"Spinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at it by stealth on account of her duties at the distaff; [36] but the book is written with so much order and method, the manuscript is so free from mistakes, corrections and erasures, that we may conclude that while spinning she worked it out in her mind, so that the apparent delay proved most advantageous. In this respect the "Life" is superior to the first version of the "Way of Perfection." This latter work was printed during ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... improvements in chemistry, dying, and mineralogy; for promoting the ingenious arts of drawing, engraving, casting, painting, statuary, and sculpture; for the improvement of manufactures and machines, in the various articles of hats, crapes, druggets, mills, marbled-paper, ship-blocks, spinning-wheels, toys, yarn, knitting, and weaving. They likewise allotted sums for the advantage of the British colonies in America, and bestowed premiums on those settlers who should excel in curing cochineal, planting logwood-trees, cultivating olive-trees, producing myrtle-wax, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... and early Reconstruction, was simple as compared to present day togs. Cloth woven from homespun thread was the only kind Negroes had. Every house of any note could boast of a spinning wheel and loom. Cotton, picked by slaves, was cleared of the seed and spun into thread and woven into cloth by them. It was common to know how to spin and weave. Some of the cloth was dyed afterwards with dye made from indigo and polk berries. Some ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... palace. So she roamed about by herself, and looked at all the rooms and chambers, till at last she came to an old tower, to which there was a narrow staircase ending with a little door. In the door there was a golden key, and when she turned it the door sprang open, and there sat an old lady spinning ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... the web was spun, the circle in actual space as the geometer knows it, would its nature be thus a series of events, a mere succession of spun threads? No, the true circle would be timeless, a truth founded in the nature of space, outlasting, preceding, determining all the weary web-spinning of this time-worn spider. Even so we, spinning our web of experience in all its dreary complications in the midst of the eternal nature of the world-embracing substance, imagine that our lives somehow contain true novelty, discover for the substance what it never knew before, invent ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... from Eden makes a beautiful picture. Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and happy—though I suppose she ought not to,—sits spinning and watching the children playing at 'helping father.' The chorus from each side of the stage explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... this mayden tendre were of age, Yet in the brest of hire virginitee Ther was enclosed sad and ripe corage: And in gret reverence and charitee Hire olde poure fader fostred she: A few sheep spinning on the feld she kept, She wolde not ben ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... see," Juli coaxed, and he brought it out, slowly, still suspicious. It was an angled prism of crystal, star-shaped, set in a frame which could get the star spinning like a solidopic. But it displayed a new and comical face every time ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... demand six-and-eightpence, And, while toiling themselves, send all petticoats spinning; And Porters who tick off our names for our gate-pence; And Bull-dogs who help to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... developed the grade of spiritual vision which opens the Desire World to him and he looks at the same object, he will see it both inside and out. If he looks closely, he will perceive every little atom spinning upon its axis and no part or particle will be excluded from ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... busy fingers plied the needle (for sewing machines were not known at that time). Young as I was, I was no stranger to the use of the needle, for that is part of a German girl's education, with knitting and crocheting. I was born in the time of weaving, spinning and carding. Much brass and pewter household articles were to be kept bright and shiny. Children in those days were little housewives and took as much pride in having the family silver, copper and brass polished as the older ones. The oaken floors were made white with soft soap and sand, and ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... anything to do with this Ministry to be certain when he fixes any time. There is a business which, till it take some turn or other, I cannot leave this place in prudence or honour. And I never wished so much as now that I had stayed in Ireland; but the die is cast, and is now a spinning, and till it settles, I cannot tell whether it be an ace or a sise.(2) I am confident by what you know yourselves, that you will justify me in all this. The moment I am used ill, I will leave them; but know not how to do it while things are in suspense. The ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... I looked again from my tall cliff I saw that great fleet rolling as in a giant's hand. At times they were pitched against the sky and staggered aloft, spinning gustily there like wind-blown leaves. Then they were hurled from these dizzy tops to the flat, moaning gulf, to the glassy, inky horror that swirled and whirled between ten waves. At times a wave leaped howling ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... "the descendants of mediaeval trout snap at the descendants of mediaeval flies, spinning about upon just the same sized and coloured wings on which their forefathers spun a thousand years ago; having become, in all that ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... you know. Besides which, my dear friend, they will give you a mitten apiece. How would you like that? They make lots for the soldiers, out of skeins of long yarn; mamma says you are a famous fellow for spinning splendid yarns yourself. Ours is dark blue; but mamma says, yours are all the colors of the rainbow, and a great deal of black besides; and everybody is delighted with them, and all the soldiers love you, and I ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... eyes too, deep under their shaggy brows, and looking out so still and dreamy, have we not noticed gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire, and half-fancied that their stillness was but the rest of infinite motion, the sleep of a spinning-top? Thy little figure, there as, in loose, ill-brushed threadbare habiliments, thou sattest, amid litter and lumber, whole days, to 'think and smoke tobacco,' held in it a mighty heart. The secrets of man's Life ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... with the melody itself as part of the expression of the poem. Sometimes the so-called accompaniment is itself almost the main thing. Such cases are found in "The Erl King," "To Be Sung on the Waters," and "Gretchen at the Spinning-wheel." At other times the accompaniment is as simple as the melody, and serves no other purpose than that of supporting the voice. A typical case of this kind is found in "Hedge Roses," and in "Hark! Hark! the Lark." It is another ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... reached the private apartments of the princess, from whence resounded a psalm which her Grace was singing with her ladies while they spun, and which psalm was played by a little musical box placed within the Duchess's own spinning-wheel. Duke Barnim had made it himself for her Grace, and it ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... certain spirit by talking and dreaming of Ben-Hur. The mother promised reunion with him to the sister, and she to the mother, not doubting, either of them, that he was equally faithful to them, and would be equally happy of the meeting. And with the spinning and respinning of this slender thread they found pleasure, and excused their not dying. In such manner as we have seen, they were solacing themselves the moment Gesius called them, at the end of twelve hours' fasting ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and narrow, but not empty and gloomy, as they were in the cities with which he was familiar. There were people everywhere. Old women sat by their open doors and spun without a spinning-wheel—only with the help of a shuttle. The merchants' shops were like market-stalls—opening on the street. All the hand-workers did their work out of doors. In one place they were boiling crude oil; in another tanning hides; in a third there ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... sweet-smelling medicinal herbs, hanging agains the walls to dry, made the air heavy with their odors. Aunt Debby was at work near the bright zone of sun-rays, spinning yarn with a "big wheel." She held in one hand a long slender roll of carded wool, and in the other a short stick, with which she turned the wheel. Setting it to whirling with a long sweep of the stick against a spoke, she would walk ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... bound together Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Its top reached to Heaven, its branches covered the Earth, and the roots penetrated into Hell. The three Normas or Fates sat under it, spinning the thread of life. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... age, and laden with blue and white china, lurked in a shadowy corner. Comfortable easy-chairs and odd, old-fashioned settees furnished the hall. In the oriel window stood a spinning-wheel and a grandfather's chair. A great bowl of roses stood on the broad window-seat. There were roses, indeed, everywhere, and books on every table. But the crowning grievance of all was the cottage piano which John had sent to Lady ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... musing, reading new publications, and taking his comfort. In his shop you shall see a joiner's bench, hammers, planes, saws, gimlets, varnish, paint, picture frames, fence posts, rare old china, one or two fine portraits of his ancestry, a bookcase full of books, the tooth of a whale, an old spinning-wheel and spindle, a lady's parasol frame, a church lamp to be mended, in short, Henry says Mr. Titcomb's shop is like the ocean; there is no end to the curiosities ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... now? he wondered; then his thoughts returned to the panorama of that eventful journey. He remembered how in the mouth of the Windy Arm on Tagish Lake, when the sail swung round and sent him spinning overboard, he would most certainly have perished in those chill waters had not Spurling jumped in and held him up till the boat put back. It was Spurling's hand which had kept the boat steady in the boiling ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight of snowflakes in ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Lady, with choral responses ("Where yon Trees your Eye discovers"), and an exquisitely graceful trio in the finale ("Heavens! what do I hear?"). The second act opens with a very plaintive romanza ("Poor Margaret, spin away!"), sung by Margaret, Anna's old nurse, at her spinning-wheel, as she thinks of the absent Laird, followed in the fifth scene by a beautiful cavatina for tenor ("Come, O Gentle Lady"). In the seventh scene is a charming duet ("From these Halls"), and the act closes ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... Mr. Ford see your life-book, Captain Jim?" asked Anne, when Captain Jim finally declared that yarn-spinning must end for ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... doesn't keep steady—swings from side to side. You have seen a top, how stiff and erect it is when it is spinning fast, and how it wobbles when it is spinning slow, just before it falls. Well, I think something of the kind is going on with Venus. The earth may be compared to a top that is whirling fast, and Venus to one that has slowed down. She is less able than the earth to resist the disturbing attraction ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Nuncey called to the grey horse, flicking him lightly with the whip. The ill-balanced trap seesawed down the slope, and soon was spinning along the cliff-road, across which the wind blew with such force that Hester caught at ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sorgho, a kind of large millet, the ripening of which had just been solemnly celebrated at this time; the extraction of that fragrant oil from the "mpafon" drupes, kinds of olives, the essence of which forms a perfume sought for by the natives; spinning of the cotton, the fibers of which are twisted by means of a spindle a foot and a half long, to which the spinners impart a rapid rotation; the fabrication of bark stuffs with the mallet; the extraction from the tapioca roots, and the preparation of the earth ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... first scramble of the alarm, Somerset made good his escape, and came out upon the Euston Road, his head spinning, his body sick with hunger, and his pockets destitute of coin. Yet as he continued to walk the pavements, he wondered to find in his heart a sort of peaceful exultation, a great content, a sense, as it were, of divine presence and the kindliness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life, but there was something less of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... said Johnny, with a long sigh of pleasure; "that's the Sleeping Beauty, sure enough. There's the blue gown, the white fur-cloak sweeping round, the pretty hair, and—yes—there's the old nurse, spinning and nodding, just as she did in the picture-book mother got me when I cried because I couldn't ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... interior, burning like a red-hot cavern, was really very fine, even in the daylight. Meantime the soldiers were at work, "saving" the scenery by pitching it into the next street; and the poor little properties (one spinning-wheel, a feeble imitation of a water-mill, and a basketful of the dismalest artificial flowers very conspicuous) were being passed from hand to hand with the greatest excitement, as if they were rescued children or lovely women. In four or five hours the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... resumed her spinning in great content, for she felt assured that no harm could come to the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... out, and I think the discovery had something to do with the kindness they always showed me, that I was a good hand at spinning a yarn: the nautical phrase had got naturalized in the school. We had no chance, if we would have taken it, of spending any part of school-hours in such a pastime; but it formed an unfailing amusement when weather or humour interfered with bodily exercises. Nor were we debarred from the pleasure ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... other way, and has an auger fixed in place at the nose. It is about twenty feet long and four feet wide and made out of the strongest metal known to modern science, cryptoplutonite. It won't heat up or break off and it will start spinning around as soon as we cut ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a corner, head on paws, watching his master's every action. Burton struck out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... is six and a little boy is six, they like pretty much the same things and enjoy pretty much the same games. She wears an apron, and he a jacket and trousers, but they are both equally fond of running races, spinning tops, flying kites, going down hill on sleds, and making a noise in the open air. But when the little girl gets to be eleven or twelve, and to grow thin and long, so that every two months a tuck has to be let down in her ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... other men scarcely heeded them. In a row, against the opposite wall, were the gambling games. The crap-table was deserted. One lone man was playing at the faro-table. The roulette-ball was not even spinning, and the gamekeeper stood by the roaring, red-hot stove, talking with the young, dark-eyed woman, comely of face and figure, who was known from Juneau to Fort Yukon as the Virgin. Three men sat in at stud-poker, but they played with small chips ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... upon this intention from her birth. She already reads well, but I am sorry to say she hates it, and never will open a book unless she is obliged; she shows no taste for any thing but making doll's clothes and spinning a top." ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... Then he festooned all the eaves, the fences, and trees, and bushes with crystal drops, which sparkled and glittered in the sunbeams like royal diamonds—then he hung icicles on the poor old horses' noses, and tripped up the heels of precise old bachelors, and sent the old maids spinning round on the sidewalks, till they were perfectly ashamed of themselves; and then he got into the houses, and burst and cracked all the water pitchers, and choked up the steady old pump, so that it might as well have been without a nose as with one, and pinched the cheeks of the little girls ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... was spinning, but business instinct came quickly to his rescue. "What happens," he asked, "if something in the third dimension ...
— Holes, Incorporated • L. Major Reynolds
... manufactures was opening. The South—more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class—caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of the scene. The crop ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... foundation, of Felix Lane, when a poor sailor boy, loving the daughter of an English merchant at Portsmouth, England. The mate got the story from a gossipy old English sailor, who claimed to know all about it, but whose fondness for spinning yarns brought discredit on his veracity. According to the old sailor's account, the fair English maid's name was Mary. Her father was one of the wealthiest merchants in the city; and one day when Lane was only nineteen he met Mary. Her beauty captivated him and inspired ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... of what is alien to her taste. The Ungainly one will sell her wardrobe to procure wine; the Wanton will part with the lands to procure fine clothes; and she who delights in cattle, and attends to her spinning, will get rid of her luxurious abode at any price. Thus, no one will possess what was given, and they will pay to their Mother the sum named from the price of the things, which each of them ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... said to be automatic. The feeder, too, on these machines is of excellent design, while the arrangements that have been introduced into the Willcox & Gibbs straw hat sewing machine are surprisingly effective in spinning up a hat from a loose roll of braid. Speaking of straw hat machines, mention should be made of Wiseman's hand stitch apparatus, as improved by Messrs. Willcox & Gibbs, and shown here this evening. This machine employs two needles, and makes a stitch resembling hand work at intervals, producing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... if there was a goblin in his heart,"-the servants said. As a matter of fact he had been deftly caught in a snare set for him. One whisper from a geisha had numbed, his will; one smile blinded his eyes. She was far less pretty than his wife; but she was very skillful in the craft of spinning webs,—webs of sensual delusion which entangle weak men; and always tighten more and more about them until the final hour of mockery and ruin. Haru did not know. She suspected no wrong till after her husband's strange ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... secret. By adroitly using a large sum of money, he bribed the person in whose hands it was, and brought it with him to these parts; but he keeps it jealously from all eyes, in order that the Duke may not get wind of it, fearing he should in some way be deprived of his treasure." While spinning out this lengthy yarn, Messer Alfonso did not look at me, because we were not previously acquainted. But when that precious clay model appeared, he displayed it with such airs of ostentation, pomp, and mountebank ceremony, that, after inspecting it, I turned to Messer Alberto and ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... blessing, and presented her with a copper medal with a cross engraven upon it. From that time the little maiden always deemed herself especially consecrated to the service of Heaven, but she still remained at home, daily keeping her father's sheep, and spinning their wool as she sat under the trees watching them, but always with ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... objects, and rejecting whatever does not enter into their own restricted notion of "utility," these cold arithmetical seers, with nothing but millions in their imagination; and whose choicest works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intellectual tasks of the library and the studio by "the demand and the supply." They have sunk these pursuits into the class of what they term "unproductive labour;" and by another result of their line ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... are pure invention and as fittingly might have been staged in any other of the nine provinces. The author humbly craves indulgence if he has in any way exceeded the license allowed him in spinning the incidents necessary for a novel of this type while seeking verisimilitude in settings ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... according to promise, the Yankees came on board, and spent a long evening with us. They were a free, open-hearted, boastful, conceited, good-humoured set of fellows, and a jolly night we had of it in the forecastle, while the mates and captains were enjoying themselves and spinning ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... gauged the importance of his acquaintances; it was thus he hoped some day to be gauged. And he trusted and believed that the time would come when he could give his fillip to the upper rim of fortune's wheel, and send it spinning downward. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... returned with a family carriage drawn by a horse and a mule. In the carriage he had, among other things, a parrot-cage which contained a screaming parrot, several pairs of ladies' shoes, a few yards of calico, the stock of an old musket, part of a spinning-wheel, and a box of garden seeds. In what way these things would contribute to the support of the army, ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... play at spang cockle, my lord?" said the Prince, placing a nut on the second joint of his forefinger, and spinning it off by a smart application of the thumb. The nut struck on Douglas's broad breast, who burst out into a dreadful exclamation of wrath, inarticulate, but resembling the growl of a lion in depth and ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... twilight, and there daily she greeted the rising sun, repeating aloud her morning prayer. Then with eager hands she took from the book-case one of the large folios. From these books Anna Sophia drew all her knowledge. And when, during the long winter evenings, the village girls were busy spinning, she would tell them the stories she had read, no hand was idle, no eye drooping. She was looked upon as the guardian angel of the village; she knew some remedy, some alleviation for every illness, every pain. In a sick-room, she was all that a nurse should be, kind, loving, patient, and gentle. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... bitterly poor and bitterly proud, starves and shivers, and hugs up his bones in his capa between the Bidassoa and the Manzanares; many a wild-hearted, unlettered Manuela applies the inexorable law of the land to her own detriment, and, with a sob in the breath, sits down to her spinning again, her mouldy crust and cup of cold water, or worse fare than that. Joy is not for the poor, she says—and then, with a shrug, ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... room was in keeping—a sanded floor, a chest of drawers, with a small looking-glass, ornamented by a sprig of asparagus, a dresser of rough pine shelves on the right of the fireplace, and a cupboard on the left, a half-dozen chip-bottomed chairs, a spinning-wheel, and a reel ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... little gray hamlets on the hill-sides, dominated by square bell-towers, about which the red-tiled cottages clustered. Outside of these were family groups sitting in the warm sunshine, some sewing, some spinning, while children tumbled and played in the inviting grass. We had seen nothing like this for many a day—certainly not in Spain. Presently we came up to the lofty snow-capped mountains, which had for a while ranged just ahead of us, when one of them seemed suddenly to open a wide ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... were now open. The area devoted to cotton had swiftly expanded as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were opened up. Cotton had in fact become "king" and the planters depended for their prosperity, as they thought, upon the sale of their staple to English manufacturers whose spinning and weaving mills were the wonder of the world. Manufacturing nothing and having to buy nearly everything except farm produce and even much of that for slaves, the planters naturally wanted to purchase manufactures in the cheapest market, England, where they sold ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... like a red rag on a bull. Flinging them from him, he sent them spinning across the stony ground with two furious kicks, following them up with further furious kicks as we looked on in speechless amazement. "What's 'er matter?" he growled, as, abandoning the chase with a final lunge, he ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... standing, he wished he'd stayed on the nice horizontal sidewalk. His head was spinning dizzily and his mind was being sucked down into the whirlpool. He held on to the post grimly and tried ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in coils when the magnetism is varied in their iron or steel cores. Observes the lines of magnetic force as iron filings are magnetized. A magnetic bar moved in and out of a coil of wire excites electricity therein,—mechanical motion is converted into electricity. Generates a current by spinning a copper plate in ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... 2 the tailor's tools—shears, goose, and bodkin—are clear enough, and I was told that the figures on the stone in the lower left-hand corner (No. 3) are locally recognized as the shuttle and some other requisite of the weaver's trade. Inverness had spinning and weaving for its staple industries when Pennant visited the place in 1759. Its exports of cordage and sacking were considerable, and (says Pennant) "the linen manufacture saves the town above L3000 a year, which ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... a delightful afternoon, and a cool breeze was fluttering the grasses. The water of the creek reflected the overhanging boughs in its dark surface, water-spiders were spinning their little whirls, crickets were singing, and swallows had begun their ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... obedient to the king's commands, set at once to work and combed out the flax, wound it round the spindle, and sat spinning at her wheel so diligently that her work was quite done by Saturday evening. But Renzolla, who had been spoilt and petted in the fairy's house, and was quite unaware of the change that had taken place in her appearance, threw ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning. Such love as mine ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... swift one, and once more Teall sent the leather spinning over the field. Hoots and cat-calls from the Souths filled the air. The Central fans began to look a bit uneasy. What was their champion pitcher doing, to let Teall get away with his deliveries ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... arm pettishly, but glanced over her shoulder with such an inviting smile that Fletcher followed, feeling very much like a top, in danger of tumbling down the instant he stopped spinning. As she came out Kitty's face cleared, and, assuming her sprightliest air, she spread her plumage and prepared to descend with effect, for a party of uninvited peris stood at the gate of this Paradise casting longing ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... all day. When the six-o'clock whistle blew, and the workmen streamed out of the factories, it was a wild waste of winter and storm. The wind had come up, and the light snow arose in the distance like white dancers of death, spinning furiously over the level, then settling into long, gravelike ridges. Ellen glanced into the office as she passed the door, and saw Robert Lloyd talking busily with Flynn and another foreman by the name of Dennison. As she passed, Robert turned with a look as if he had been watching ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... great thing, A great thing to me, Spinning down to Weymouth town By Ridgway thirstily, And maid and mistress summoning Who tend the hostelry: O cyder is a great thing, A great thing ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the supper than the dinner table. My pride was in the labors of the field. Mother did the spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copper as a mordant, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... The spinning of linen yarn is carried on in Scotland nearly in the same way as the knitting of stockings, by servants, who are chiefly hired for other purposes. They earn but a very scanty subsistence, who endeavour to get their livelihood by either of those trades. In most parts of Scotland, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... said Jennie Denton, with a quiet decision. She stood at her big wheel, spinning busily, though it was nine o'clock; and though her words were few and quiet, the men knew from her face and manner that Davie's licking would not be easily accomplished. In fact, Jennie habitually stood between Davie ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... there any gentleman there of the name of Moneylaws? I took the envelope from him in a whirl of wonder, and tore it open, feeling an unaccountable sense of coming trouble. And in another minute the room was spinning round me; but the wording of ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... the shape of a spinning top. Shell is thin, and its rich meat is easily extracted on account of its ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... eye could see down the Assumption, with their flocks, herds, and brush fences; upon the hamlet to which his enterprise had given birth, and where he could see, in one cottage, his sabotiers bent over their benches adding to their piles of wooden shoes; in others, women at the spinning wheel or loom, making the cloths of which he had improved the pattern, or weaving the fine and beautiful arrow-sashes, those ceintures flechees of which the art is now lost, yet still known as snowshoers' rareties by the name of "L'Assomption sashes"; his makers ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... happiness," says your wife, after the answers of all the rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... not extend beyond a limited number of characters, and that all she committed to memory were the examples of these few worthy female characters of dynasties of yore; while she attached special importance to spinning and female handiwork. To this reason is to be assigned the name selected for her, of Li Wan (Li, the weaver), and the style ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... because of its allusion to the logographic printing press, which prints words instead of letters. Phaenologue was thought of, but Logograph sounds better. My father will allow me to manufacture an essay on the Logograph, he furnishing the solid materials and I spinning them. I am now looking over, for this purpose, Wilkins's Real Character, or an Essay towards a Universal Philosophical Language. It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... The spinning of tops was one of the all-absorbing winter sports. We made our tops heart-shaped of wood, horn or bone. We whipped them with a long thong of buckskin. The handle was a stick about a foot long and sometimes we whittled the stick to make it ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... down the Slide, bumping from side to side, finally landing with a splash in the pond, sending up a little white geyser of spray. Buster also began to take a more active interest in life. She, too, shouted as she sent a fair-sized boulder spinning down the incline. ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... determined on instant vengeance, and, travelling rapidly, surprised the house of Katla. The undismayed sorceress, on hearing them approach, commanded her son to sit close beside her, and when the assailants entered they only beheld Katla, spinning coarse yarn from what seemed a large distaff, with her female ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... Malone said at random. "I work for him." He closed his eyes. The room, he had discovered, was spinning slightly. "Now," he said, "you're ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... song without words, but told so well in tone that it was easy, seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen sky, the streaks of mottled foam sliding landward along the weltering backs of black waves, spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, showing the roots of the ledges among boulders brown with weed and sea ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Thorn threw up his gun and two pale flashes leaped out. Osborn was slower and swung his barrel. The sharp reports were echoed from the next butt and a thin streak of smoke that looked gray in the sunshine drifted across the bank of turf. Two brown objects, spinning round, struck the heath and a few light feathers followed. The grouse that had escaped went ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... New Year's tales. Heard a good lecture by E. P. Whipple on "Courage." Thought I needed it, being rather tired of living like a spider—spinning my ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... have, what beliefs they would entertain, what customs they would sanction, and so forth. This theory of the Social Contract was once famous, and exerted a notable influence on political history, and it is still interesting in the same way that spinning-wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs are interesting; but we now know that men lived in civil society, with complicated laws and customs and creeds, for many thousand years before the notion had ever entered anybody's head that things could be regulated ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... farm had its spinning wheel and that clothes were made of the homespun woollens, but neither historian nor poet has ever pictured a New England shepherd with the shepherd's pipe. Imagination has ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... Westcote calls "lanificium," "the skill and knowledge of making cloth, under which genus are contained the species of spinning, knitting, weaving, tucking, pressing, dying, carding, combing and such-like," we have records from the twelfth century; though until the reign of Edward IV only friezes and plain coarse cloth were made. In Edward's reign an Italian, "Anthony Bonvise," is reputed to have taught Barnstaple ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... movements, and, having begun by throwing his long shock of hair backwards twirls round gracefully enough, keeping good time with the music. This is merely a feat of endurance, resembling the dancing or spinning dervishes of Egypt, and generally ends by the dancer suddenly squatting down upon the floor with his flowing gown fully expanded in a circle around him. The skill of the dancer is shown most in successive dances, such as the slow progression by merely twisting the feet to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... grow up to be presented, lady-mothers and aunts must continue to project breakfasts, water parties, and galas, whereby to throw them in the way of flirtation, courtship, and marriage. Mischief, in her most smiling mask, sits like the beautiful witch in Thalaba at an everlasting spinning-wheel, weaving a mingled yarn of sin and sorrow for the daughters of Fashion. Although the cauldron of Hecate and her priestesses has vanished from the heath at Forres, it bubbles in nightly incantations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... that streamed lazily upward from his cigar one might have thought the banker fast asleep in his chair, so still he sat, while his mind labored with the quiescent velocity of a spinning top. He had won a big stake over Lauzanne's victory. The race had helped beggar Porter, and brought Ringwood nearer his covetous grasp. If Porter failed to win the Eclipse, his finances would be in a pitiable state; he might even have ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... towards the chief current, they saw a drift of everything belonging to farms and dwelling-houses that would float. Chairs and tables, chests, carts, saddles, chests of drawers, tubs of linen, beds and blankets, workbenches, harrows, girnels, planes, cheeses, churns, spinning-wheels, cradles, iron pots, wheel-barrows—all these and many other things hurried past as they gazed. Everybody was looking, and for a time all ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... sufferings were needed to strike a spark of human feeling out of him; but now that I am well his nature has resumed its sway. And yet, what cause was there for anger? Is not the voyage prospering as favourably as possible under the circumstances? Is not the raft spinning ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the world could have hindered John and the Professor from following up and witnessing the scene. Angel didn't try to run the sawmill, or to turn the lathe, but he did the next best thing, he jumped on the grindstone and sent it spinning while running over the top, a trick he had learned and which was one of the ways he had to help out George and Harry ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... news to Lord Sheffield was written on the 14th July, 1789, the day of the taking of the Bastille. So "that evening sun of July" sent its beams on Gibbon mourning the dead friend, as well as on "reapers amid peaceful woods and fields, on old women spinning in cottages, on ships far out on the silent main, on balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... is hard to sit spinning out one's brains by the fireside, without having heard the least thing to set one's hand a-going. I am so put to it for something to say, that I would make a memorandum of the most improbable lie that could be invented by a viscountess-dowager; as the old Duchess of Rutland (747) does when she ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... in your face; if, when you lounged into the opera-pit, handsome dog that you are, each spendthrift rake in 'Fop's Alley,' who now waits but the scratch of your pen to endorse billets doux with the charm that can chain to himself for a month some nymph of the Ballet, spinning round in a whirlwind of tulle, would shrink from the touch of your condescending forefinger with more dread of its contact than a bailiff's tap in the thick of Pall Mall could inspire; if, reduced to the company of city clerks, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ukraine in a very ungracious manner. Our animal would take a kick from no other animal calmly, and so, without waiting to weigh consequences, it gave RUDESHEIMER'S Rosinante a severe "chuck" in the ribs with its hind feet. In an instant horse and rider were spinning around like a top. A space was immediately cleared, and the crowd awaited in breathless silence the fate of the Knight. His swayings were fearful, until PUNCHINELLO, anticipating an apoplectic fit from such a terrific revolution, dashed in, and seizing the frightened steed by the bridle, ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... Conformably with, and contrary to, Arab usage, it is the men who weave the textiles, and not the women. The latter do the spinning and the dyeing. Masonry is man's work—in negro countries it is the women who build the houses—and in the blacksmith's and other trades the craft descends from father ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... scuttling Ford delivery trucks. It locked fenders with Casey when he swung to the left. The two cars skidded as one toward the right-hand curb; caught amidships a bright yellow, torpedo-tailed runabout coming up from Main Street, and turned it neatly on its back, its four wheels spinning helplessly in the quiet, sunny morning. Casey himself was catapulted over the runabout, landing abruptly in a sitting position on the corner of the vacant lot beyond, his self-righteousness ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... a mighty plucky thing for you fellows to pull out in the sea that was running. The sight of you coming was the only thing that helped me to hold on. I was just about all in when you reached us. You certainly sent that old boat spinning along." ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... to show in that parlor. He had gyroscopes: and he would wind them up and set half-a-dozen of those anti-natural tops spinning straight out in the air for my diversion. There were great sacks of uninflated balloons, and delicate sheet-rubber, from which Sorel made up balloons. There were other curious things in rubber,—a tobacco-pouch, for example, in perfect ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... him. Holding the musket in his arm, he took the glass, drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then, spinning a silver dollar into the air, said, as it rang ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... something went spinning through Gyp's head. She raised her hand. For a second it hovered close to the glass. Then, with a sick feeling, she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... habits. A recent writer has said: "Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time.' Well, he may not count it, and ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... and large benevolence. The education of Pantagruel presents the ideal pedagogy of the Renaissance, an education of the whole man—mind and body—in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and word-spinning of the effete mediaeval schools. Friar John is the monk whose passion for a life of activity cannot be restrained; his violence is the overflow of wholesome energy. It is to his care that the Abbey of Thelema is confided, where young men and maidens are to be occupied with every noble toil ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... stand, Spinning churns on either hand, Neatly capped and aproned white— Airy fairy dairy sight! Jersey priestesses they seem Miracleing milk ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... last bitter thought, and then he was too occupied for cerebral indulgence. For the next minutes he wielded truer than any! Men came and fell, and others leaped and fell, skulls shattered, the life-stuff spurting, before Otah's shaft went spinning away in shattered ruin; he leaped to seize another, employed it in great sweeping swaths against those who still came. Two went down, but two came to fill the gap. In perfect unison, one parried as the other ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... ordered briskly, "to your spinning, jades, to your spinning! Into my car, the three of you! No, Martha, I will not take a refusal; you shall not walk: you've got to come along, if I have to tuck you under my arm. I don't care if you never reduce. What do you want to reduce for, anyhow? You're all right just ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... between the grooves. These lands grip the bullet as it passes through the bore and rotate it to the right about the longer axis. This rotation serves to prevent tumbling and keeps the bullet accurately on its course. This spinning of the bullet also causes it to drift slightly to the right as it passes through the air. The same effect is produced by throwing ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... kept two stenographers busy; he was spinning the web of his reorganization, bringing about a condition under which men were compelled to exchange their stock in the National Provisions Company for their former property. He was a crafty little man, and his ways ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and saw his pretty sister Carlen at the high spinning-wheel, walking back and forth drawing the fine yarn between her chubby fingers, all the while humming a low song to which the whirring of the wheel made harmonious accompaniment, he thought to himself bitterly: "Work, indeed! As if they did not work now longer than we do, and quite ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... late now, anyhow," remarked the other, drily, "because there they go, spinning down the road like wildfire. Percy never does anything except in a whirl. He's as bold as they make them, and the only wonder to me is that he hasn't met with a terrible accident before now. But somehow he seems to escape, even when he smashes ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... her seat and got in himself, while the two men tucked them in warmly and then climbed into the front seat. It was but a few moments before they were on the road again, spinning towards the city ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... their appetites they visited the other room of the cabin, which was fitted up as the living room of a family of the olden time. It had log walls, bare rafters overhead, a tall old-fashioned clock in a corner, a canoe cradle, a great spinning-wheel on which the ladies, dressed like the women of the olden times, spun yarn, and gourds used for drinking vessels. Some of the ladies were knitting socks, some carding wool, while they talked together, after the fashion of the good, industrious ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... indeed in all the valleys hereabout, spinning-wheels are not uncommon. I also saw a woman sitting in her room with the door opening on to the street, weaving linen at a hand-loom. The woman and the hand-loom were both very old and rickety. The first and the last specimens of anything, whether ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Coolly, quickly, she stepped to the window. Major Burleigh had just reached the top step and was exchanging greeting with his host. The stylish team and glistening wagon were just spinning away. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... was an additional spur to my endeavors to repurchase the boat. I entered myself as a day-laborer in the garden of our squire; and my wife was called occasionally to perform some services at the house, and employed herself in needle-work, spinning, or knitting at home. Not a moment in the day was suffered to pass unemployed. We spared for ourselves, and furnished all the comforts we could to the poor about us; and every week we dropped a little overplus into a fairing-box, to buy the boat. If any accident ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... scheme if the King stood out; it was to avoid decision by confusing and spinning out the matter in hand, or by substituting another as though arising, opportunely out of it, and by which it was turned aside, or by proposing that some explanations should be obtained. The first ideas of the King were thus weakened, and the charge was afterwards returned to, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... Spinning, weaving, and knitting are doubtless best left in the hands of the factory worker. But, under present conditions, buying ready made all the garments needed for a family may be an expensive and unsatisfactory method if the elements of worth, wear, finish, and individuality are worthy of consideration, ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... have of seeing the other side! Do you always take the part of the person who isn't here? If so, all the better for me this last week, when the mater has been spinning stories of my obstinacy, and pig-headedness, and general contradictiveness. I thought I had better hurry home at once, before you learnt to put me down as a hopeless ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet: descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... spare not, he usually spoke as if there were some marrow in his bones, and some vigor in his wind-bags. When he came to see the good wife of his congregation, he gave her a hearty shake of the hand, congratulated her as he found her at her spinning-wheel; spoke with a hearty approbation, if he saw that her children were civil and cleanly; if otherwise, he blazed out with proper boldness, by telling her that all her praying and groaning, would avail nothing for her soul's safety, so long as Jackey's breeches were ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... present times. It has since received three very capital improvements, besides, probably, many smaller ones, of which it may be difficult to ascertain either the number or the importance. The three capital improvements are, first, the exchange of the rock and spindle for the spinning-wheel, which, with the same quantity of labour, will perform more than double the quantity of work. Secondly, the use of several very ingenious machines, which facilitate and abridge, in a still greater ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... the beach at Calais. He came straight over to London to arrange about your going to his Princess, whoever she may be, and he arrived here at the castle while your father and my grandfather were sitting together after dinner spinning stories. He was for your going to London directly. He spoke to grandfather about me, too. Mother says he is a bloodthirsty wretch and no right Christian. But grandfather must have thought a lot of him or he would never have listened to a word about my ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... instrument on a spinning-wheel within the door, and slowly lit a pipe with both hands. The bar-tender jumped from his perch and stood with a familiar leer, of which when Benoit said "Mr. Cuiller, monsieur," Chrysler took ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... wool has been scoured it is batched, i.e., it is (p. 026) mixed with a quantity of oil for the purpose of lubricating the wool to enable it more easily to stand the friction to which it is subjected in the subsequent processes of spinning and weaving by giving it ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... his hand, and he saw the lever fall slowly. There was motion within the case—wheels and shining spheres that touched one upon another were spinning in gleaming circles of silvery green—and from above he heard the first faint whisper of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... more appalling to the imagination than any famine or pestilence that ever swept the world. Well has Mr. George Gissing named nineteenth-century London in one of his great novels the "Whirlpool," the very figure for the nineteenth-century Great City, attractive, tumultuous, and spinning down to death. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... some conclusion," observed Giraffe; "because, if we happen to run across a conflagration to-morrow, when we're out hunting, it'll be some comfort to me to know, when I'm spinning along, that you're snug and safe behind, and not being ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... blessed saints and martyrs! Open, earth! And hide my recreant knighthood in thy gulf! Yet, mercy, Madam! for till this strange day Who e'er saw spinning wool, like village-maid, A ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... on a certain evening Glinda sat in her library, surrounded by a bevy of her maids, who were engaged in spinning, weaving and embroidery, when an attendant announced the arrival at the palace of ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... magical! Cows kick, not backward but sidewise. The impact which was intended to project the counterfeit theologian into the middle of the succeeding conference week reacted upon the animal herself, and it and the pain together set her spinning like a top. Such was the velocity of her revolution that she looked like a dim, circular cow, surrounded by a continuous ring like that of the planet Saturn—the white tuft at the extremity of her sweeping tail! Presently, as the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... sitting on a broken stone, in a strange, wild dress, and engaged in spinning a thread drawn from wool of three different colours. She was at the same time half singing and half muttering a kind of charm, which seemed to have reference to the child which had been born the night before; and as she finished, Mannering heard her murmur something about the thread of ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... thought that the "Fate Sisters" would discover me way out here and sit on the corner of Minnesota and 12th spinning their breakable yarn. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... save a little money and become "respectable." We can follow out their history after Mr. Disraeli leaves them. They marry Harriet and Caroline, and contrive to educate a sharp boy or two, who will rise to become superintendents in the mills and to speculate in cotton-spinning. They in turn send into trade, with far greater advantages, their sons. The new generation, still educating, and, faithful to the original impulse, putting forth its fresh and aspiring tendrils, gets one boy into the church, another at the bar, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Except Paul de Kock, who certainly makes me laugh, I don't think I've looked into a book of the sort these thirty years. Gad! Pen's a lucky fellow. I should think he might write one of these in a month now,—say a month,—that's twelve in a year. Dammy, he may go on spinning this nonsense for the next four to five years, and make a fortune. In the meantime I should wish him to live properly, take respectable apartments, and keep a brougham." And on this simple calculation it was that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... need of with respect to it, such as gentleness, manliness, truth, fidelity, simplicity, contentment, and the rest. Wherefore, on every occasion a man should say: This comes from god; and this is according to the apportionment and spinning of the thread of destiny, and such-like coincidence and chance; and this is from one of the same stock, and a kinsman and partner, one who knows not, however, what is according to his nature. But I know; ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... and spake not a word. Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse than the former we heard. 'Husband,' I say, with a tender solicitude, 'Why have you passed such a foolish decree?' Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, 'Stick to your spinning, my mistress,' says he, 'Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is the care and the business ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia. In that pleasant humour they all posted to Rome; and intending, by their secret and sudden arrival, to make trial of that which every one had before avouched, only Collatinus finds his wife, though it were late in the night, spinning amongst her maids: the other ladies were all found dancing and revelling, or in several disports. Whereupon the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame. At that time Sextus Tarquinius ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... wood lately introduced. The ceiling was coved, and surrounded by a rich frieze of carving. A large table, suggestive of hospitality, was covered with drapery of the snowiest linen, the product of the spinning-wheels and busy looms of the women of the Seigniory of Tilly. Vases of china, filled with freshly-gathered flowers, shed sweet perfumes, while they delighted the eye with their beauty, etherializing the elements of bread and meat ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby |
