"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... small round mottled variety is considered the best. The drone, or, as some call him, the thief,[213] is black with a large belly. The wasp, which has some resemblance to a bee, is not, however, a fellow labourer, but attacks the bees with his sting, wherefore the bees ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... rose above the drone of the millstones, and old Gabe stopped with open lips to listen. The boy's face was pressed close to the logs. A wet paddle had flashed into the sunlight from out the bushes across the river. He could just see a canoe in the shadows under them, and with quick suspicion ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... almost at the full, and a few gently sailing scraps of cloud, which crossed it, made it seem to be coming towards them. The plains beneath were veiled in haze; detached sounds mounted from them: the prolonged barking of a dog, the drone of an approaching train. Round about them, the air was heavy with the scent of the sun-warmed pines. Maurice had taken her hand and sat holding it: it was the one thing that existed for him. All else was vague and unreal: only their two hearts beat in all ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... buckled down to work at home, and in one point only father and son resembled—industry. A drunkard M'Adam was, but a drone, no. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... beneath it ran those ground noises that the rabbit, for instance, understands so well; but between these overtones and undertones he heard the scream of the hawk, spiraling down in huge circles, and the rapid call of a grouse, far off, and the drone of insects about his feet, or darting suddenly upon his brain and away again. He heard these things by the grace of the wind, which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and again shut off all except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... to return, since his seminary bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of the Cross—and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... give to the Indian conjuror as an artist, either in sleight-of-hand, in juggling, or as an illusionist. His tricks are as "old as my unpaid bills" and from time immemorial have been performed with the same monotonous patter and the irritating drone of the "bean" or so called musical instrument. I may here say that this musical torture is used to disguise movements of the showman's hand in the same way as the European uses his magic wand, ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... hands and walk behind. Indeed thy servants bore a troubled mind, O King, but how do else? So time went by. Meanwhile to make it seem she wrought some high Magic, she cried aloud: then came the long Drone of some strange and necromantic song, As though she toiled to cleanse that blood; and there Sat we, that long time, waiting. Till a fear O'ertook us, that the men might slip their chain And strike the priestess down and plunge amain For safety: yet ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... bare "lands" and barren class-rooms, in time waxed wearisome to Sylvanus. He grew to loathe the drone of the classes, the snuffy prelections of professors long settled on the lees of their intellects, who still moused about among the dusty speculations which had done duty for thought when their lectures ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... presence, and lit by a cheerful fire, time and again. Do not think me insincere when I assure you they were the most delightful ones I ever passed. If you find time to write a line to one who is now a worker in the hive instead of a drone, it will be ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... only to say this, love, that I have not come here to sponge upon your kindness. I will be no drone. I wish to be useful to you, Cora. Now you are far away from all milliners and dress makers and seamstresses, and I am very skillful with my needle and can do everything you might wish to have done in that ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences; then suddenly raising his big head and his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... can live long just for himself. Everybody helps somebody else, and that makes life pleasant. The Queen Mother often lays as many as two thousand eggs in a day. Most of these are Worker eggs, and are laid in the small cells of the brood comb, which is the nursery of the hive. A few are Drone eggs and are laid in large cells. She never lays any Queen eggs, for she does not want more Queens growing up. It is a law among the Bees that there can be only one grown Queen living in ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... caught fine beaver, The beaver is a very instinctive animal. There are several varieties, The Dam Builder, The Bank Beaver, The Bachelor Beaver and the Drone Beaver. The beaver ranges in color from white to black. I never saw a white one, and but one black one except when I looked in the glass. The Beaver weighs from twenty to thirty pounds in the United States, and from forty to fifty in Alaska. His food is bark, young grass ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... "I go there with you. Your House of Commons always fascinates me. I hear you speak, perhaps? No? What does it matter? I will hear the others drone. I go to ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... through sleeping hamlets and villages, up hill and down hill, on and ever on toward London and the wonders thereof. But, little by little, the chink and jingle of the harness, the rumble of the wheels, the rhythmic beat of the sixteen hoofs, all became merged into a drone that gradually softened to a drowsy murmur, and Barnabas fell into a doze; yet only to be awakened, as it seemed to him, a moment later by lights and voices, and to find that they were changing horses once more. Whereupon Mottle-face, leaning over, winked his owl-like ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... that grand sentence, Nec vero terroe ferre omnes omnia possunt—that is to say, that not every soil is suited to every tree, Senor Don Jose—to the exhaustive treatise on bees, in which the poet describes the habits of those wise little animals, defining the drone ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the upset. He stepped out into the night. It was dark, only the stars above him dimly betraying the familiar shapes of mountains, forests, and buildings around. Up in the bunk-house some man was wailing a verse of "Ella Re," accompanied by a guitar, and the doleful drone of the hackneyed chorus was caught up by the other men "off shift." But, nauseating as it was to him, this piebald ballad of the hills, it contained one shrieking sentence: "Lost forevermore!" That was it! Joan ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... with which she had been bedecked, drenched in her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat. The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the men who were making merry without. Then suddenly the news of what had occurred spread among the guests, and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble of excited voices, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... retrace their steps saved them from the fear of going astray. Through the vast forest a deathlike silence reigned; and this silence was not made up of an infinity of tiny sounds, like the silence of a summer day when the crickets whirr in the treetops and the bees drone in the clover-blossoms. No; this silence was dead, chilling, terrible. The huge pine-trees now and then dropped a load of snow on the heads of the bold intruders, and it fell with a thud, followed by a noiseless, glittering drizzle. As far as their eyes could reach, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... brought into spiritual light by means of song?—a benefit which will last through eternity as well as time. Even the man of wealth who lives on the interest of his possessions is not necessarily a drone in the human hive. He may, by wise and careful use of his wealth, greatly increase the world's riches. By the mere management of it he may fill up his days with useful and happy employment, and by devoting it and himself ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the cottage Stuart built on the hills. A jaunty sailboat nods at the buoy near the water's edge. The drone of bees from the fruit trees in full bloom on the terraces promise a luscious harvest in the summer and fall. The lawn is a wilderness of flowers and shimmering green. The climbing roses on the southeastern side of the house have covered it to the very eaves of the roof. Stuart has just ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and the rattle ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... scandalous pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... and was shining into the room. By its light he could see the outline of the beds. Around him there ascended a choral harmony composed of snores of every degree, reaching from the mild, mellow intonation of Clive, down to the deep, hoarse, sepulchral drone of Uncle Moses. In spite of his vexation about his wakefulness, a smile passed over Bob's face, as he listened to those astonishing voices ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... in a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... suffered sorely even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono, the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers, and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the church ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... was debating the development of a Mahon-modified guided missile, and a drone plane was under construction. But non-military items also arrived for activation and test. Automatic telephone switching systems, it appeared, could be made much simpler if they could be trained to do their work instead of built ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... words I can answer you," said the book-hawker. "I was once a monk, a lazy drone. Our convent was rich, and we had nothing to do except to appear for so many hours every day in church, and repeat or chant words, of the sense of which we did not for a moment trouble ourselves. Copies of the blessed gospel, however, were brought among us, and certain works by Dr ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... the tide stands poised; the holiday spirit is unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the wood thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of his song between his scolding and upbraiding, as you approach the vicinity of his ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... surprised a big drone bee, just as she bent to take a drink of water from a stream. The insect had been out of her sight, on the other side of a boulder. It rose with an angry buzz as she bent down; a few feet away from her it hung in the air, ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... return it with interest the first time you are in our neighborhood. Mademoiselle, put on your best looks to-morrow, along with your wedding finery; remember that my son's bride must do honor to my son's taste. Justin! my coach—drone, vagabond, idiot, where is ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the low west-wind singing to itself through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill fluted across the deepening silence ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... foreground. But the river at full tide champed audibly against the wharves, and the various sounds of that restless port assailed my ears—the roar of the unseen traffic behind me, the fluting and screaming of whistles, the mingled shouts, oaths, and orders in the distance, and the drone of that profound water ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying a slow ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... while they talked, and his rays were growing hot in the clear air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The queen rose from ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... love be born in us, if, instead of living in and for the world's good, we separate ourselves from our kind, and pass the years in fruitless meditation or selfish idleness? No. The active bad man is often more useful to the world than the naturally good or harmless man who is a mere drone. Only the brave soldier receives the laurels of his country's gratitude; the skulking coward ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... exhausted can only serve to dispirit the debtor; or, where his resources are but partial, the want of power in the Government to compromise and release the demand instigates to fraud as the only resource for securing a support to his family. He thus sinks into a state of apathy, and becomes a useless drone in society or a vicious member of it, if not a feeling witness of the rigor and inhumanity of his country. All experience proves that oppressive debt is the bane of enterprise, and it should be the care of a republic not ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... so cautious a man as Addington at this period speaking of the Church as "an honest drone, who, if she did not stir herself very soon, would be stung by the wasps of the conventicle." The metaphor is not good for much, for the drone can sting too, and does nothing but sting. But what is it that, at any time, makes the church ineffective? The abuse of the ministerial patronage. The clergy altogether depend on the guidance, the character, and the activity of their bishops. If ministers regard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... well, but not very well; the small difficulties will be got over, but I rather fear they will never draw the loads we expect of them. Still they promise to be a help, and they are lively and attractive features of our present scene as they drone along over the floe. At a little distance, without silencers, they sound ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... quite so rich or nourishing as the first growth; others, pointing at a kind of inferior bee, which receives the name of Foggie from its finding its nest among fog or moss; and others uncivilly insinuating that the Latin fucus, a drone, is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... cease to have any confidence in him; and when you see that, your majesty may turn your back to him, dismiss him from his post, turn out his meddling partizans, and restore things to quiet; the bee will have lost his sting, and become an idle drone whose buzzing ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... or a position of any kind? Look around you at the works of God. Everything has its proper function, and pursues its proper course. Even a stone can be used for one purpose or another. How, then, can it be right for a man who is a thinking being to remain a drone?" ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a small brown- ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... bag-pipe is the drone ground bass which sounds without intermission. Each drone is fitted with a beating-reed resembling the primitive "squeaker" known to all country lads; it is prepared by making a cut partly across a piece of cane or reed, near the open end, and splitting ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques recognized it for ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until the noon hour; ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... forestall Jerry. Jerry would have to find a tent somewhere, and inasmuch as there were none to be had here at Linderman, he would probably have to return to Dyea. That would delay him seriously— enough, perhaps, so that the jaws of winter would close down upon him. Through the drone of pattering drops there came the faint sound of a cough. Mr. Linton sat up in bed. "Pneumonia!" he exclaimed. Well, Jerry was getting exactly what he deserved. He had called him, Tom, an "old fool," a "dam' old ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when, looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver hair had already turned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness that we had entered the ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... pealing chords the modern piano is so fertile in. I count it as one of the most spontaneous gavottes of modern times, one that is buoyant with the afflation of the olden days. It carries a musette of which old Father Bach need not have felt ashamed,—one of the most ingenious examples of a drone-bass ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... on the drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing into ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... sometimes more. Silently one stenographer, tiptoeing in, replaced another, who as silently departed; and from the adjoining room, the subdued, nervous, rapid click, click, click of the typewriting machine invaded, without disturbing, her consciousness. Towards three o'clock the low drone of the rotaries in the cellar made itself felt rather than heard; the early edition for the country was being run off. Time was flying—danced away by nimble feet in the West End, worked away by nimble fingers in Fleet ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... Of a lazy drone, And a bed on a cushioned knee; But in wild free ways I will spend my days, And at night on the ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... floating on the surface of the river, not drifting seaward, as one would expect, but languidly following the tide up and down, forever lolling along the bank. Above this putrefying feast swarmed myriads of flies, their buzzing combining in a drone like that of an electric fan. The sun struck viciously down upon the yellow foreshore, its glare reflected by the hard-packed sands as by a sheet of brass; the heat-waves danced and flickered. Sending ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... furtive visits. The intense stillness of the night, broken by an occasional rustling in the grass or the hedge; the smell of the flowers in the garden beyond; the distant drone of ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... silhouetted outlines of slag-heaps and pits and houses, now ruined, now whole. By the roadside little huts some three feet square built by their owners, who gathered around little blazing fires now that their day's work was done. The low drone of homing planes filled the air as one by one they swooped down to earth, or rose on some perilous mission, while bursting shrapnel added golden balls of fire to the firmament of heaven, now a deep, deep blue. To north, to east, to south, yellow-green flashes of ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... pollen; wax-making; life of the drone; life of the queen; democratic government; description of queen and drone; swarming; wildness of; favorite hives; ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... music in all parts of Britain from the earliest of modern times, was the bagpipe, a reed instrument generally of imperfect intonation, the melody pipe being accompanied by a faithful drone, consisting of the tonic and its octave, and occasionally the fifth. It was the witty Sidney Smith who described the effect as that of a "tune tied to a post." This instrument was common in all parts of Britain until driven out by better ones. It still ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... distances. I will keep it in mind. It is a complete perplexity to me, and yet certainly insects can rudely somehow judge of distance. There are special difficulties on account of the gradation in size between the worker-scells and the larger drone-cells. I am trying to test the case practically by getting combs of different species, and of our own bee from different climates. I have lately had some from the W. Indies of our common bee, but the cells SEEM certainly to be larger; but they have not yet been carefully ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill them; and that is all they are fit for. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... four several times did the Tonneraire thus prove herself a crack ship. A crack ship with a crack crew and officers, remember; for the best of ships is but a drone unless well managed. Not even a drone, indeed; for a drone is a most duty-full bee, and a most respectable member of the apiarian republic. There is a vast deal of very indifferent music in the very best of fiddles, and I feel quite convinced that had some less active officer ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... desire to make proselytes. He knows his own mind, and hammers his doctrines out with a hard and iterative stroke that hits its mark. Yet his literary tone, in spite of its declamatory pitch, not seldom sinks into a drone. Holbach's contemporaries were in too fierce contact with the tusks and hooked claws of the Church, to have any mind for the rhythm of a champion's sentences or the turn of his periods. But now that the efforts of the heterodox have taught the Churches to be better Christians ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... was nephew to Lord Alfred Grendall, first cousin to Miles Grendall, and abstained on behalf of his relatives. An overture was made to Sir Damask Monogram, who certainly could afford the contest. But Sir Damask did not see his way. Melmotte was a working bee, while he was a drone,—and he did not wish to have the difference pointed out by Mr Melmotte's supporters. Moreover, he preferred his ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... a drone," Bee announced, and with that she began a droning sound that was worse than the buzzing, and kept it up till it set their ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... World-Power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of India there were men who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus of harsh-throated crows, the strident creaking of cart- wheels, the buzz and drone of insect swarms and the rattle call of the tree lizards; men whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool grey skies and wet turf and moist ploughlands of an English hunting country, men whose memories listened yearningly to the music of a deep-throated hound and the call of a game-bird in the stubble. ...
— When William Came • Saki
... it is, and the far woods are dim, and the rooks cry and call. Down in the valley the lamps, and the mist, and a star over all, There by the rick, where they thresh, is the drone at an end, Twilight it is, and I travel the road ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... kinds of people we meet every day; One is at work, the other at play, Living uncared for, dying unknown.— The busiest hive hath ever a drone. ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... races of men, but among no other group of animals. I need only mention the social organisation and government of the monarchic bees and the republican ants, and their division into different conditions—queen, drone-nobles, workers, educators, soldiers, etc. One of the most remarkable phenomena in this very interesting province is the cattle-keeping of the ants, which rear plant-lice as milch-cows and regularly extract their honeyed juice. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... chattering on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... is burdened by So many a fool, so many a drone, Whose thoughts and deeds are all awry— These trees of flesh, these forms ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... our restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,—change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,—trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said good-by to Mother Binning and went. The ash-tree, the hazels that fringed the water, a point of mossy rock, hid the cot. The drone of the wheel no longer reached his ears. It was as though all that had sunk into the earth. Here was only the deep, the green, and lonely glen. He found a pool that invited, cast, and awaited the speckled victim. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and manliness, are lost together in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split and rent into ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us is full ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... for a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ribbon of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... purse-proud fool! Honoured by my friendship, but not ready to accept me as his daughter's suitor! As if I would lounge away hours that mean dollars to me in his stiff old drawing-room, just to hear his everlasting drone about stocks up and stocks down, and politics gone all wrong. He has heard that I play cards, and—How pretty she looked! I believe I half like that girl, and when I think she has a million in her own right—Damn it, if I cannot win her openly and with papa's consent, I will carry her off ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... only the basso Graf arrived with pedantic punctuality from Karlsbad, and immediately provoked the chaff of our theatrical wags. He sang at a rehearsal of the Schweizerfamilie with such a schoolmasterly drone that I completely lost my composure. The arrival of my excellent brother-in-law Wolfram with my sister Clara was of more advantage for musical comedy than for grand opera, and caused me considerable trouble ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... and glanced through my waiting mail. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. I looked through the pile twice. A family reunion and they had not notified me! I had become as detached as all that! I glanced at Esther again. She was scratching away like mad. I heard the drone of a hurdy-gurdy outside. I would not stay here. The thought of a holiday in Irving Place became suddenly unendurable. I must escape it somehow. There was a train north an hour later. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... against Luigi's; weariness had overcome him, and for the past five minutes he had been peacefully sleeping. The old ladies had dropped their voices to a lulling drone, to help him to steal the rest his brother wouldn't take him up-stairs to get. Luigi listened a moment to Angelo's regular breathing, then said ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later. I don't think there's a man in town who could be induced to go into his neighbor's store and ask him how's trade; for he would have to atone for such an insult with his life. Everything is dreamy, and drowsy, and drone-y. The trees stand like statues; and even when a breeze comes, the leaves flutter and dangle idly about, as if with a languid protest against all disturbance of their perfect rest. The mocking-birds ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Condition a little, and lived a whole Summer in the Shape of a Bee; but being tired with the painful and penurious Life I had undergone in my two last Transmigrations, I fell into the other Extream, and turned Drone. As I one day headed a Party to plunder an Hive, we were received so warmly by the Swarm which defended it, that we were most of us left ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short breeches, and pointed hat, like that Aladdin wears ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... become quite friendly with this amiable lady. If he had been afraid that his voice, in these delicate southern ears, must sound like the first guttral drone of Donald's Pipes at Castle Dare, he had speedily lost that fear. The manly, sun-browned face and clear-glancing eyes were full of animation; he was oppressed no longer by the solemnity of the servants; so long as he talked to her he was quite ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... souls are not vendible, and besides she did not know she possessed one—for the familiar redolences of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf. These were far away: they had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams. What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a steam-organ many streets away. It belonged to a roundabout, and regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled with the buzz of a fly on the window and with the hard breathing ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... time came, began a voluntary which made the people open their ears, and wonder who had got into the loft: they kept their places to enjoy the treat. When the organist saw this, he pushed the interloper off the stool, with "You'll never play 'em out this side Christmas." He then began his own drone, and the congregation began to move quietly away. "There," said he, "that's the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... thee, when the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle that rest ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... up, and all the school glanced with her. The drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty mass of waveless hair, and lit by the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... pragmatical moralist played upon by a sententious drone, he thought it politic to detach them, and vanquish Clara while she was in the beaten mood, as she had appeared before Vernon's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... schools and colleges out of the Abbey lands, and bishops' rents, and other spoils of Rome, which the nobility of Scotland have won with their sword and bow, and with which he would endow new hives to sing the old drone." ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... bee, when his sharp sting is gone, Forgets his golden work, and turns a drone: Such is a satire, when you take away That rage, in which his noble vigour lay. What gain you by not suffering him to tease ye? He neither can offend you now, nor please ye. The honey-bag and venom lay so near, That both together you resolved to tear; And lost your pleasure to secure your ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... roads and railways in our back area. Arras was often severely bombed. The German aeroplanes on any fine night came to be regarded as inevitable. Bombing might be continued until nearly dawn. When no bombs fell close there was always the constant drone announcing their possibility. To men in huts or in the open, without lights or any means of shelter, the terror carried nightly overhead was greater far than that which ever served to ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... usual instructions. I listened nervously to the anticipatory hum of the insects. Getting into bed, I threw a propitiatory prayer in their general direction. A half hour later, I coughed pretentiously to attract my guru's attention. I thought I would go mad with the bites and especially the singing drone as ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... An oaken floor, New-rinsed with sunshine, or bespread With but the tiny coverlet And pillow for the baby's head; And pray Thou, may The door stand open and the day Send ever in a gentle breeze, With fragrance from the locust-trees, And drowsy moan of doves, and blur Of robin-chirps, and drone of bees, With afterhushes of the stir Of intermingling sounds, and then The good-wife and the smile of her Filling the silences again— The cricket's call, And the wee cot, Dear Lord of ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... exist between the bees of the Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of light and shade gave an eerie suggestion of such a bodiless assemblage as might have come together in the time of the Terror at midnight in the Place du Greve. The single note of strong colour—all the more effective because it was a very trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... destroying romance, this gave a certain majestic romance of its own; the romance of man's struggle to conquer the stupendous forces of Nature with his science. It was as if Vulcan's stithy had been dropped down into a profound ravine of the Alps, and the drone of machinery mingled with the music of ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... said, cheered myself by the air. "Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but's ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... commonwealth, let him never look by tarrying longer to come by any more. For after this time, and forty years of age, the most part of students do commonly give over their wonted diligence, and live like drone bees on the fat of colleges, withholding better wits from the possession of their places, and yet doing little good in their own vocation and calling. I could rehearse a number (if I listed) of this ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... captain too. How often cross-eyed Justice hits amiss! Doomed by Athenian mobs to banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... and the way of taking them thus: Set Pursenets on their Holes, and put in a Ferret close muzzled, and she will boult them out into the Nets: Or blow on a sudden the Drone of a Bag-Pipe into the Burrows, and they will boult out: Or for want of either of these two, take Powder of Orpiment and Brimstone, and boult them out with the Smother: But pray use this last seldom, unless you would ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... in summer to provide; Drive with the bee the drone from out thy hive: Build like the swallow in the summer tide; Spare not too much, my son, but sparing thrive: Be poor in folly, rich in all but sin: So by thy ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... busy humming bees, That never think to drone, On flowers and flourishes of trees ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... of the disemployed began to be held. Towards the end of April we read of vast crowds assembling in the neighbourhood of Drone, county Tipperary, crying aloud for food and employment. They consisted chiefly of the dismissed labourers. Their wretched emaciated children were clinging to them for sustenance, but they had not wherewith to satisfy their hunger. Large numbers ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... a kind cricket fluttered, Perched upon the place Vacant left, and duly uttered 'Love, Love, Love,' whene'er the bass 100 Asked the treble to atone For its somewhat sombre drone." ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... In Cupid's court went merrily, And Cupid played A Jewish trade In this his scheming Lottery; For hearts, we're told, In shares he sold To many a fond believing drone, And cut the hearts In sixteen parts So well, each thought the whole his own. Chor.—A ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... through the snow to a light in a tent where a voice in a wild drone, like that he had heard at negro camp-meetings, attracted him. He did not go in: stood at the tent-door, listening. Two or three of the guard stood around, leaning on their muskets; in the vivid fire-light ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various |
