentines,' sais she, 'so get out.' And she walked away, quite dignified, muttering to herself, 'Make a pudding, eh! ...

— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... station-yard, Miss Mapp looked to see what vehicles were standing there. It was already ten minutes past four, and the Ardingly motors must have been there by this time, if there was anything "doing" by the 4.15. But positively the only vehicle there was an open trolly laden with a piano in a sack. Apart from knowing all about that piano, for Mrs. Poppit had talked about little else than her new upright Bluthner before her visit to Buckingham Palace, a moment's reflection convinced Miss Mapp ...

— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... (carrying budded boughs of trees; they march and countermarch in simple march figures, while piano plays "Campbells are coming," or "Narcissus." They form in line, each saluting queen as he ...

— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... garlands of composition. The style of the Regency with its use of musical instruments for decorative motifs is also attractive. The chairs should be comfortable, the lights soft and well shaded side-lights, with a plentiful supply near the piano. ...

— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare {param}, ...

— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... daughter, I will permit you not to marry her. But I shall betroth you to the daughter of Eli Witebski, the great merchant. You are longing for learning—flu! I am going to give you a very well educated wife. Her parents keep her in a boarding school at Wilno; she speaks French and plays the piano. Nu! if you are so difficult to please, that girl ought to suit you. She is sixteen years old. Her father will give her a big dowry, and immediately after the wedding ...

— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko

... became—quite genuinely—a nervous, hesitant, pale little thing. However, the suppliant hostess bore her off, and presently her rich contralto notes passed through the garden, adding to its passion and mystery, and through the open French windows, John could see her standing against the wall near the piano, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed, her creamy throat swelling in the very abandonment ...

— Victorian Short Stories • Various

... big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery ...

— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... depending on this man's punctuality, she has bought in London clothes and trinkets—chiefly for me, indeed—and she has no immediate means of paying these debts; but, if she will only keep her mind tranquil, all will yet be well. You flatter me that I play tolerably on the piano-forte and the harp; you will recommend me, and I can endeavour to teach music. So that, if mamma will but be well, we shall not be in any great distress—except in leaving you; that is painful, but must be done. Yes, ...

— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth

... and when there is company here, remember, I shall always expect you to sit quietly, and listen to the conversation, as it is very improving to young girls to be in really good society. You will have a music teacher, and practice on the upright piano in the library, instead of the large one in the parlor. One thing more, if you want anything, come to me, and ask for it, and I shall be very much displeased if you talk to the servants, or encourage them to talk to you. Now, everything is understood, and I hope you will ...

— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... comfortable about her presence there at all, she was pleased with the effect she produced. When the Contessa sang there suddenly appeared out of the midst of the crowd a slim, straight figure in a black gown, which instantly sat down at the piano, played the accompaniments, and disappeared again without a word. The spectators thronging round the piano saw that this was a girl, as graceful and distinguished as the Contessa herself, who passed away without a word, and disappeared when her office was ...

— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... its piano, books and pictures and other scattered evidence of culture and refinement, showed the manner in which the Blaines liked to live. Through the open window, affording a fine view of Central Park, with its rolling lawns, winding paths and masses of green foliage, ...

— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow