"Drumhead" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the guns were, they were silenced forever as a frightful beam of destruction stabbed relentlessly through the control room, whiffing out of existence the pilot, gunnery, and lookout panels and the men before them. The air rushed into space, and the suits of the three survivors bulged out into drumhead tightness as the pressure ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... with his knuckles; it responded sonorously like a drumhead, the vibration shaking the charcoal from the tracings, filling the air with a fine dust. The outlines grew faint, just perceptible enough to guide him in ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... laborious. By the time the expedition reached the fork, it was felt exceedingly questionable whether the MORAL of the force were sufficiently good to undertake more extended operations. A halt was called, the men refreshed with water and a bath, and it was decided at a drumhead council of war to continue the descent of the Embassy Water straight for Vailima, whither the expedition returned, in rather poor condition, and wet to the waist, about ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and the next pirating along the coast mad drunk on orange beer; besides, the Tweedies were getting to talk native now, and got more the hang of what was going on around them. So they give Afiola a sort of drumhead court-martial, and bounced him unanimous, and all the pent-up deviltry of the man came out of him at one lick, like touching off a dynamite cartridge. Tweedie preached against him from the pulpit; the other chiefs, slow as they had been to move before, now ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... I noticed in particular a Vogtland regiment, whose marching step was fairly orthodox, following the beat of a drummer who tried to vary the monotony of his instrument in an artistic manner by hitting the wooden frame alternately with the drumhead. The unpleasant rattling tone thus produced reminded me in ghostly fashion of the rattling of the skeletons' bones in the dance round the gallows by night which Berlioz had brought home to my imagination with such terrible realism in his performance of the last movement ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... despotism and try any form of government in which the citizen has in the smallest degree to co-operate in the execution of the laws, you have need of these virtues at every step. As soon as you give up the attempt to rule men by drumhead justice, you have to begin to trust in some degree to their intelligence, to their love of order, to their self-respect, and to their desire for material prosperity, and the nearer you get to what is called free ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... bethought himself of the drum which was to be used in the dance. The head was made of ground-hog leather, and perhaps a corner could be cut off and utilized for wings. No sooner suggested than done. Two pieces of leather taken from the drumhead were cut into shape and attached to the legs of one of the small animals, and thus originated the bat. The ball was now tossed up and the bat was told to catch it, and his expertness in dodging and circling about, keeping the ball ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were, but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to the drumhead courts-martial. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Dellarme's whistle. "Thur-r-r!" went the automatic in soulless, mechanical repetition, its tape spinning through the cylinder, while the rifles spoke with the human irregularity of steel-tipped fingers pounding at random on a drumhead. All along the line facing La Tir the volume of fire spread until it was like the concert of a ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer |
