"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread. ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... old-fashioned. But what I want to insist upon is this: The standard of conduct must be fixed for women. Our children want something settled, not everything left uncertain. Our morals (I do not mean our sexual morals only, but our whole ethical and social conduct) has become like a skein of wool that has been unraveled by a puppy. We want a firm broad way in which it is good and possible for all of us to walk without hurting one another, not the horrid scramble that to-day ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other, like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light of the fields we traverse—these fields intoxicated with life and vibrant with the music ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... there side by side, and elbow by elbow, he made a cast of his spear, and it went through the three women, that they were like a skein of thread drawn together on the spear. And that is the way he made an end of the strange, unknown three. And that place got the name of the Valley of the ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... has lingered at edge of trees, right, steals out to look after her departing playmates. Stands at place where spinning-wheel was. Again shakes her head, as if in perplexity over the strange arts of the palefaces. Finds on grass part of a skein of flax. Tosses it lightly in the air. Catches it again as it falls. Begins a characteristic dance, swaying, tossing skein, catching it. Each step of the dance takes her further into background. Then she comes down center again, like a tossing bough or a blown flame. She does not ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... resting on the edges of the tub or vat. These sticks are best made of hickory, but ash or beech or any hard wood that can be worked smooth and which does not swell much when treated with water may be used. The usual method of working is to hang the skein on the stick, spreading it out as much as possible, then immerse the yarn in the liquor, lift it up and down two or three times to fully wet out the yarn, then turn the yarn over on the stick and repeat the dipping processes, then ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... yes! and yet I have tangled among The fray'd warp and woof of this brief life of mine Other lives than my own. Could my death but untwine The vext skein... but it will not. Yes, Duke, young—so young! And I knew you not? yet I have done you a wrong Irreparable!... late, too late to repair. If I knew any means... but I know none!... I swear, If this broken fraction of time could ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and brown as a hazel-nut, and a thick mop of fine, bright hair, rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of the pale brown that the sun knows how to waken in a shallow ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... European diplomacy that the publication of his recent memoirs was awaited with profound interest by half the chancelleries of Europe. (Even the other half were half excited over them.) The tangled skein in which the politics of Europe are enveloped was perhaps never better illustrated than in this fascinating volume. Even at the risk of repeating what is already familiar, I offer the following for what it is worth—or ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... to the King? Hath your King zest enough to reign? Is my White Rose King still abroad in Burgundy?' And as Sir Giles replied to each inquiry in turn, and told all he could of political matters, she exclaimed: 'Ah! that is better than the hearing whether the black hen hath laid an egg, or the skein of yellow silk matches. I am weary, O! I am weary. Moreover, young Hal, I know as matters are that could I see George Nevil face to face I could do somewhat with him, and I laid my plans to obtain a meeting, but therewith, ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she trod so far in the fatal footsteps of her ancestress, Mary Stuart. She had none of her rash violence, but not a little of her spirit of romantic intrigue, and that feminine delight of having in hand a tangled skein, of which she held securely ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... clear high forehead, he heard—or thought he heard despite the jar of the street—the rustle of the muslin robe. Hermione passed, nor ever knew how, by taking this way from the house of a friend, she coloured the skein of life for three mortals—for herself, her ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... answered him, and said: 'My friend, lo, thou hast said all that a wise man might say or do, yea, and an elder than thou;—for from such a sire too thou art sprung, wherefore thou dost even speak wisely. Right easily known is that man's seed, for whom Cronion weaves the skein of luck at bridal and at birth: even as now hath he granted prosperity to Nestor for ever for all his days, that he himself should grow into a smooth old age in his halls, and his sons moreover should be wise ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... all with the same air of weary disgust. Her voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of silver in a skein ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the literary history of such a collection is difficult indeed, for it has drawn upon all civilizations and all literatures. But since Hammer-Purgstall and De Sacy began to unwind the skein, many additional turns have been given. The idea of the "frame" in general comes undoubtedly from India; and such stories as 'The Barber's Fifth Brother,' 'The Prince and the Afrit's Mistress,' have been ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pleasant as anything could be which involved deception; there was always the sting of that fact. Miss Granger was rarely absent for ten minutes together on these occasions; it was only some lucky chance which took her from the room to fetch some Berlin wool, or a forgotten skein of floss silk for the perennial spaniels, and afforded the brother and sister an opportunity for a few hurried words. The model villagers almost faded out of Miss Granger's mind in this agreeable society. She found herself listening to talk about things which were of the earth ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... as clear, to look through, but it was another case altogether, no more like the other one than a apple-pie is like a mug o' cider. An' then they both took it up, an' they swung it around between them, till it was all twisted an' knotted an' wound up, an' tangled, worse than a skein o' yarn in a nest o' kittens, an' then they give it to ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... stand the trees, Shadowy, whispering immensities, That rain down quietude and darkness on heart and eye. None move, none speak, none sigh But from the laurels comes a leaping voice Crying in tones that seem not man's nor boy's, But only joy's, And hard behind a loud tumultuous crying, A tangled skein of noise, And the girls see their lovers come, each vying Against the next in glad and confident poise, Or softly moving To the side of the chosen with gentle words and loving Gifts for her pleasure of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... paper. It described with rollicking sarcasm, a gay "millionaire" party which had been given in Rector's private dining rooms. Among the ridiculed hosts were Van Cleft, Wellington Serral and Herbert De Cleyster! Here, in some elusive manner, ran the skein of truth which if followed would lead to the solution of mystery. He must carve out of this mass of pregnant clues the essentials upon which to act, as the sculptor chisels the marble of a huge block to expose the figure of his inspiration, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... triumphs that a novelist can achieve: for to make people sympathise with virtue is a vulgar trick that any common fellow can do; but it is not everybody who can take a scoundrel, and cause us to weep and whimper over him as though he were a very saint. Give a young lady of five years old a skein of silk and a brace of netting-needles, and she will in a short time turn you out a decent silk purse—anybody can; but try her with a sow's ear, and see whether she can make a silk purse out of THAT. That is the work for your real great artist; and pleasant it is to see how ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bore these victims to their death, he would, if he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, as he hoped to do, hoist a white one when coming home. When he reached Crete, he won the heart of Minos' daughter Ariadne, who gave him a skein of thread: by unwinding this as he went he would leave a clue behind him, by which he could find his way out of the labyrinth, after killing the monster. When this was done, by his great skill and strength, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a discretion over matters upon which in any progressive community the people must decide for themselves. However near to the appearances such an impression might be, nothing could be further from the facts. If I have helped the reader to unravel the tangled skein of our national life, if I have sufficiently revealed the mind of the new movement to show that there is in it 'a scheme of things entire,' it should be quite clear that the deliberate intentions both of Mr. Gerald ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... first to a doorkeeper, then to a passer-by. Porters even in Petersburg try to avoid the eyes of visitors, and in Moscow much more so; no one answered Bersenyev's call; only an inquisitive tailor, in his shirt sleeves, with a skein of grey thread on his shoulder, thrust out from a high casement window a dirty, dull, unshorn face, with a blackened eye; and a black and hornless goat, clambering up on to a dung heap, turned round, bleated plaintively, and went on chewing the cud faster than before. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... which had woven this smooth and finished texture out of the ravelled skein was naturally the first impression that I felt, on handing the manuscript back to Ezra Jennings. He modestly interrupted the first few words in which my sense of surprise expressed itself, by asking me if the conclusion which he had drawn from his notes was also the conclusion ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... whole, for calmness of judgment and for philosophic depth of thought. Considering that Guicciardini in this great work was writing the annals of his own times, and that he had to disentangle the raveled skein of Italian politics in the sixteenth century, these qualities are most remarkable. The whole movement of the history recalls the pomp and dignity of Livy, while a series of portraits sketched from life with the unerring ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and crowbars— Now they prick pins at a tissue Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue? Where is our ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... her wear her Precious Toy, And I 'll rejoice to see her joy: Her bauble 's only one degree Less frail, less fugitive than we, For time, ere long, will snap the skein, And scatter ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... foes more deadly wait Than Saladin's fierce crew. The lamp of love Was changed for one of hate, which threw Its false and fatal skein of light above. A shuddering shock, a fearful ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... which stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... chances for humor, particularly the funny story, for humor with a genuine point is not trivial. But do not spin a whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable. There is no way, short of sheer power of speech, that so surely leads to the heart of an ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... destructively snipping a skein of silk with my scissors. "I offered them to please myself: I felt she did me a favour ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... first, as it was the most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... to unravel the tangled skein of their relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another man, she acknowledged freely. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sandier even than his hair, giving effect to every freckle on his honest face. A little behind was Mary, winding one of Blanche's silks over the back of a chair, and so often looking up to revel in the contemplation of Harry's face, that her skein was in a wild tangle, which she studiously concealed lest the sight should compel Richard to come and unravel it with those wonderful fingers ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fallen skein Of some tired spider, looped and blown, As fragile as a strand of rain, Across the air, and upward thrown By breaths of hayfields newly mown— So glimmering it is and fine, I doubt these ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... four shades of scarlet, four ditto of crimson, four ditto of amber, four ditto of peach, three ditto of stone-colours, three ditto of blue, three ditto of blue greens, three ditto of yellow greens, and one skein of white embroidery silk or ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... to Your Honor. He has said that the British are helpless. He brought Your Honor a report from Palestine that was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing better; for he is one of those men who say always what the hearer would like ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... assuring her that he is alive when she believes him dead. The autobiographical story (especially when the writer is a mere convenient supernumerary, designed, like the uncle from America in the old-fashioned melodrama, to straighten out the tangled skein), is apt to involve other difficulties than the mere embarrassment of having to distrust the author's assertion, or censure his indiscretions. The illusion is utterly spoiled by that haunting arriere pensee that this or that writer, whom you know perhaps at first ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... can surpass Mr. Crawford in the construction of a complicated plot and the skilful unravelling of the tangled skein."—Chicago Record-Herald. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... toe. The widowed dame or lonely maid, Who, in the still but cheerless shade Of home unsocial, spends her age, And rarely turns a lettered page, Upon her hearth for thee lets fall The rounded cork or paper ball, Nor chides thee on thy wicked watch, The ends of raveled skein to catch, But lets thee have thy wayward will, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... sitting in front of her with his elbows planted on his knees and both his hands stretched forwards. Extended on these two hands of his was a skein of thread, which the elegant little woman was ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... chance to work here," laughed his uncle. "There is variety enough to please you, too. We have throwing mills; a place where we dye silk in the skein; a winding and weaving plant; another plant for dyeing goods in the piece; and a big printing and finishing plant. If you do not find something to suit you by the time you have worked through all these it will be your own fault. Of course women have the monopoly of certain parts ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... of tangled floss they lie, (You always said they should have been a girl's.) The tears will come—you cannot quite tell why— They fall unheeded on that mass—his curls. Poor little silken skein, so dear to you. "'Twere better short," the wiser father said, "He's getting older now."—Alas, how true! And yet you wonder where ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... have that appearance," she assented, with a smile. She kept him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein of converging wires. "Suppose I go up ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... think of it! It seems to me that I do not want another like Aniela, or a better one either,—I want her. I say it seems to me; for it is a feeling without any definite shape. I carry within me something like an entangled skein; I weary myself, and yet am not able to reduce it to any kind of order. In spite of all my self-knowledge, I cannot quite make out what it is that makes me feel sad. Is it because I find I love her, or is it because I feel I could love her very much? Sniatynski unconsciously ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... assembly) kunsido. Situation situacio, sido. Situation (post) oficio. Six ses. Sixteen dek-ses. Sixty sesdek. Size grandeco. Size (of a book) formato. Size glueto. Skate gliti. Skates glitiloj. Skein fadenaro. Skeleton skeleto. Sketch skizi. Sketch skizo. Skewer trapikileto. Skid malakcelo. Skiff boateto. Skilful lerta. Skill lerteco. Skilled lerta. Skim sensxauxmigi. Skimmer sxauxmkulero. Skin hauxto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... spake Odysseus of many counsels: "Atreus' son, what word hath passed the door of thy lips? Man of mischief, sure thou shouldst lead some other inglorious army, not be king among us, to whom Zeus hath given it, from youth even unto age, to wind the skein of grievous wars, till every man of us perish. Art thou indeed so eager to leave the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, the city for which we endure with sorrow so many evils? Be silent, lest some other of the Achaians hear this word, that no man should so much as ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... stones and had nearly killed him. He nevertheless went on inventing, and next produced a machine for weaving flowered silks, with a contrivance for giving a dressing to the thread, so as to render that of each bobbin or skein ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... ball of yarn, with which kittens have been making cobwebs, has always seemed to me a much easier task than to unknot the tangled skein of confused influences, that trip up our feet at every step in life's path. Here was I, who but a month ago had a supreme contempt for guile and a lofty confidence in uprightness and downrightness, transformed into a crafty ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... these strands were being knit into the skein Martinez was producing another. Quietly, carefully, persuasively, he had been pursuing his own particular course of eliciting history for use in his "Chronicle," as he named it,—and for another use concerning which he was ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... meet this criterion may lead him to break common conventions, and to appear disrespectful, sulky, stubborn, or in some other way queer and exceptional. He is likely to be misunderstood, because he so easily misunderstands others. The skein of human motives is too complex for his ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... of the Fabian Society, deeply stirred by the tremendous social import of this movement, banded themselves together to unravel the tangled skein of women's economic subjection and to discover how its knots were tied. The first step was to get women to speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances as matters boldly to be faced. Whatever the truth may turn out to be with regard to natural ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... heads, he would make revelations 'enabling him or her to know themselves.' Through all these bargains and blessings, the recruiting-sergeant watchfully elbowed his way, a thread of War in the peaceful skein. Likewise on the walls were printed hints that the Oxford Blues might not be indisposed to hear of a few fine active young men; and that whereas the standard of that distinguished corps is full six feet, 'growing lads of ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... little what to expect, while to my companion he would be all original. We stood there waiting (for the Salisbury train was late), and wondering with a warm, half-fearful eagerness what sort of new thread Life was going to twine into our skein. I think our chief dread was that he might have light eyes—those yellow Chinese eyes of the common, parti-coloured spaniel. And each new minute of the train's tardiness increased our anxious compassion: His first journey; his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five, and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and consequently never ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... artistic feat, not unworthy of a queen. Isabella instituted trials of needlework amongst her ladies. In the days of her disgrace and solitude, Catherine turned to her embroidery for solace and occupation. She came forth to meet the Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio with a skein of red silk round her neck.[603] Taylor, the water ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... thee?" said Cleopatra, smiling her slow smile. "Has the golden skein of stars got tangled, my astronomer? or dost thou plan some new feat of magic? Say what is it that thou dost so poorly grace our feast? Nay, now, did I not know, having made inquiry, that things so low as we poor women are ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... it, but I presume that arises from not knowing how to proceed. I have a skein to unravel, and cannot find out ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... you something about Friar's Oak, and about the life that we led there. Now that my memory goes back to the old place it would gladly linger, for every thread which I draw from the skein of the past brings out half a dozen others that were entangled with it. I was in two minds when I began whether I had enough in me to make a book of, and now I know that I could write one about ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... where the jagged cliffs of the Superstitions sweep down to the gorge of the Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze—a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep. And as he looked upon it his melancholy gaze changed to a staring, hawk-like intentness; he leaned forward in the saddle and Chapuli stepped eagerly down the slope, head up, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the wind, djannion (my soul.) Hope, for lovers, is a skein of worsted—endless. In cool blood, you do not even trust your eyes; but fall in love, and you will believe in ghosts. I think that Seltanetta would hope that you could ride to her from your coffin—not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... surprised her. After she had written it, it had seemed remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"—as Theophile Gautier would have called it—besides devoid of human interest. But Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer had succeeded surprisingly well. What boreal epic had he read ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... wild, tormented world, broken into a hundred sharp mountain ridges which seemed to cut the sky, because between the high peaks and the tangled skein of far-away villages surged foaming seas of cloud, which appeared to separate high, bright peaks from shadowed vales, by incredible distances. As far as the eye could travel with utmost straining, away to the dark, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... meal with a big lump in her throat. She had not meant to rebel openly, but she had lost her temper, and the words had flashed out. Beatrice's threat alarmed her. Through all the tangled skein of Gwen's character there ran, like a thread of pure gold, the intense passionate love for her father, and the desire to preserve his good opinion. She could not bear to see the grieved look that came ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... enough how the very persons who justly admire your work, constantly complain of this fragmentary style of publication, which is the despair of those who have not the leisure to place your scattered sheets where they belong and disentangle the skein.* (* Owing to the irregularity with which he received and was forced to work up his material, Agassiz was often either in advance or in arrears with certain parts of his subject, so that his plates and his text did not keep pace with each ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... she. "Three yards more would finish, and now I shall have to go down to the village and buy a whole skein, just ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... this loan is complicated by the fact that half of it was at the time alleged to have been placed in Paris, but it appears, as far as one can disentangle fact from the twisted skein of the report, that the Paris placing must have resulted much as did the first effort made in London, and that practically the whole of the bonds there issued came back into the hands of the representatives ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... friends of the prisoners are allowed to enter the prison, their use is sadly evident. It would not be safe to permit wives and husbands, and mothers and sons, to clasp hands in unrestrained freedom. A tiny file, a skein of silk, can open prison-doors and set captives free; love's ingenuity will circumvent tyranny and fetters, in spite of all possible precautions. Therefore the vigilant authority says, "You may see, but not ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... home. Then you can form your own mind on it and see how best to help my folks out their troubles; 'cause I ain't trying to hide that was my reason for wanting you to come. You'd helped us so much with the title affair I knew you'd unravel this skein. But I'm powerful glad to see you, all the same, and I do hope you'll get as much good for yourself out the visit as I want ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... held the dog's nose against her cheek for comfort, while she confessed herself. Oh! what a fool she had been. Why, pray, had she been paying all these visits to the farm, and spending all these hours in this young fellow's company? Her quick intelligence unravelled all the doubtful skein. Yearning towards her kindred?—yes, there had been something of that. Recoil from the Bannisdale ways, an angry eagerness to scout them and fly them?—yes, that there had always been in plenty. But she dived deeper into her self-disgust, and brought up the real bottom ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her. I am not supposed to know that she is a visitor to Rickwell. He'll suspect our game if I chatter about her, Ware. We must be cautious. This is a difficult skein to unravel." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... thirteenth century, the period of the epigones sets in for Spanish-Jewish literature. In Charisi's Tachkemoni, an imitation of the poetry of the Arab Hariri, jest and serious criticism, joy and grief, the sublime and the trivial, follow each other like tints in a parti-colored skein. His distinction is the ease with which he plays upon the Hebrew language, not the most pliable of instruments. In general, Jewish poets and philosophers have manipulated that language with surprising dexterity. Songs, hymns, elegies, penitential prayers, exhortations, and religious meditations, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... head examined at Utica, he was told he was deficient in the organ of color, his eyebrow showing it. He immediately remembered that his mother often told him: 'Theodore, it is of no use to send you to match a skein of silk, for you never bring the right color.' When relating this, he observed a general titter in the room, and on inquiring the reason a candle was put near him, and, to his amazement, all agreed that the legs of his pantaloons were of ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... recollect, it cost seven shillings and six-pence," replied Nicholas, pulling out, not a skein of blue silk, but ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of Germany possesses a special talent for adding new complications to a difficult situation, so as to render it impossible of solution. He has now so completely tangled up the parliamentary skein, that in a little while it will be impossible for Parliament to govern. Can one conceive of a majority of the Chamber rallying around the Catholic centre, or the socialists, for the same reason, increasing in number ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... from other men, and there lies his best happiness, because he is waiting upon God. His life may be long or short; he may mix with the crowd or sit solitary. If he differs at all from others, it is in this, that he desires no costly thread of gold, no bright-hued skein that he may weave his texture of life. Upon that tapestry will be depicted no knight in shining armour; no nymphs with floating vestures, no paradise of flowers; rather dim hills and cloud-hung valleys, and the darkness of haunted groves; with one figure ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and thirty minutes late. For two hours Sheila Langford had been on the station platform awaiting its coming. For a full half hour she had stood at one corner of the platform straining her eyes to watch a thin skein of smoke that trailed off down the horizon, but which told her that the train was coming. It crawled slowly—like a huge serpent—over the wilderness of space, growing always larger, steaming its way through the golden sunshine of the afternoon, and after a time, with a grinding ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... part played by Mr. Simon Rattar in unravelling the dark skein, or at least in trying to, was naturally described at some length, and Mr. Carrington showed his usual sympathetic, and, one might almost say, entranced appreciation of the many facts told him concerning ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast, a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled some few yards further ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... rain sifting softly through the leafless trees, and answering to the faint sighing of the autumn wind. Morris enjoyed it very much, and but for the green glasses he still wore would have looked and appeared like his former self as he sat in his armchair, now holding the skein of yarn which Aunt Betsy wound, now talking with the deacon of the probable exchange of all the prisoners, a theme which quickened Helen's pulse and sent the blood to her pale cheeks, and again standing by Katy as she played his favorite airs, his rich bass voice mingling with hers and Helen's, ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... wool to spin for his master, a wool-monger. Love being thus, with the pleasant image of her beloved Pasquino, admitted into her soul, mightily did she yearn, albeit she hazarded no advance, and heaved a thousand sighs fiercer than fire with every skein of yarn that she wound upon her spindle, while she called to mind who he was that had given her that wool to spin. Pasquino on his part became, meanwhile, very anxious that his master's wool should be well spun, and most particularly about that which Simona span, as if, indeed, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Sutherland said, "will you be so good as to fetch me another skein of this sweater-coat yarn from the storeroom?" Christina went obediently, inwardly hot and raging. She wanted to rush in by The Woman's side and stand up for Gavin and tell how chivalrous and brave he really was. But how ridiculous ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... passion all the lurking fiends which, in times of peace and order, society spurns.... Every one of us is entangled in the tentacles of the octopus. Every one of us discovers in himself the same confusion of good and of bad impulses, knotted and intertwined. A tangled skein. Who shall unravel it?... Thence comes the feeling of inexorable fate by which, in such crises, men are overwhelmed. Nevertheless this feeling derives merely from their own despondency in face of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... just now, Mr. Traverse," said Gussie, lifting up a skein of silk for him to hold, and beginning to wind it off. "Does the future Mrs. Traverse ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... to Dashwood and Solomon to make himself personally acquainted with that string in the tangled skein which he was determined to unravel; and now, with his mind at rest upon that subject, he was returning to settle matters with Ling Chu, that Chinese assistant of his who was now as deeply under suspicion as any suspect in ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that thou hast ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... had she gone in the story of the world's first civilization; but she had gone further in her friendship with Michael Amory and in her knowledge of things Mohammedan. He had helped her to unravel the skein of difficulties which Egypt's three distinct and widely-different civilizations had presented to her—the period of ancient Egypt, the period which we now call Coptic or Early Christian and the period of the Arab ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... closely with twine before they are thrown into the dye-pot. The winding must be close enough to prevent the dye penetrating to the yarn. This means, of course, when the clouding is to be of white and another colour. If it is to be of two shades of one colour, as a light and medium blue, the skein is first dyed a light blue, and after drying is wound as I have described, and thrown again into the dye-pot, until the unwound portions become the darker blue ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... fluttered between illusion and reality, and every breast panted with undefined terror, quailing before the awful power that watches secret crimes and winds unseen the skein of destiny. At that moment a cry burst forth from one of the uppermost benches—"Look! look! comrade, yonder are the cranes of Ibycus!" And suddenly there appeared sailing across the sky a dark object which a moment's inspection showed to be a flock of cranes flying directly over the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou; Braved in my own house by a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant!" (Taming of the Shrew, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me," said Pleydell. "But we must have some news from the land of Egypt, if possible. Oh, if I had but hold of the slightest thread of this complicated skein, you should see how I would unravel it!—I would work the truth out of your Bohemian, as the French call them, better than a Monitoire, or a Plainte de Tournelle; I know how to manage a ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... put in to welt the seams; and all this went off in great bundles to farmhouses to be sewed by the farmers' wives and daughters for the earning of pin-money. If the gloves were to be the most genteel members of the buckskin race, there was added to the bundle a skein of silk, with which a slender vine was to be worked on the back of the hand. The sewing was done with a needle three-sided at the point, and a stout waxed thread was used. A needle of this sort went in more easily ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... we life-long, we can never Straighten out life's tangled skein, Why should we, in vain endeavour, Guess and guess ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... formed by Hephaestus, because a little door had not been left in his breast, so as to enable his fellows to look into his secret thoughts." (See Lucian's Hermotimus, cap. xx.) There was a proverb, [Greek: To| Mo/mo| a)re/skein] Momo santisfacere; vide Adagia Variorum, 1643, p. 58. Byron describes Suwarrow as "Now Mars, now Momus" (Don Juan, Canto ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... cut into short threads, never more than half the length of the skein. If a long needleful is used, it is not only apt to pull the work, but is very wasteful, as the end of it is liable to become frayed or knotted before it is nearly worked up. If it is necessary to use it double (and for coarse work, such as screen panels on sailcloth, or for ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... sorcerer be cast out, that I may behold the light!" The ceremony could be prolonged at will: the sick person pulled to pieces the cluster of dates, the bunch of flowers, a fleece of wool, some goats' hair, a skein of dyed thread, and a bean, which were all in turn consumed in the fire. At each stage of the operation he repeated the formula, introducing into it one or two expressions characterizing the nature of the particular offering; as, for instance, "the dates will no more hang from their stalks, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... with her the letter promised by Brentano in his note of mystery. This time she confided in Laurel her scheme for unraveling the tangled skein in the web of dishonor that had been woven ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... committal of the soul to God. Look that thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling the skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best. Faith in good—perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his passage through ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tipped with a strong, hard thorn, sharp as a needle, and growing naturally in the form of a barb. Two dozen arrows for each constituted their initial equipment, but they cut a considerable quantity of spare reeds and thorns, and wound quite a large skein of silk to bind the barbed heads with, as they were quite prepared to lose several of their arrows at the outset, and accordingly made ample provision for their replacement, which could be done at odd moments, while ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... something of the same narrowness and similarity in the range of their tastes and feelings that is marked in children. The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point at the two ends and spread out in the middle. Middle age is the period of most diversity, when individuality is most pronounced. The members of the club observed with astonishment that, however affectionately we may regard old persons, we no ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... he moves off. Every bit of this picture is suggestive: the closed door behind,—only a Brahman may open that door; the mythological carving,—only a Brahman has the right to understand it; the three-skein cord,—only a Brahman may touch it. Even the ragged old cloth is suggestive. In old India nothing but Caste counts for anything, and a reigning Prince lately gave his weight in gold to the Brahmans, as ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... than any one else. Hanging to her neck by a skein of plaited horse-hair was the polished shell of a minute ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... spectroscope. The beams of white sunlight consist of innumerable beams of every hue in intimate association. Every shade of red, of yellow, of blue, and of green, can be found in a sunbeam. The magician's wand, with which we strike the sunbeam and sort the tangled skein into perfect order, is the simple instrument known as the glass prism. We have represented this instrument in its simplest form in the adjoining figure (Fig. 17). It is a piece of pure and homogeneous glass in the shape ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Cleek's voice was absent-minded, for his thoughts were working, and already he was beginning to tie the broken threads of the skein that he had gathered into a rough cord, with here and there a gap that must—and should—be filled. It was strange enough, in all conscience. Here were these underground tunnels leading, "if you kept to the right," from a field out Saltfleet way, to the very heart of the Fens themselves. ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... of silk the whirling spoles reveal, If smiling Fortune turn the giddy wheel; But if sweet Love with baby-fingers twines, 130 And wets with dewy lips the lengthening lines, Skein after skein celestial tints unfold, And all the silken tissue shines ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... without more ado, and I set off for the castle, troubled for my unreadiness in woman nature, the most puzzling, calling, captivating skein in all the universe, because it holds, behind the silken veil of its treasure-house, the eternal mystery of creation, that something divine which is nearest to ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... and Tom what she knew about Mr. Falconer—that it was her house he had rented for his friend, etc. But everything about the matter was so indefinite. She was fearful of exposing her unhappy heart, and she had withal some vague hope of unsnarling the tangled skein when she should find opportunity to think. So she allowed them to finish up their discussion and to leave the room without a hint of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... radical perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine—whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... was Mrs. Warden, wearing her thin but still brown hair in "water-waves" over a pale high forehead. She was sitting on a couch on the broad, rose-shaded porch, surrounded by billowing masses of vari-colored worsted. It was her delight to purchase skein on skein of soft, bright-hued wool, cut it all up into short lengths, tie them together again in contrasting colors, and then crochet this hashed rainbow into afghans of startling aspect. California does not call for afghans to any great extent, but "they make such acceptable presents," ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... as the distaff moved the hemp grew visibly less, while the skein of gold thread became larger ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... sensible space, they may exhibit a Colour; as we see, that though a Slenderest Thrid of Dy'd Silk do's, whilst look'd on Single, seem almost quite Devoyd of Redness, (for instance) yet when numbers of these Thrids are brought together into one Skein, their ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... could no longer bear this behaviour, and they plotted together how to get rid of her. Now, one of the windows looked into the garden of an ogre, so they proposed to drive the poor girl away through this; and letting fall from it a skein of thread with which they were working a door-curtain for the queen, they cried, "Alas! alas! we are ruined and shall not be able to finish the work in time, if Violet, who is the smallest and lightest of us, does ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... going in the big chimney, Westbury would drop in and, pulling up a big chair, would take out his knife and, selecting a soft, straight-grained piece of pine kindling, would whittle and look into the fire while he unwound the skein that threaded through the years from Azariah Meeker, or Ahab Todd, down to the few and scattering remnants that still flecked the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... observance of secrecy, sometimes stopping Abe on the stairs, sometimes beckoning him to her side when she was busy about her household tasks on the pretense of requiring his assistance. On one occasion she even went so far as to inveigle him into holding a skein of wool about his clumsy hands, while she wound the violet worsted into a ball, and delicately inquired if he believed Samuel spoke the truth when he had protested that he had never paid ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... knew who Van Sneck was at a time when the hospital people were doing their best to identify the man. And I know how fearfully uneasy he was when he got to know that some of us were aware who Van Sneck was. It has been a pretty tangle for a long time, but the skein is all coming out smoothly at last. And if we could get the ring which Henson forced by violence ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences; ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... simplest and most at hand expedient was a dip in the universal indigo tub, which waited in every "back shed" of the Puritan homestead. One single dip in its black-looking depths and the skein of spun lamb's wool acquired a tint like the blue of the sky. Immersion of a day and night gave an indelible stain of a darker blue, and a week's repose at the bottom of the pot made the wool as dark in tint as the indigo itself. For variety in her blues, the enterprising housewife ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... thread of the story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports with the girls of the village, gets drunk at times, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... and 5 feet long, tied together with string or bark cloth at two opposite points, so as to form a belt of between 2 feet and 2 feet 6 inches in length. For better description I would liken it to a skein of wool, as it looks when held on the hands of one person for the purpose of being wound off into a ball by someone else, but which, instead of being wound off, is tied up at the two points where it passes round the hands of the holder, and is then pulled ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson |
