"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tuscan valley," the philosopher proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's mail. "Florence was a devil—Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"—with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars—"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after—after we had found that we had ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... wean ourselves—shall we never heed the teachings of Philosophy (unless perchance they have been sounding in our ears like and enchanter's drone):— ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... and, what is still more delightful, a year of equality: the glutton now eats the delicacies for which he longed when he could not purchase them, and the drunkard has the pleasure of wine, without the cost: the drone lives awhile without work, and the shopkeeper, in the flow of money, raises his price: the mechanick, that trembled at the presence of sir Joseph, now bids him come again for an answer: and the poacher, whose gun has been seized, now finds an opportunity to reclaim ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 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 it by ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... The organist has sailed into his set piece; the choir advances; follows the bride looking so lonely that I long to comfort her and remind her of my egg stand; and, last of all, the pretty bridesmaids. The clergyman begins his drone. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... flower-garden and the straw roofs of bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn, and the bell on Sundays. A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the valley by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the place of Hermiston, where it comes ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spring you rose up, all of a sudden, and started in to cure me of being a drone. The medicine you used was strong; it did the business pretty thoroughly. You've no kick coming at the result. I'm going ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... a great drone, for he prefers the chimney-corner to the field, even although it cannot have been very cold if the weather was open enough to admit of ploughing. And he is a great fool, too, for he buys his comfort at a very dear price, as do all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the blast through the loose windows, flapped dismally, and the people drew their wraps about them, for the fireless room was cold. Steadily, insistently, the hive-like drone of conversation murmured on. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... nook on my right stands the little brown mill, with its huge wheel, and wide blue pond, and foamy waterfall. On that day I heard its drone, and saw the geese bathing, and throwing up the bright sparkling drops with their wings, until they fell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... chagrin which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable nec amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill concealed. There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win. He is dangerously near the frame ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in neglect,—as some fools pass for philosophers by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... thou who has 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 of the Ara Coeli. But that was the mundane view of the matter, a view ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... had worked long enough and that he should send for me. I was surprised when I received the word, "Mother, come," not aware he knew the condition. I had many hours of thought before I could decide when my voice was not even impaired, to give up my life's work and be a drone in the hive. At last I yielded to the desire of my sons to go south. I promised on condition that I came unheralded. I supposed I was going so far away no one knew me. Alas, this world is small, so it behooves us all ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... The blue-jays stop their harsh teasing screams now and then to toll a clear, musical passing bell for these, and the nuthatches are goblin gabriels blowing eerie trumps of resurrection to which the spirits of the bee people drone a second as they wing their way onward. The great white town of the white-faced hornets is conspicuous on the blueberry bush down in the far corner and within it are the husks of a few of its once roaringly busy ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... did not ask him to explain. They walked down the middle of the narrow streets. No one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. Once or twice from an upper story came the faint twanging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they passed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of glasses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... dawn we rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and then reach out to share the fruits ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... you may not hear A sound less soothing than the rustle cool Of swaying leaves, the steady wiry drone Of unseen crickets, sudden chirpings clear Of happy birds, the tinkle of the pool, Chafed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... see her when she's out for play or meals, And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals, But she is not always idle or a decorative drone, And if she wastes her wages, well, she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... of serious interest was going on upstairs. There sat Kate before the looking-glass, with flushed cheeks and quivering mouth. The low drone of many voices came to her through the floor. Then a dull silence and one voice, and Nancy Joe coming and going between the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... this was, with the scent of sassafras and winter green all around him, and the meadow lark high in the air somewhere. There were bees in the wild honeysuckle not far away. He could hear their lazy drone. It would be nice to be a bee and fly, fly away from everything. Did bees care about things? Did they have troubles, and love folks and lose 'em? When a bee died did the other bees care? Aw Gee! Mark in—j—No! He wouldn't say it! Mark ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... heard a steady, humming drone, like a swarm of angry bees—felt a peculiar, soothing warmth about his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... for their dizzy 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 ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... led across to the lonely cottage. Holmes tied the dog to the hedge, and we hastened onward. My friend knocked at the little rustic door, and knocked again without response. And yet the cottage was not deserted, for a low sound came to our ears—a kind of drone of misery and despair which was indescribably melancholy. Holmes paused irresolute, and then he glanced back at the road which he had just traversed. A brougham was coming down it, and there could be no mistaking ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in a cooler. There were a few swift motions, a pop distinctly heard above the drone of the orchestra. The man tossed aside his cigarette and leaned forward. Two glasses with slender stems, each containing a liquid that effervesced and sparkled, one in the man's hand, one in the woman's, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... wild bees, let us briefly review the life of the Honey bee. The queen bee having wintered over with many workers, lays her eggs in the spring, first in the worker, and, at a later period, in the drone-cells. Early in the summer the workers construct the large, flask-shaped queen-cells, which are placed on the edge of the comb, and in these the queen larvae are fed with rich and choice food. The old queen deserts ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... assoone as morne is past, When all men resteth while all the day doth last, They drinke, they banket, they reuell and they iest They leape, they daunce, despising ease and rest. If they once heare a bagpipe or a drone, Anone to the elme or oke they be gone. There vse they to daunce, to gambolde and to rage Such is the custome and vse of the village. When the ground resteth from rake, plough and wheles, Then moste they it trouble with burthen ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... 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. My suitcase ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... 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 ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... said. "My prospects are of the dreariest nature. You will give me the living of Trewinion when Mr. Polperrow dies, and I shall drone out my life on your bounty. Ah! The thought ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... come. The shouts and hootings ceased. Out of the silence there arose only the champing of a horse's bit or the hysterical giggle of a woman. The high painful drone of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sought out the companions of my school-days. What strange irony of fate is that which sends some of us out into the restless world to grow away from our old ideals and make others, and restrains some in the monotonous rut of village life, to drone peacefully their little span! But happy he, who, knowing nothing, misses nothing. If there were any village Hampdens, or mute, inglorious Miltons among my playmates, they gave no present indications. I found the ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... another yell as he pushed the machine before him, and the next instant was whirling down the thoroughfare with the rapidity of an express train, bawling for people to "Stand clear!" In another moment he was out of sight, in a cloud of dust, and his yells fell to a drone in the distance. ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... in her level, crystal-clear tones; "you know nothing of a man. Your men are maromeros. They are fit only to roll cigarettes in the shade until the sun strikes and shrivels them up. They drone in your hammocks and you comb their hair and feed them with fresh fruit. My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... show that "There is no real difficulty under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating to any extent slight modifications of instinct which are in any way useful"! How could the working bee conserve the gains accumulated by experience or habit? The drone is the father and the queen is the mother of the sterile female working bee. Neither parent knows how to build a cell. How could they transmit their knowledge or their habits to the working bee? Every new swarm of bees would not know ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... The drowsy drone of honey-laden bees, The poppied breath of gardens blooming fair, The scent of elder blossoms, sweet and rare, Come stealing in on balmy southern breeze; And dying lays, whose long lost melodies Still haunt old storied ruins everywhere, Are dimly floating through the fragrant ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... was resting 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 in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... people bowed before it—a weird chant rising into murmuring echoes along the high, dim ceiling. There were priests standing rigidly in front of the idol, their hands stretched high; and every eye was upon them. None saw the three in the doorway until a roar split the drone of worship. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Rocky Springs, so far away, was powerless to affect it. Even the song of the tumbling creek, which coursed through the heart of the valley, was powerless to awaken discordant echoes. Its music was low and soft. It was like the drone of the stirring insects, part of that which went to make up the atmosphere of ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... forcing the Princess of Helium up the few steps to the side of the tyrant of Okar, and I had no eyes and no thoughts for aught else. A priest opened a book and, raising his hand, commenced to drone out a sing-song ritual. Salensus Oll reached for the hand of ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the lizards—they lived in chinks of the crumbling adobe and in interstices of the sidewalk—remained without, motionless, as if stuffed, their eyes closed to mere slits, basking, stupefied with heat. At long intervals the prolonged drone of an insect developed out of the silence, vibrated a moment in a soothing, somnolent, long note, then trailed slowly into the quiet again. Somewhere in the interior of one of the 'dobe houses a guitar ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... cared for him, and was most happily endowed with wealth and good looks also. When he left for Canada they were inwardly glad (they imagined that something might occur to end the engagement)—all except Richard, the wiseacre of the family, the book- man, the drone, who preferred living at Greyhope, their Hertfordshire home, the year through, to spending half the time in Cavendish Square. Richard was very fond of Frank, admiring him immensely for his buxom strength and cleverness, and not a little, too, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... almost every man view the practical incapacity of his wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears—Mr. Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon me and reforming my errors of judgment, or perhaps that he was ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... my Graunie summon, To say her prayers, douce, honest woman! Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, Wi' eerie drone; Or, rustlin, thro' the boortries comin, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... some folks call me the Bee Bird or Bee Martin. Once in awhile I change my diet and do snap up a bee! but it is always a drone, not a honey-bee. Some ill-natured people say I choose the drones because they can't sting, and not because they are tramp bees and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... not, dearest 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
... the hour, till honor and justice, truth 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 ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... drone out the same verse as before. The sound of a key being inserted in the lock is heard. The door ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... 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 ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive—— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the Deacon finished the ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... Pelisson made a fair copy of his prologue; Moliere contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Erlon?" he thundered. "Have you again dared to save life, and neglect the object of our expedition? Fool! you will yet be driven forth as a drone from the hive. The girl's dead; throw her into the sea; she will be a dainty ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... only at rare intervals, when the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed only ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... back boundary fence and was soon walking up to his knees in grass and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the grass was scant, and that his bed ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... very furniture which ministers to our daily uses is loved and petted; and in decorating our rooms we educate ourselves in design. The place in church which has been our own for years,—is not that dear to us, and the voice that has told us of God's tidings—even though the drone become more evident as it waxes in years, and though it grows feeble and indolent? And the faces of those who have lived around us, do we not love them too, the servants who have worked for us, and the children who have first toddled beneath our eyes ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... sticks, blunderbusses, anything they could snatch up at a moment's notice; and some of them were not unacquainted with fighting. Dire silence prevailed among the men, but the women shouted as they ran, and the curious army moved forward to the drone and squall of drum and pipe. The enemy was sighted on the level land of Cabbylatch; and here, while the intending combatants glared at each other, a well-known local magnate galloped his horse between them and ordered them in the name of the King to return to their ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... advanced with difficulty. My gig jolted over the firm roots of the centenarian oaks and lindens, which incessantly intersected the long, deep ruts—the traces of cart-wheels; my horse began to stumble. A strong wind suddenly began to drone up above, the trees grew turbulent, big drops of rain clattered sharply, and splashed on the leaves, the lightning and thunder burst forth, the rain poured in torrents. I drove at a foot-pace, and was speedily compelled to halt; my ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... observation planes. Squadrons from Connecticut and southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small end before her, the large end pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed in above, laying a smoke screen at 10,000 feet to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with the drone of jets, and ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... being almost always attacked when trying to enter another hive. But Mr. Tegetmeier has shown[282] that this instinct does not apply to drones, which are permitted to enter any hive; so that there is no a priori improbability of a queen receiving a foreign drone. The fact of the union invariably and necessarily taking place on the wing, during the queen's nuptial flight, seems to be a special provision against continued interbreeding. However this may be, experience has shown, since the introduction of the yellow-banded ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... sweets—all flavored with bitterness—of court life. Women, wine, gambling, and fighting had given me the best of all the evils they had to offer. Was I now to drop that valorous life, which men so ardently seek, and was I to take up a browsing, kinelike existence at Haddon Hall, there to drone away my remaining days in fat'ning, peace, and quietude? I could not answer my own question, but this I knew: that Sir George Vernon was held in high esteem by Elizabeth, and I felt that his house was, perhaps, the only spot in England where my head could safely ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... slopes to a wheat-field that is like a wall of gold. Here I lie and laze away the time, or dip into a favorite book, Stevenson's Letters or Belloc's Path to Rome. Bees drone in the wild thyme; a cuckoo keeps calling, a lark spills jeweled melody. Then there is a seeming silence, but it is the silence ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... as a Brigade-Major's job is worth to confess ignorance at such a crisis. So, after sweeping the skies fruitlessly with his glasses and listening intelligently to the steady drone, he said, "Yes!" with as much conviction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... will you have slept out your Yesterday's Debauch? Are you not asham'd, you sleepy Sot, to lye a-bed till this time of Day? Good Servants rise as soon as it is Day, and take Care to get every Thing in order before their Master rises. How loth this Drone is to leave his warm Nest! he is a whole Hour a scratching, and stretching, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... or who had not long beards, carried THEIR tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation. Meanwhile, the chaunting was very monotonous and dreary. The procession passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making a brilliant show. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... another group of women who wish to bear children, but who seem to be anxious to reduce the father to the position of the drone-bee. He is to have no part in the child after its birth. The duty of caring for it and bringing it up is to be undertaken by the mother, aided, when necessary, by the State. This is a terrible injustice against the father and the child. It seems ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... in general if he were set free, and would sooner or later land again in some penal institution or other, and thus his life would be wasted, and public funds wasted in arresting, discharging and rearresting the useless drone, the balance of whose life would be passed in various ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... 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 ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... we must lack His eloquence to-day. The people, who Always love high-sounding words more than Wise thoughts, prefer the music of his voice To good old Wilson's drone. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... Grain; a Blockhead and an Ass. } Because a Cuckold's Life was his hard fate, Must Wedlock be abused at this rate? Because he had a strumpit for his Wife, He now commends a mopish single Life. Let him content himself to live a Drone, In some dark Corner of the World alone; And trouble not his Brains with our blest State, Which now is far above his wretched fate; He talks of prayers a little while before, And then he curss'd his Wife and call'd her whore. Oh! meddley of confusion, ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh," went the drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... 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 upon us with ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... heard the curious drone of the strange car as it swooped down upon us, coming to a sudden halt a yard distant, with really ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... 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 in ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... legs felt as if they were lead. I seemed to be standing still. One frightened glance over my shoulder showed the machine, like some monstrous vulture, bearing down on me. I could feel it gaining and gaining. The heavy drone of the engines seemed to fill the air with its noise. A pitiful sense of helplessness gripped me. I knew I was going to die like a rat in the jaws of a fox terrier. I screamed aloud in my terror and pitched headlong on the turf. With a roar, and a rush of wind that almost lifted ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... blowing about one. He tried to picture on that dull strip of metal overhead a stretch of green grass, a tree, even the blue sky and floating white clouds. But the patch remained stubbornly gray, the murmur of Wonstead went on and on, a drone in his aching ears, the throb of the ship's life beat through his ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... bellowing, the tappers hard at work upon the benches, while every now and then came a musical cyclone of "Incomparable! Divine!" from the trained phalanx who intoned their applause, their united voices sweeping over the tumult as the drone of the wind dominates the roar of the sea. It was madness—insufferable madness! If this were allowed to pass, there was an end of all musical justice in Greece. Policles' conscience would not permit him ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... importance to you, for I am not important, and there was no weight of life in it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe I was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the meaning of it all. I wonder if you ever heard the lines—foolish ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Central Africa folds softly over the picture, the multiform life of earth swiftly re-awakens; birds and butterflies hover in the air, the monkeys chatter merrily, and leap from bough to bough. The sounds which then arise—song and hum and murmur, the roll of the river, the drone of insects, the cries of the wild beasts—all seem to blend in one grand vesper harmony—one choral hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord of life. These are generally hushed as the night advances; and then swarms of fire-flies and glow-worms ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of the propeller—like the drone of a giant locust—resounded over the town, people came pouring out from houses and shops to witness the descent. The crowd gathered so quickly that Peggy had difficulty to avoid hitting some of them. However, she managed to bring the aeroplane to ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... spirit of that quiet county, so slow is its course, so narrow is its width. Even the roads don't take the trouble to bridge it. They merely hump themselves slightly when they feel it tickling underneath them, and go on, vouchsafing no further notice of its existence. Yet the Drone is a local celebrity in Middleshire, and, like most local celebrities, is unknown elsewhere. The squire's sons have lost immense trout in the Drone as it saunters through their lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Harvie merely and gone back to sea, and not until two years had passed would she marry me. We lived in Adam's house. It was so near the little school that when I opened the window in summer-time she could hear the drone of our voices. During the weeks before you were born I kept that window open all day long, and often I went to it and waved my hand ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... is no longer arctic. Butterflies become larger and more abundant, grasses with imposing spread of panicle wave above your shoulders, and the summery drone of the bumblebee thickens the air. The Dwarf Pine, the tree-mountaineer that climbs highest and braves the coldest blasts, is found scattered in storm-beaten clumps from the summit of the pass about half-way down the canon. Here it is succeeded by the hardy Two-leaved Pine, which is speedily ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... her take The chain in her own 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 dread our eyes ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... jig—a tarantella, perhaps—always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... 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 ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... white frame building, oblong in shape, had four windows with green outer blinds on each of its two sides, and a door at the end nearer the road. As Webb traversed the open space, where, on Sundays, horses were hitched to the trees and saplings, a drone as of countless bees fell on his ears. To a native this needed no explanation. During five of the week-days the building was used as a schoolhouse. The sound was made by the students studying aloud, and John's niece, Dolly Drake, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... reading up his French and German—for he found both those languages would be very useful to him in the City; while Agnes was busy over her drawing-board, tracing designs for Christmas and Easter cards. She declared she was not going to be the only drone in the hive, and bade fair to be successful later on, for two of her little cards had already been accepted by a great City publishing firm. When Mr. Murray dropped in of an evening he used to have a long look from one to the other of their cheerful, contented faces, ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... just enough mind left to shrink back very suddenly, and lurk very still and closely; for I knew what a narrow escape it had been, as I heard the bullet, hard set by the powder, sing mournfully down the chasm, like a drone banished out of the hive. And as I peered through my little cranny, I saw a wreath of smoke still floating where the thickness was of the withy-bed; and presently Carver Doone came forth, having stopped to reload his piece ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... around and the sweet breath of the opening roses stole in with the summer breeze, while the drone of bees and the pure notes of a song ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has run nor the wrestlers he has thrown. His superiority is based upon the fact that he doesn't have to work, and that others are compelled to work for him. And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and the white man and woman flaunt the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... much of the Christian doctrine as suits him. Now when I compare myself with the miller, I feel that, as far as human usefulness goes, I am far lower in the scale. I am, when all is said and done, a drone in the hive, eating the honey I did not make. I do not take my share in the necessary labour of the world, I do not regulate a little community of labourers with uprightness and kindness, as he does. But still ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Dear, no! Grooby and Havershon may be trusted to drone the evening out, I should hope, with no trouble to anybody but themselves. The Government are just keeping a house, that's all. Have you been grinding at your ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fly, deep down in the crystal cage, buzzed on audibly; and to one who heard it, the drone of the lazy wings seemed like the roars of a ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... red swung to and fro in the sunshine as they climbed the Doctor's whitewashed porch. Big bees hummed their sleepy drone from the fragrant hearts of the flowers, and a humming-bird whirred busily in and out in search of the honeysuckle that he loved. Up-stairs Mrs. Morgan was darning stockings in the coolest room in the house,—a bedroom with a ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... need of thee: Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws, Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily; But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy To embattail and to wall about thy cause With iron-worded proof, hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk Brow-beats his ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... intermittent drone became a gasping gulp; changed into a violent yawn and only then turned into startled ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... Henry and Richmond were on a train, speeding away from the roar, the clang, the turmoil, the smoke, the atmospheric streams of stench, the trouble of the city. They saw a funeral procession, and Richmond remarked: "They have killed a drone and are dragging him out of the hive, and as they have set out so early they must be going to pay him the compliment of a long haul." They passed stations where men who had spent a quiet night at home paced up and down impatiently waiting ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... derived from Turkish beg armudi, prince's pear. With beg, prince, cf. bey and begum. The burden of a song is from Fr. bourdon, "a drone, or dorre-bee; also, the humming, or buzzing, of bees; also, the drone of a bag-pipe" (Cotgrave). It is of doubtful origin, but is not related to burden, a load, which is connected with the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... 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 is execrated ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... each other across the ford, assembled themselves together and lowed musically to the milkers. Phoebe Lyddon and John Grimbal still stood at the farm-gate, and they watched, as a boy and an aged man came forward with buckets and stools. Then, to the muffled thud of the water-wheel and the drone and murmur of the river, was added a purr of milk, foaming into tin pails, and sharp, thin monitions from the ancient, as he called the cows by their names and bid ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... pleased with you. You have demonstrated something between the ears besides strawberry Jello. You have just described the objective of Project Pegasus. We intend to shoot the beast into space and bring the top stage home again by drone control." ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's song, and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... 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 ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... and 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 ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Argyle family is a modern structure, and boasts very few vestiges of the old romantic history attached to the name. The park and look-out upon the lake are beautiful, but except from the brief pleasure derived from these, the old cross from Iona that stands in the market-place, and the drone of the bagpipe which lulled me to sleep at night playing some melancholy air, there was nothing to make me feel that it was "a far cry to Lochawe," but, on the contrary, I seemed in the very midst of the prosaic, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the Saxon kings and the rules of good policy had before inclined him. He entered at last into the cause of his brother-in-law and the distressed English. He persuaded the King of Denmark to enter into the same measures, who agreed to invade England with a fleet of a thousand ships. Drone, an Irish king, declared in their favor, and supplied the sons of Earl Godwin with vessels and men, with which they held the English coast in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... more like betting or training people, though." She put her hand on his arm warningly, as a high-pitched falsetto penetrated the drone of their half-whispered words, saying, "I tell you Dick knows all ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... grinned, but his eye was threatening. To the school-teacher he soon began to give special notice, for that was what Allaphair seemed to be doing herself. He saw them sitting in the porch together alone, going out to milk or to the woodpile. Passing her gate one flower-scented dusk, he heard the drone of their voices behind the morning-glory vines and heard her laugh quite humanly. He snorted his disgust, but once when he saw the girl walking home with the teacher from school he seethed with rage and bided his time for both. He did spend ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... judge and criminal do we meet, but as a misguided oppressor and his ready and devoted victim. I, too, may ask, are these the harvest of the rich hopes excited by the classical learning, acute logical powers, and varied knowledge of William Allan, that he should sink to be the solitary drone of a cell, graced only above the swarm with the high commission of executing Roman malice on ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... was described with gusto. Doris, who knew the village constable well, laughed outright, while Furneaux cackled shrilly. None who might be watching the little group in that delightful garden, with its scent of old-world flowers and drone of bees, could have guessed that a grewsome ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... artisan, artificer, craftsman, handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, dilettante, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... fire on this cheerless hearth the fortunes of the state were discussed and directed, benefices disposed of, court appointments debated, and reputations made and unmade in tones that suggested the low drone of a group of canons intoning the psalter in an empty cathedral. The Marchioness, who appeared as eager as the others to win Odo to her party, received him with every mark of consideration and pressed him to accompany her on a visit to her brother, the Abbot of the Barnabites; an invitation ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... curiously enough, instead of 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 fleeting river—a ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the drone of a bagpipe, and a good supply of wind is required to fill it. Proverbially applied to those who undertake more than they are ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... Heilig was a drone if he were your son," replied Mrs. Brauner. She knew that if any one else had dared thus to attack their boy, his father would have been growling and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... gripped him by the hair and carried him far away, Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way: Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... refrain from tears as she thought how different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier smell, ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... my neighbour was the fellow 'Mwanga whom I had kicked out of the store. Happily I was so dusty that he could scarcely recognize me, but I kept my face turned away from him. What with the light and the warmth, the drone of the water, the silence of the folk, and my mental and physical stress, I grew drowsy and ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... air 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 murmur of ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... loosened his teeth and drew back a step to look at the crumpled and motionless creature before him. The jay was dead. He had won his first battle. And with victory came the wonderful dawning of that greatest instinct of all, which told him that no longer was he a drone in the marvelous mechanism of wilderness life—but a part of it from this time forth. For he ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood |
