"Threads" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Spider River; thence it bends to the northwest until it approaches within about 4 miles of Lake Megantic; thence it turns again south, having the valley of Arnolds River on the right and of Dead River on the left. It leaves Gasford Mountain in Canada, threads its way over very high ground between the head of Arnolds River and the tributaries of the Magalloway; inclines then to the north, so to the west, over very rocky, mountainous, and difficult country, leaving Gipps Peak in the United States, and turns by a sharp angle at Saddle ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... from the window and wished I might hurry the creaking, grinding revolution of the wheels. We were climbing higher and higher among the mountains. The chestnuts, growing scanter, were replaced by dark firs and pines. Streams came winding down like icy crystal threads; the little rivers we crossed looked blue and glacial; pale-pink roses and mountain flowers showed themselves as we approached the peaks. A polite official, entering, examined our papers; and with snow surrounding us and cold clear air blowing in at the window, we left ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... it is rifle-proof," said Howard. "The fine threads of which it is composed are woven so compactly that you ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... jackdaws that for some seconds they darkened the air. With harsh screams the birds soared higher and higher above their fortress, which they had possessed for ages in perfect security. We reached the bed of the stream, where scattered threads of water tinkled as they fell over huge blocks into little pools below, and then went whispering on their way towards the darkness. At the botton of a long slant of greenish slimy stone, patched here and there with moss, I stopped a few minutes, feeling that ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... an hour afterwards. One sin makes many. The devil's hounds hunt in packs. Consistency requires the denier to stick to his lie. Once the tiniest wing tip is in the spider's web, before long the whole body will be wrapped round by its filthy, sticky threads. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... or in the evenings sauntered about, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, and blue bonnet cast carelessly on the head: it was almost a single family, bound together by a network of intermarriages, so intricate as to render it impossible for any one who did not belong to the community to follow the threads or read the design of the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... have you take care that you do not adopt mere rules, and seek to impress them rigidly upon others, as if they were general principles, which must at once be suitable to all mankind. Do not imagine that your individual threads of experience form a woven garment of prudence, capable of fitting with exactness any member ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... longitudinal sides of the cells were tangents, and afforded two points of support. The head was next conducted to the different parts of the cell which it could reach, and it carpeted the surface with a thick bed of silk. We remarked that the threads were not carried from one side to another, and that this would have been impracticable, for the worms being obliged to support themselves, and to keep the posterior rings curved, the free and moveable part of the body ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... Junia that evening nor for many evenings, but Carnac and Junia met the next day in her own house. He came on her as she was arranging the table for midday dinner. She had taken up again the threads of housekeeping, cheering her father, helping the old French- woman cook—a huge creature who moved like a small mountain, and was a tyrant in her way to the old cheerful avocat, whose life had been a struggle for existence, yet ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... panic among the citizens; and happening just when Bache published Talleyrand's letter, Harper, on the 18th, gravely announced to the House of Representatives, that there existed a traitorous correspondence between the Jacobins here and the French Directory; that he had got hold of some threads and clues of it, and would soon be able to develope the whole. This increased the alarm; their libelists immediately set to work, directly and indirectly to implicate whom they pleased. Porcupine gave me a principal share in it, as I am told, for I never read his ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... pains, for political reasons, to conceal his identity, is a creation of a very high order. Its plot is intricate and original, and the denouement startlingly tragic. In the course of the story, the chief clue of which is love, woven in with intrigue, ambition, wealth, poverty, and other threads of human life, there occur no fewer than over four hundred characters, each one possessed of a distinctive personality drawn with marvellous skill. It contains incidents which recall the licence tolerated in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... you," Sir Alfred continued slowly, "consider me. I run a greater risk than you. There are threads from this office stretching to many corners of England, to many corners of America, to most cities of Europe. If a man with brains should seize upon any one of them, he might follow ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... irresponsible, or rather it suggested a childlike putting of all responsibility for her actions upon others, which he remembered now too well. Perhaps it was this which kept him from observing that the corners of her smiling lips, however, twitched slightly, and that her fingers, twisting the threads of the tassel, were occasionally stiffened nervously. For he burst out: Oh yes; he had drifted into it when it was a toss up if it wasn't his body instead that would be found drifting out to sea from the first wharf of San ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... retort referred to is merely a large tube, closed at one end, and with a screw coupling at the other; the dimensions may be conveniently about 5 inches by 10. The screw threads should be filled with fireclay (as recommended by Faraday) before the joint is screwed up. Before purchasing a bottle the experimenter will do well to remember that unless it is of sufficiently small diameter to go into ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... were incrusted by the chilling vapor. It hung upon the manes of the cattle, and decorated, wherever seen, the humble grass, which appeared bending, like threads of crystal. The small bushes were indescribably beautiful, and seemed as if chiseled out of the whitest marble. As far as the eye could extend, over brooks, fields, and woods, the same striking and singular sight ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... seated upon a high, cushioned chair of state, was a little man who was so very fat that he was nearly as broad as he was high. This man was dressed in a loose silken robe of purple that fell in folds to his feet, while upon his head was a cap of white velvet curiously worked with golden threads and having a circle of diamonds sewn around the band. At the opposite end of the boat stood an oddly shaped cage, and several large boxes of sandalwood were piled near ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... food and the beds," groaned Heavy. "But I never will. One teacher already has advised me about my diet. She says vegetables are best for me. I ate a peck of string beans this noon for lunch—strings and all—and I expect you can pick basting threads ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... nearest and dearest, ... he saw her soft gray garments change to glistening white, ... the wreath she wore sparkled as with a million dewdrops.. a roseate halo streamed above her and around her,—long streaks of crimson flared down the sky like threads of fire swung from the stars,—and in the deepening glory, her countenance, divinely beautiful, yet intensely sad, expressed the touching hope and fear of one who makes a final farewell appeal. Ah God! ... he knew her now! ... too late, too ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... listening; but the third need hardly puzzle thee, thy hookah is bright with it; all thy jewels are set in it; gold is inlaid in the ivory of thy bath; thy cup and thy dish are of gold, and golden threads are wrought ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... dew lies heavy in the early morn, On grass and mosses sparkling crystal-fair; And shining threads of gossamer are borne Floating upon ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... that the injury will be repaired; but defects that may follow from this can easily be remedied by study. It simply depends upon yourself, Monsignor, as to in how long you can be at your post again here. As soon as you have learned the threads of business, you will be able to apply yourself as before. I shall look for a report in a fortnight's time at the latest. Good day, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... from the same seeds, and also by difference of soil and climate. It is a small tree, however, rarely growing over forty feet high, with thick leaves and numerous branches. The leaves are the most important part of it—for it is upon these the silkworms feed, spinning their fine threads out of the milky juice, which in its properties resembles the juice of the caoutchouc tree. It is true that the silkworm will feed upon the other species of mulberries, and also upon slippery elms, figs, lettuce, beets, endive, and many kinds of leaves besides; but the silk made ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... marble chamber, with its birds and flowers, the serried brilliance of his amazing art-collections were all like him, were really the color of his soul. To think that after all she was not the one to bind him to subjection, to hold him by golden yet steely threads of fancy to the hem of her garment! To think that he should no longer walk, a slave of his desire, behind the chariot of her spiritual and physical superiority. Yet she ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Mrs. McAlister's girlhood had passed; a certain girlishness, however, would never pass, and her clear blue eyes had all the life and fire they had shown when, as Bess Holden she had been the leader in most of the pranks of her class at Vassar. The brown hair was still unmarked by grey threads and the complexion was still fresh and rosy, while in expression the face in the window below was far younger than the one peering out from the ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... feathers; give it the solution and replace it. Now take out all the cotton which you have been putting into the body from time to time to preserve the feathers from grease and stains. Place the bird upon your knee on its back; tie together the two threads which you had fastened to the end of the wing- joints, leaving exactly the same space betwixt them as your knowledge in anatomy informs you existed there when the bird was entire; hold the skin open with your finger and thumb, and apply the solution to every part of the inside. Neglect ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... that they had three tanned hides, and when John looked at the denuded feet of the boys, and at his own condition, the sight of the hides was enough to set him to work. The first thing that engaged his attention was the making of a set of lasts, and then the ramie fiber was twisted for threads; after which he sought out the lumber pile to make pegs, and selected some of the dried shellbark hickory for this purpose. Thus he imposed one very needed ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... Venetian palazzetti, one fantastic, the other classical; and there is a rough pavement, which is still wanting in Patras. A visit to the silk-shop of Garafuglia Papaiouanou was obligatory: here the golden-hued threads reminded me of the Indian Tussur-moth. Also de rigueur was the purchase of nougat and raki, the local mandorlato and mastache, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... arrived, beautiful in her serene, straightforward gaze from under fine brows and a wealth of dark hair that caught threads of light even under the gas-jets, and made hurriedly breathless excuses to her hostess. Danvers was introduced to her immediately, ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... Mr. Molyneux, by dint of severe self-command, had succeeded in abstracting his thoughts from disgrace almost certain,—from thinking over, in horrible variety, the several threads of inquiry and answer by which that disgrace was to be avoided or precipitated,—how was it possible to maintain such abstraction, while the worthy preacher, wholly unconscious of the blood he drew with every word, ground out his sentences in such ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... and virtuous the victim, the keener and more careful was he in pursuit. To entrap unsuspecting game without exciting alarm he considered the most exquisite art of gallantry. What sport it was to entangle this superb creature in a web of invisible gossamer threads! ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... cages, each containing thirty-six pigeons. These pigeons were of various colors, and all named. They were expected to return soon to their homes, unless cold, fog, a hawk, or a Prnssian bullet should stop them on the way. Each would bring back a small quill fastened by threads to one of its tail-feathers and containing a minute square of flexible, waterproof paper, on which had been photographed messages in characters so small as to be deciphered only by a microscope. Some of these would be official despatches, some private ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... their merits or demerits.[21] Darwin[22] mentions a tree near Siena de la Ventana to which the Indians paid homage as the altar of Walleechu; offerings of cigars, bread, and meat having been suspended upon it by threads. The tree was surrounded by bleached bones of horses that had been sacrificed. Mr. Tylor[23] speaks of an ancient cypress existing in Mexico, which he thus describes:—"All over its branches were fastened votive offerings of the Indians, hundreds of locks of coarse black ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... looked into this new-comer's small face with conflicting thoughts, and memories of the long white beach and the crashing surf at Porto Santo, and regret for things lost—so strangely mingled and inconsistent are the threads of human thought. At last he decided to turn his face elsewhere. In September 1488 he went to Lisbon, for what purpose it is not certain; possibly in connection with the affairs of his dead wife; and probably also in the expectation of seeing his brother ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... greater attractions for the American tourist than England. It was the home of his forefathers; its history is to a great extent the history of his own country; and he is bound to it by the powerful ties of consanguinity, language, laws, and customs. When the American treads the busy London streets, threads the intricacies of the Liverpool docks and shipping, wanders along the green lanes of Devonshire, climbs Alnwick's castellated walls, or floats upon the placid bosom of the picturesque Wye, he seems almost as much at home as in his native land. But, apart from these considerations of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... a wheat field ahead on either side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke already extended far away to the east and west—to the Byfleet pine woods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The road was dotted with people running ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... his power, that Osiris will shield him when the Hebrew sword rings on the Hivite spear. He will take to wife some fair cousin of Esau's house, a maid more beauteous far than those who drink the sweet waters of the south. Old Abram's daughters are fair and have dove's eyes; their lips are as threads of scarlet and their breasts like young roes that feed among the lilies. Does not the song say so? But those of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... myself. There is the whole universe to dream over, and one's life is spent in the perpetual doing of an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the sense of the significance of little things, the little loose variegated threads which are yet the stuff of which our picture of the universe ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... him," Aunt Celia intervened, with a very curious smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey a vision of threads weaving and interweaving a close, white mesh round ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... not gloomy, for there was a wide door, apparently unguarded, and another square opening cut in the rock to serve as a window. Through both openings light streamed in like taut threads of Yasmini's golden hair—strings of a golden zither, on which his own heart's promptings played ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the semblance of the ripening hand of time. She sprinkled the turf, short, fine, and vivid, with flowers both native and exotic. She called forth a thousand fountains to enrich the scene. Sometimes they crept beneath the turf in almost imperceptible threads; sometimes they ran beside the alleys, or crossed them in sportive wantonness; and sometimes you might see them in broader and more limpid currents rolling over a smooth and spotted bed. Now they rose from the soil in foamy violence, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement; so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,—the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,—all his waving mesh ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... to the home where love and affection awaited him, ready to make him forget what he had suffered. But the silver threads in his dark hair and a certain quiet seriousness in his manner, and in the hearts of all the dwellers in the old mansion, showed that the occurrence of that fatal 27th of September had thrown a shadow over them all which was not to ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... for the sentimental and the strategical threads in the Consulta negotiations. It was neither for sentiment nor for strategical advantage solely that Italy finally entered the war. Nevertheless, if the German Powers had frankly and freely from the start recognized Italy's position, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... how intimately that spiritual part of us, which is undying, can attach to itself and its operations the poorest objects of that external world around us, which is perishable. In the ravelled skein, the slightest threads are the hardest to follow. In analysing the associations and sympathies which regulate the play of our passions, the simplest and homeliest are the last that we detect. It is only when the shock comes, and the mind recoils before ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Vaucouleurs the clear waters of the Meuse flow freely between banks covered with rows of poplar trees and low bushes of alder and willow. Now they wind in sudden bends, now in gradual curves, for ever breaking up into narrow streams, and then the threads of greenish waters gather together again, or here and there are suddenly lost to sight underground. In the summer the river is a lazy stream, barely bending in its course the reeds which grow upon its shallow bed; and from the bank one may watch its lapping waters ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... exhaustless invention—without the highest admiration which can attend on a master of warfare. But it is equally impossible to suppress astonishment and indignation in following, or rather attempting to follow, the threads of obstinacy, duplicity, pride, and perfidy, which, during the same period, complicated, without strengthening, the tissue of his negotiations. It is only when we fix our eyes on the battles and marches of this wonderful campaign, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... without any weight and makes you feel happy and crinkly like bubbling water. There's no sun on the empty house— sly-looking house— you can't see in its windows that watch you out of their corners. Perhaps there's a big spider there spinning gray threads over the windows till they look like dead people's faces.... Jimmie says: Jimmie's hair is white as a white mouse. His lashes are gold as mama's wedding ring and his mouth feels cool and smooth like a flower wet with rain. You wouldn't believe Jimmie ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... crouching beast of prey, the silent and deadly reptile, the verdant swamp, flower-strewn and fathomless, wooing to destruction, the rushing torrent and resistless hurricane, are but a few of the dangers through which he threads his way. And when, at close of day, weary and hungry, foot-sore or saddle-galled, he halts for refreshment and repose, it seems but the beginning of his labours. Wood must be cut and collected, the fire lit, the meal prepared, often its very materials must be sought in pool and thicket, before the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... old-fashioned tongs. The curling irons were but a quarter of an inch in diameter and they were heated by thrusting them into the living embers of the kitchen fire. When Sary drew the comb through her scanty tresses they took on the appearance of carrot- colored cotton threads which had just been ripped out of an old garment—so crinkly and frizzed were the strands of hair. The flowered organdy dress that Eleanor had given Sary to wear for the great occasion of receiving a caller, was much too small for the buxom widow, and she was in great distress ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... however, the ear-rings. And he thereupon became very thoughtful. And when he saw that he obtained not the ear-rings even though he had adored the serpents, he then looked about him and beheld two women at a loom weaving a piece of cloth with a fine shuttle; and in the loom were black and white threads. And he likewise saw a wheel, with twelve spokes, turned by six boys. And he also saw a man with a handsome horse. And he began to address them ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... while Medenham was driving from Cavendish Square to Charing Cross, Cynthia was crossing London on a converging line from St. Pancras to the Savoy Hotel. Strange, indeed, was the play of Fate's shuttle that it should have so nearly reunited the unseen threads of their destinies! Again, a trifling circumstance conspired to detain Vanrenen in London. One of his business associates in Paris, rendered impatient by the failure of the great man to return as quickly as he had promised, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... long in preparation: but separately and with an individual distinction; without mixture,—for long almost without movement. That the elements thus separately prepared were of the greatest importance, and run everywhere like chief threads of the pattern through all our subsequent life, who can doubt? They give color and tone to every part of the figure. The very fact that they are so distinct and separately evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with them, but proves their distinct origin. ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist. None of our kings was so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost inextricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he was equally false and tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor, the friendship of the Flemish towns ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... promise which Luther had given to his Augustinian brethren, only a few weeks before, under pressure from Miltitz, remained as yet unfulfilled. Nor did Miltitz himself wish the threads of the web then spun to slip from his fingers. Even at this hour, with the consent and at the wish of the Elector, an interview had been arranged between Miltitz and Luther at the Castle of Lichtenberg (now Lichtenburg, in the district of Torgau), where the monks of St. Antony were ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... a commission to investigate the plot that had led to the attempted assassination. As a matter of fact there was no plot whatever, but the police officials and the detectives set to work with the utmost zeal to discover all the threads of the non-existing conspiracy. They did everything to deserve the fees they were paid; they got up in the small hours of the morning, searched one house after another, took copies of papers and of books they found, read diaries, personal letters, made extracts ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... that I almost fear to represent it as complicated by description. It consists of a stout hook fixed in the floor, to which the threads of the far end of the web are secured, a cord fastening the near end to the waist of the worker, who supplies, by dexterous rigidity, the necessary tension; a frame like a comb resting on the ankles, through which the threads pass, a hollow roll for ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... and proud, He threads e'en now the Grecian crowd— Whilst vengeance follows in pursuit, Gloats over his transgression's fruit. The very gods perchance he braves Upon the threshold of their fane,— Joins boldly in the human waves That haste yon ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... His face was so swart that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once imagined that a stream of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from some more Oriental race. I stammered out an apology for my intrusion, but told him how irresistible were such subtile threads as Schumann's "Carnival" had projected through the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cave was a picturesque one. We carried long wax altar-candles and our guides huge torches made of threads of aloe-fibre soaked in resin and wrapped round with cloth, in appearance and texture exactly like the legs and arms of mummies. As we went, the Indians sang Mexican songs to strange, monotonous, plaintive tunes, or raced about into dark corners shouting with laughter. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... are odd things enough in the water. Among others, certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants—Algae ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... his to follow Those threads through lovely curve and hollow, And muse a lifetime how they got Into that wild, mysterious ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... out into curls; sometimes it was divided into three parts, one of which fell down the back and the other two on either side of the cheeks. Huge periwigs, closely curled, with numberless cords maintained transversely by golden threads, rows of enamels, or pearls, were put on like helmets over young and lovely faces, which sought of art an aid which their ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... doors; and it looks very nice on the outside; for though the roses and honeysuckles which we have planted against it are only of this year's growth, yet it is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers; for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly beautiful but very useful, as their produce is immense. We have made a lodging-room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor, therefore we have covered it all over with matting. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... cups were of a troubled and clotted red, with alternating blotches of dark and light, some were variegated with white and yellow stains, some wore a film of rainbow colours, some glittered, shot with gold threads through the clear crystal, some were as if sapphires hung suspended in running water, some sparkled with the glint of stars, some were black and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... beams, Till, chilled with cold, they shade th' ethereal plain, Then on the thirsty earth descend in rain; How some, whose parts a slight contexture show, Sink hovering through the air in fleecy snow; How part is spun in silken threads, and clings Entangled in the grass is gluey strings; How others stamp to stones, with rushing sound Fall from their crystal quarries to the ground; How some are laid in trains, that kindled fly, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... to disentangle the threads of a discussion that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental thicket. At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... hands, and gathering about them their work, prepared to listen. The men were busy fashioning spears and carving on ivory, while the women scraped the fat from the hides of the hair seal and made them pliable or sewed muclucs with threads of sinew. Nam-Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. During the years of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he deemed, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... inhabited point on Jontarou, was beautiful and quiet, a pattern of vast but elegantly slender towers, each separated from the others by four or five miles of rolling parkland and interconnected only by the threads of transparent skyways. Near the horizon, just visible from the garden, rose the tallest towers of all, the green and gold spires of the Shikaris' Club, a center of Federation affairs and of social activity. From the aircar which brought them across Port Nichay the evening before, Telzey had seen ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... approvingly. He did understand that metaphor. A burning match will not ignite pure wool; threads of shoddy ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... the whole was crowned by a village hat of chipped straw. Amongst all the rosy and all the weathered faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower - girl and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it in a fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold that played in ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whole law, makes plain its inmost essence and its tremendous alternatives. As in the closing strains of some great symphony, the themes which have run through the preceding movements are woven together in the final burst of music. Let us try to discover the component threads of the web. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... some imaginary resemblance, some fancied recollection? The thing was elusive, and so he gave it up, aware that if his brain had played him no trick, there was here another confirmation of his hope that he was on the true scent. Were the threads converging? ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... well what grandpa's favourite was; it was one of the first pieces she had learned by heart. So she played for him "Silver Threads ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... in public proved nearly fatal to Her Majesty on her return to her apartment. There her real feelings broke forth, and their violence was so great as to cause the bracelets on her wrists and the pearls in her necklace to burst from the threads and settings, before her women and the ladies in attendance could have time to take them off. She remained many hours in a most alarming state of strong convulsions. Her clothes were obliged to be cut from her body, to give her ease; but as soon as she was undressed, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... her hair and put on a fresh afternoon percale. To see Myra with her thin brown face, her slicked-back black hair which showed white threads like ravellings, in her afternoon house-dress of gray percale, one would never have taken her for a bride. Yet Myra had a very bridal feeling, sitting in her own home, with her own sewing, instead of running the machine in the shop, as ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... place they were wearing out, and, secondly, they seemed—as we say—to be 'getting too large' for them, and to hang loosely and untidily upon their gaunt frames. The captain's eyes looked larger and sadder, and his voice grew hollow at sunset, and threads of white began to show among his dark curls, and increased in number ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... great degree on bodily temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him in contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... substituted for pebbles, as were also beads of enamel, either round, pear-shaped, or cylindrical: the necklaces were terminated and a uniform distance maintained between the rows of beads, by several slips of wood, bone, ivory, porcelain, or terra-cotta, pierced with holes, through which ran the threads. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... pointed out to me that although the actual work of the Army on these women's questions is 'more than just a little,' it had, as it were, only touched their fringe. Yet even this 'fringe' has many threads, seeing that over 44,000 of these women's cases have been helped in one way or another since this branch of the home work ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... ignorant of the unmitigated savagery of the thing, I said more than that, in my folly. "I'd have ye love John Cather," says I, "as ye love me." 'Tis a curious thing to look back upon. That I should snarl the threads of our destinies! 'Tis an innocency hard to credit. But yet John Cather and I had no sensitive intuition to warn us. How should we—being men? 'Twas for Judith to perceive the inevitable catastrophe; ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... the eyepiece of an important telescope, and opticians preserve a particular race of spiders, that their webs may be taken for that purpose. The spider lines are strained across the best instruments at Greenwich and elsewhere; and when the spinners of these beautifully fine threads disturbed the accuracy of the tube in the western wing of the old Observatory, it was said to be but fair retaliation for the robberies ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... all his multifarious schemes and occupations he found it convenient to cover himself by elaborate mystifications, and was as anxious (it would seem) to deceive posterity as to impose upon contemporaries; and hence it is as difficult clearly to disentangle the twisted threads of his complex history as to give an intelligible picture of the result of the investigation. The publication of the Iliad, however, marks a kind of central point in his history. Pope has reached independence, and become the acknowledged head of the literary world; and it will be convenient ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 'alayk ya Fula'n—"White (or happy) be it to thee!" naming the person. Amongst these votive stones we picked up copper-stained quartz like that of 'Aynunah, fine specimens of iron, and the dove-coloured serpentine, with silvery threads, so plentiful in the Wady Surr. The Wasm in most cases showed some form of a cross, which is held to be a potent charm by the Sinaitic Bedawin; and on two detached water-rolled pebbles were distinctly inscribed lH and Vl, which looked exceedingly like Europe. Apparently the custom ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... cigarettes; and she was often quite drunk as she mumbled her Ave Maria, and told her beads on her knees before going to bed in the evening. Still the other inmates of the house appeared to have great respect for her; and it was evident that she held the threads of whatever business they might ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... Sattin Bonnetts and Hatts, Pastboard Stomachers, Cotton, Thread and Worsted Mens and Womens Hose, a great Variety of Ribbons, Necklaces and Earings, black and white Silk Mitts, Kid and Lamb Gloves and Mitts, French ditto, Cotton, Cambrick and Scotch Threads, with a great Variety of Millenary Goods, too many to enumerate. —> The said Todd and Purcell having spare Room in said House, can accommodate young Ladies with Board and Lodging at ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... he stood on deck, his comely Indian features were lit up by a good humoured smile. He looked a giant, brave and active. He was teeming all over with youthful vigour. His eyes were black like polished jet, sparkling and deep set. His mouth large, square and firm; and his hair like threads of coarse, black silk, brushed back from a low, narrow forehead, hung loosely down over his ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... was not a sewing-machine, like you and me; he was a Gobelin loom. The threads and the colors came into him FROM THE OUTSIDE; outside influences, suggestions, EXPERIENCES (reading, seeing plays, playing plays, borrowing ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in his mind and started up his complex and admirable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... faded ribbon string You used to wear about your throat; And of this pale, this perished thing, I think I know the threads by rote. God help such love! To touch your hand, To loiter where your feet might fall, You marvellous girl, my soul would stand The worst of hell—its ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... in a garret in London, teaching false art in a third-rate school some of the time, doing penny-a-line journalistic work when I got the chance; clerk for a month or two in a brewer's office and sacked for incapacity—those are a few of the real threads in my life." ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of kerosene and rotten apples that came from the heap of notes. He was exhausted by the jolting ride in the chaise, tired out and sleepy. His head was heavy, his eyes would hardly keep open and his thoughts were tangled like threads. If it had been possible he would have been relieved to lay his head on the table, so as not to see the lamp and the fingers moving over the heaps of notes, and to have let his tired sleepy thoughts go still more ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... get elsewhere. What he had done for him had been still easier to do for other clients—ignorant men and women who knew nothing of business, and left it all to him, gratefully pleased with the good interest he paid them. The web had been woven with almost invisible threads at the first, but the finest thread among them was a ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... and take along with it the neighboring edifices on both sides of the street. There were also the hidden possibilities of betrayal, of treachery, for we knew that scores of Wall Street's most ingenious minds were bent on unravelling and exposing the secret threads ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... yonder are others and more numerous, who have no precautions to take before murdering the unarmed prey. In the preliminary struggle, I know some who grab their victims by the neck, by the rostrum, by the antennae, by the caudal threads; I know some who throw them on their backs, some who lift them breast to breast, some who operate on them in the vertical position, some who attack them lengthwise and crosswise, some who climb on their backs or ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose—bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... Berkeley, we left the buoyed course and ran the rest of the way to Eppes Creek in a narrow side channel that threads among the shallows close along shore. It is what the river-men call a "slue channel"; and we had to take frequent soundings to follow it. Looking back at dejected old Berkeley, we were glad to know that a new owner of the place was about to ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... he was. Not he. He sniffed, looked on me, and sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the gear. It was a mucluc of the Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads, and devoid of beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that was remarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me of walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore so marvellous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles this hair ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any further, no little threads that ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... metal together; in the middle I fastened a thick iron wire which reached to the middle of the flask B; upon the point of this wire C, I stuck a small wax candle, whose wick I had twisted together out of three slender threads. I then lighted the candle, and at the same time placed over it the inverted flask B, which I then pressed very deep into the mass. As soon as this was done, I filled the dish with water. After the flame was extinguished and everything had become quite cold, I opened the flask in the same ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... lockes like threads of golde, Appeard to each man's sight; Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles, Did ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... a barn to spin; Pussy came by, and popped her head in; "Shall I come in, and cut your threads off?" "Oh, no, kind sir, you would snap ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... that looked wrong; they look wrong still, and will always look wrong if your present attitude is maintained. I wish to see you, that we may, together, review these unhappy questions, and out of a tangled skein bring even threads, if possible. Let me hear from ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... Her wide brown eyes were bright and fearless and honest. The faint color came and went under the clear skin as freely as the heart could send it, and though her hair was brown and soft, there were ruddy tints among the coils, that flashed out unexpectedly here and there like threads of red gold twined in ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... only have to substitute a bloc for a man. But in France and England, where the centralisation is far less complete, the success of the socialistic party and its achievement of supreme power would mean an almost entire subversal of all established methods of administration, for all the threads would have first to be gathered into ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... all municipal, provincial, State, and national organizations form but a few strands in the universal web he has woven. Custom officials, revenue officers, the militia of the States, the army, the navy, the personnel of every city, State, and national legislative bodies form interdependent threads in the mesh he is master of; and, like a big beneficent spider, he sits in the center of his web, able to tell by the slightest tremor of any thread ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... When the threads of English development get entangled in a knot, which he seemingly can no longer cut by more political phrases, M. Guizot takes refuge in religious phrases, in the armed intervention of God. Thus the spirit of God suddenly ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Threads—When 2 threads are used, twist the one with which the stitches are to be made round the little ...
— The Bath Tatting Book • P. P.
... perfectly true to this confidence. She never confounded relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling any. An entire intimacy, which seemed to make both sharers of the whole horizon of each others' and of all truth, did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the history that an equal ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... he find so many tangled threads, So many dislocated purposes, So many failures in the race ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... that is ever kind said yesterday: "Your well-beloved's hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise, Though now it's hard, till trouble is at an end; And so be patient, be wise and patient, friend." But, heart, there is no comfort, not ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... would blow, the air being as fickle as the rain; and now and then we would see a slender column of dust, a thousand or two feet high, marching across the desert, apparently not more than two feet in diameter, and wavering like the threads of moisture that tried in vain to reach the earth as rain. Of life there was not much to be seen in our desert route. In the first day we encountered no habitation except the ranch-house mentioned, and saw no human being; and the second ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... accomplishing all this. Father did not notice that he loved him in a special manner; and it was really jolly to live on earth, so there was no need for him to make believe. The threads of his soul stretched themselves to all—to the sun, to the knife and the cane he was peeling; to the beautiful and enigmatic distance which he saw from the top of the iron roof; and it was hard for him to separate himself from all that was not himself. When the grass ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... egoism, in the finding and losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of Peer Gynt Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded, because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... usefully attacked:—there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... song; perhaps the only one he had known, for he had shoved that blest cart of his since a boy of thirteen; he had worn himself as threadbare as the clothes on his back, and at last the threads had snapped. He had died of old age—in his thirties. And his junk-cart, with its bells, stood, silent and unmanned, upon the vacant lot just ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... nuts having the same number and size of threads are available, use them in place of the outside nuts. They are easier to turn when inserting a saw blade in a hole or when removing broken blades. —Contributed by W. A. Scranton, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... contest yonder? See I miracles or pastimes? Beauteous urchins, five in number, 'Gainst five sisters fair contending,— Measured is the time they're beating— At a bright enchantress' bidding. Glitt'ring spears by some are wielded, Threads are ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... asked me to go into a small drawing-room, where a surprise awaited me. On entering I saw on a table, protected under a long glass box, the Niagara Falls in miniature, with the rocks looking like pebbles. A large glass represented the sheet of water, and glass threads represented the Falls. Here and there was some foliage of a hard, crude green. Standing up on a little hillock of ice was a figure intended for me. It was enough to make any one howl with horror, for it was all so hideous. I ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... its youth. Nika and her mother had retired to the room called 'Golden,' because of the rich chasings of gold on its walls of purest marble, and the threads of gold and vermilion which interlaced in chaste design the polished floor of ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... too, that silver and gold were as common as the stones that he saw lying in the streets, as he rode through Jerusalem in his open chariot, clothed in white, threads of glittering gold mixed ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... upon which the score of 'Siegfried' is built. Had Wagner trusted merely to the casual inspiration of the moment, it is possible that the new work would have harmonised but ill with the old; as it was, he had but to gather up the broken threads of his unfinished work to find himself once more under the same inspiration as before. His theory still held good; his materials were the same; he had but to work under the same conditions to produce work of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... once part disappeared out of memory like a mist that recedes into a faint cloud and lies faint and far on the boundaries of the day; my own personal life, to which I had been bound by such a multitude of gossamer threads that when I tried to unloose one I seemed to weave a hundred in its place, seemed to sink below the surface of consciousness. I ceased to think, to feel; I was conscious only of the vast and glorious world of tree and sky which surrounded me. I felt a ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... summer boarders), which did duty for a village inn, I found Mrs. Halsey; a notable housewife, with a strong taste for ancestry, and an uncultivated world of romance still brightening her soft brown eyes. She knew all the threads in the story that I was following; and the interest with which she spoke made it evident that she had often woven them together in the winter evenings on patterns ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... anatomy, to all the well-deserved reproach for unpardonable perversities of phrase and outrages on rhythm, there is left to us the consciousness that a striking human transaction has been seized by a vigorous and profound imagination, that its many diverse threads have been wrought into a single, rich, and many-coloured web of art, in which we may see traced for us the labyrinths of passion and indifference, stupidity and craft, prejudice and chance, along which truth and justice have to find a devious and doubtful way. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... lives on, and with our woe Weaves golden threads of joy and peace, And somewhere we will surely know From sorrow and pain the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... inscription,—which, however, I found too illegible to allow of its being copied; and over the tomb was spread a pall of silk, striped in red, green, and white, but much faded. Against a pillar, which supports the roof, were hung rows of coloured rags and threads of yarn, with snail-shells and sea-shells strung among them by way of further ornament. A wooden bowl, at one end of the tomb, was probably intended to receive alms for the support of the devotee who claims the place, and who practises the curing of ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... 2-ply single is S-twisted. The fiber is probably of some species of agave. The outer two of the three heavy cords form the selvage cords. The center cord was split into its two component yarns, and forms the beginning of the inner warp threads. Two-ply cords were introduced rapidly to make a maximum of the 27 present at its greatest width. Introduction of the warp elements was accomplished very evenly, producing no distortion of the flat surface. Twining was done with ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... of the beard explains at once why the necktie, always crumpled and rolled by the gestures of a disquiet head, has its own beard, infinitely softer than that of the good old man, and formed of threads scratched from ...
— A Street Of Paris And Its Inhabitant • Honore De Balzac
... composed of a white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles beside the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... so great was the sorrow of the Infante that he and all his company began to lament aloud. And Doa Sol, when she beheld her father, took off her tire, and threw it upon the ground and began to tear her hair, which was like threads of gold. But Doa Ximena held her hand and said, Daughter, you do ill, in that you break the command of your father, who laid his curse upon all who should make lamentation for him. Then Doa Sol kissed the hand of the Cid ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape—art considered theoretically and technically, historically, philosophically ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various |
