"Tambourine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fault being a tendency to strong and highly colored language. To make the marching more effective and develope a better sense of time, I instituted a very simple and rudimentary form of orchestra with a triangle, a tambourine, and finally a drum. When the latter instrument made its first appearance Jacob sought a secluded spot by the piano and gave himself up to a fit of fairly courteous but excessive mirth. "A drum!" he exclaimed, between his fits of laughter. "What'll yer have next? This is a ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... kind of tambourine, ornamented with fan-like feathers, in the lodge. Fair Cloud used to play upon it, or rather shake it in a rhythmic way. There was also a war-drum in the lodge, and an Indian called Blackhoof used to beat ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the Calenders had satisfied their hunger, they offered to play to their hostesses, if there were any instruments in the house. The ladies were delighted at the idea, and Sadie went to see what she could find, returning in a few moments laden with two different kinds of flutes and a tambourine. Each Calender took the one he preferred, and began to play a well-known air, while the ladies sang the words of the song. These words were the gayest and liveliest possible, and every now and then the singers had to stop to indulge the laughter which almost choked them. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... timbrel, a rustic musical instrument made of a thin strip of wood about four inches wide brought round in the shape of a tube or drum, and having small metal discs fixed in holes at regular intervals like those of a tambourine. It is generally held in the right hand and struck with ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... A tambourine is being played near by, and Fox, with a heart much lighter than his complexion, is indulging ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... sustaining; but her countenance was not to be mistaken. It was the same ballad-singer that had twice crossed her path, and given her mysterious intimations of the lurking mischief that surrounded her. When the rest of the performances were concluded, she seized a tambourine, and, tossing it aloft, danced alone to the melody of her own voice. In the course of her dancing, she approached to where Inez reclined: and as she struck the tambourine, contrived dexterously to throw a folded paper on the couch. Inez seized ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... sir! sheer!" and muttering something about non compos mentis, the Lieutenant stalked away; while the Down Easter beat a melancholy retreat, holding up his pan like a tambourine, and making dolorous music on ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the names of all the ancient Irish musical instruments as follows:—Cruit, a harp; Timpan, a drum, or tambourine; Corn, a trumpet; Stoc, a clarion; Pipai, the pipes; Fidil, the fiddle. He adds: "All those are mentioned in an ancient poem in the Book of Leinster, a MS. of about the year 1150, now in the Library of Trinity College. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... them, like Deborah, Beat the tambourine and danced While she sang a hymn in praise Of the slayer ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... d'Amalfi accompanied himself, in dancing, with castanets. Corinne before she began saluted the assembly most gracefully with both her hands, then turning round upon her heel took the tambourine which the Prince Amalfi presented her with. She then began to dance, striking the air upon the tambourine, and there was in all her motions, an agility, a grace, a mixture of modesty and voluptuousness, which might give an idea of that power which the Bayadores exercise over the imagination ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... through the air, vivifying, healthier than those of May, having the odor of hay and the odor of flowers. Two singers of the highway are there, leaning on the graveyard wall, and they intone, with a tambourine and a guitar, an old seguidilla of Spain, bringing here the warm and somewhat Arabic gaieties of ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... they found had with him a little Italian girl with a red silk handkerchief knotted about her head. She sang and played on a tambourine, and Gabriel persuaded his companion to watch and ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... the round table in the centre of the room, on which lay a tambourine and a little green box. Lagune developed unsuspected lengths of knobby wrist and finger directing his guests to their seats. Lewisham was to sit next to him, between him and the Medium; beyond the Medium sat Smithers with Miss Heydinger on ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... not to be allured by flattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst them; she set her delicate pearly teeth tight, and vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous oath that she was tired; that she was sick of them; that she was no strolling player to caper for them with a tambourine; and with that declaration made her way out alone into the little open court under the stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... brought from the well in Christiansborg. Astounding and full of effect was the multitude of sweet young girls who showed themselves. Many of the youngest students who had feminine features were dressed as ladies; some of them might even be called pretty. Who that then saw the fair one with the tambourine can have forgotten her? The company crowded round the ladies. The professors paid court to them with all propriety, and, what was best of all, some ladies who were less successful became jealous of the others. Otto was much excited; the noise, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... last. "Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, "great is the power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the green leaves of ivy twisted about the sacred wands, and the wheeling motion of the tambourine whirled round in the air, and the long hair floating unbound in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the goddess, when the moon ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... It would be no more absurd to give an idiot a tambourine and call him a musician—he would be an idiot all the same. So with the clerk, the laborer, the hod-carrier, the teacher; he remains the same in spite of all the polished arms, resplendent uniforms, and pompous titles bestowed ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... possessed the heads of the Church of England in expecting to appeal with success to the educated people of the present day, while still declining to move with the course of thought of the people. Already the braying of a trombone out of tune, and the barbarous jingle of a tambourine, had absorbed some hundred thousand of possible church-goers; and though, of course, it was impossible for sensible men and women—the people whom the Church should endeavor to grapple to its soul with hooks of steel—to look, except with amused sadness, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... rival spooks. They interfered, but they did not produce silence or darkness. On the contrary, as soon as Eliphalet and the officer went into the house, there began at once a series of spiritualistic manifestations, a regular dark seance. A tambourine was played upon, a bell was rung, and a flaming banjo ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... 'singing-house' provided for Jack's amusement when ashore (U.T. 5) consisted of a fiddle and tambourine; while at dances the instruments were fiddles and harps. It was the harps that first aroused Mr. Jingle's curiosity, as he met them being carried up the staircase of The Bull at Rochester, while, shortly after, the tuning ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... than of a representation. A woman in a voluminous white silk dress and a black mantilla pirouettes in the middle of a dusky room, to the accompaniment of her own castanets and that of a row of men and women who sit in straw chairs against the whitewashed wall and thrum upon guitar and tambourine or lift other castanets into the air. She appears almost colossal, and the twisted and inflated folds of her long dress increase her volume. She simpers, in profile, with a long chin, while she slants back at a dangerous angle, and the lamplight (it proceeds from below, as if ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... laugh and we'll quaff without measure. The toast and the joke shall go joyfully round, With love and good humour the room shall resound. The slipper be hid—the stocking let fall, And rare blindman's-buff shall keep up the ball; Whilst the merry spinette, and the sweet tambourine, Shall heighten and perfect the gay festive scene. Such mirth and such rapture never were known, I'm surprised that so long you will tarry; I prithee, Ulrica—prithee, come down; For the sport of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... round with the tambourine, the golden youth of Castel-le-Gachis turned from her coldly. Here and there a single halfpenny was forthcoming; the net result of a collection never exceeded half a franc; and the Maire himself, after seven different applications, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slightest perceptible tones were sufficient to produce an inexplicable anxiety. There was a certain woman of fifty who was fond of the music of the clarionet and flute, but was not able to listen to the sound of a bell or tambourine. Frank knew a man who ran out of church at the beginning of the sounds of an organ, not being able to tolerate them. Pope could not imagine music producing any pleasure. The harmonica has been noticed to produce fainting in females. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... holding of Conventions, and speech-making in concert-rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performances of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces, on banjos, the tambourine, and bones. But the joke is becoming stale. People are getting cloyed with these performances, and are looking for some healthier and more intellectual amusement. The ludicrous is wearing away, and disgust is taking the place of pleasurable ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... find him at home when I next called. One afternoon, when nearing my own home, I met him in one of his favorite disguises,—a long blue swallow-tailed coat, striped cotton trousers, large turn-over collar, blacked face, and white hat, carrying a tambourine. Of course to others the disguise was perfect, although it was known to myself, and I passed him—according to an old understanding between us—without the slightest recognition, trusting to a later explanation. At another time, as I was making a professional ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... and a large fireplace with a kettle to correspond, round which the working men have congregated time out of mind on a winter's night, refreshed by draughts of good strong beer, and cheered by the sounds of a fiddle and tambourine: the Jolly Boatmen having been duly licensed by the Mayor and corporation, to scrape the fiddle and thumb the tambourine from time, whereof the memory of the oldest inhabitants goeth not to the contrary. Now Nicholas Tulrumble had been reading pamphlets on crime, and parliamentary ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Seasons and their attendants—Spring, with armfuls of blossoms and cherubs letting loose the doves; Summer, whose sprites are shooting down arrows of fervid heat; Autumn, with his grapes and sheaves, and his followers festive with lute and tambourine; and old Winter, moving through angry clouds, while his children pour out the showers and blow blasts from their shells. In the room of the Committee on Naval Affairs on both sides as you enter rise grayly the vestibules of vast temples, typifying, perhaps, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... in a double cotillion, to the moving strains of a violin and horn, the lively jingle of a string of sleigh-bells, and the genial snoring of a tambourine. Then came dextrous displays in the dances of our forbears, who followed the fiddle to the Fox-chase Inn or Garden of Gray's Ferry. There were French Fours, Copenhagen jigs, Virginia reels,—spirited figures blithely stepped. And the grave-faced, square-jawed Elders seemed ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... must, we were certain, be among the crowd assembled to hear our names shouted out on the still air. We were greatly affected by the publicity of the occasion; but the village heard the announcement, both of our names and of our loss, with the phlegm of indifference. "Vingt francs pour avoir tambourine mademoiselle!" This was an item which a week later, in madame's little bill, was not ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... voice singing something about la vendemmia; and though Lucy had never learnt Italian, her wonderful dream knowledge made her sure that this meant the vintage, the grape-gathering; and presently there came along a little girl dancing and beating a tambourine, with a basket fastened to her back, filled to overflowing with big, beautiful bunches of grapes: and a whole party of other children, all loaded with as many grapes as they could carry, came leaping and singing after her; their black hair loose, or sometimes twisted with vine-leaves; ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of a minstrel first part. "Gentlemen, be seated." The opening chorus was not half over before Alfred was laughing as heartily as ever boy laughed. The antics of the fellow with the tambourine who hit the singer sitting next to him on the head with it in time with the pattering of the sheepskin on his knees, hands and head, the assumed anger of the singer as he again hit him a resounding thwack, the finish, where the man with the bones and tambo worked all over ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went up stairs in the dark, with my head tingling,—from Mrs. Joe's thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,—I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking questions, and I was ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and the loft, running over our heads with a dolorous rattle. The gentleman who moved the mechanism was a sacristan in red cotton drawers and a lace cassock, who sat in full view in the niche behind the high altar. There seemed to be a spirited rivalry between him and the tambourine artists as to which could contribute the most noise, and I think a fair judge would have granted it a ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... generally been military material. Perhaps the vicissitudes of my life have made me insensible to what are called reverses of fortune, for, when a child, I remember sleeping on the moonlit flags of Paris, with no pillow except my tambourine; and I remember it not without delight. Let us sit down. I feel I am talking in an excited, injudicious, egotistical, rhapsodical, manner. I thought I was calm, and I meant to have been clear. But the fact is, I am ashamed of myself. I am doing a wrong thing, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... certain sort—of a certain sort. "The Blood Drinker,"' added Mr Crummles with a prophetic sigh, '"The Blood Drinker" will die with that girl; and she's the only sylph I ever saw, who could stand upon one leg, and play the tambourine on her other knee, LIKE ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... fellows composing a man-of-war's crew. A big landsman from Utica, and a dare-devil topman from Cape Cod, are the leading vocalists; Symmes, the ship's cook, plays an excellent violin; and the commodore's steward is not to be surpassed upon the tambourine. A little black fellow, whose sobriquet is Othello, manages the castanets, and there is a tolerable flute played by one of the afterguard. The concerts usually commence with sentimental songs, such as "Home, sweet ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... passed by the men in smoking, and relating their adventures, and by the women in singing and beating the tambourine, whilst my poor master and I were left to ponder over our forlorn situation. The mark of favour which I had just received had set my imagination to work, and led me to consider my condition as not entirely desperate. But in vain I endeavoured to cheer up the spirits of my companion; he did ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... you think was the tune they danced to? "The drunken Sailor"—sometimes "Jim Crow," Tails in the way—and some got pinched, too, 'Cause they were too long. What do you think they had for a fiddle? An old Banjo with a hole in the middle, A Tambourine made out of a riddle, And that's ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... well as children use the drum or tambourine in their games. They are fond of notching the edges of two bits of whalebone, and whirling them round their heads to make a humming sound, just as English boys do; and they also make toys like wind-mills, with arms to turn round with ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... singing does make me feel so badly. Just step over and say I will send them a barrel of watermelons and cantaloupes, and those Mrs. Brown sent me too, if they will get up a dance or make any kind of cheerful noise. There is a tambourine among the children's toys: you can beat ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... know its name —could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers I think it counts ten for the opposing side; ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... public and private Bodies of Citizens, from the highest to the lowest, march; the very Hawkers, one finds, have ceased bawling for one day. The neighbouring Villages turn out: their able men come marching, to village fiddle or tambourine and triangle, under their Mayor, or Mayor and Curate, who also walk bespaded, and in tricolor sash. As many as one hundred and fifty thousand workers: nay at certain seasons, as some count, two hundred and fifty thousand; for, in the afternoon ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... painting of a naked Hermaphroditus. In his right hand is a little torch reversed; his left arm rests on the shoulders of Silenus, who appears to accompany his songs on the lyre, whilst a winged Cupid sounds the double flute. On the other side is a Bacchante with a thyrsus and tambourine, and near her a little Satyr, who also holds ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... excelled me so much, that I sat down upon the ground, and burst out a-crying; he could actually complete an entrechat of ten distinct beats, which I could not accomplish! However, I was well consoled by him; for he invented, for Aldridge's benefit, The Tambourine Dance, which had uncommon success. The dresses were Chinese. Twelve assistants held small drums furnished with bells; these were struck in the air by the dancer's feet when held as high as their arms could reach. This Aldridge performed, ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... To the drawingroom, of course. [She goes out. Onward, Christian Soldiers, on the concertina, with tambourine accompaniment, is heard when the door opens]. Are ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... there is Lubin and Javotte already there— Hark! 'tis the fife and the jerked tambourine— Mother and granddad sitting all steady there, Smiling and nodding, enjoying the scene. They will delighted be, While all benighted we Dance in the moonlight that checkers ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the smoker's outfit being completed by a neat pile of rectangular clippings from newspapers. On the shelves of the whatnot were some fragments of a dead pie, the relics of a "Fifteen-Puzzle," a pink Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with part of a girl's face still visible in aged colours, about two thirds of a hot-water bag, a tintype of Hedrick, and a number of books: several by Henty, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," "100 Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform," "The Jungle Book," ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... that was her hour! His eyes rested idly on a little old coloured print of a Bacchante, with flowing green scarf, shaking a tambourine at a naked Cupid, who with a baby bow and arrow in his hands, was gazing up at her. He turned it over; on the back was written in a pointed, scriggly hand, "To my little friend.—E. H." Fiorsen drew smoke deep down into his lungs, expelled it slowly, and went to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dream, all right. Who ever saw a princess rigged out for the tambourine act and mixin' with a lot of chestnut roasters? But old whiskers had the evidence down pat, though. As he told it, she was a sure enough princess, so far as the tag went, only the family had been in ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... thickened and hung visibly in mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair; her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay, palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs. The folds hung from her waist, and she wore above them a short close bodice like a Bengali woman. Her head covering had slipped, and clung only to the knot of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... become an efficient spiritual energy; and the higher the organism the grander the power that is developed, man being the most perfect organization evolves the grandest spiritual power, as a superior violin evolves finer music than a tambourine. But the intelligence and will of man are only phenomena, like the music, and have no existence beyond that of the organism that produces them. This is substantially the theory of materialists generally, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... I should like to relate here that one of his seemingly gross but really innocent diversions was occasionally visiting a certain black house of prostitution, of which there were many in St. Louis. Here while he played a flute and some one else a tambourine or small drum, he would have two or three of the inmates dance in some weird savage way that took one instanter to the wilds of Central Africa. There was, so far as I know, no payment of any kind made in connection with this. He ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the house," said Pen, grimly pursuing the simile, "forty besetting thieves in the shape of lurking cares and enemies in ambush and passions in arms, my Morgiana will dance round me with a tambourine, and kill all my rogues and thieves with a smile. Won't she?" But Pen looked as if he did not believe that she would. "Ah, Blanche," he continued after a pause, "don't be angry; don't be hurt at my truth-telling. Don't you see that I always ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... box with a sprig of mint planted in it; although they watered it every morning, it scarcely grew, for there was no sun. One day the woman and child disappeared together with their pretty poodle; they left nothing in their quarters except a worn-out, broken tambourine. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... dancer, such as may still be seen performing in Egypt, and we know that even in the fifth dynasty dancers called Denga (Dinka tribe?) were brought as curiosities to Egypt. B[e]s was often figured as dancing with a tambourine; he was the god of the dance, and protected infants from evil and witchcraft; hence he appears on the imposts of the capitals of the birth-house at Dendereh. The animal whose skin he wears is the cynaelurus guttatus, whose name is bes. Possibly ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... the country inn-doors, attract the fiddler, and he strolls on his own account, when the payment of salaries is suspended. A veteran actor was wont to relate his experiences of fifty years ago as a member of the Stratford-upon-Avon company, when the orchestra consisted only of a fife and a tambourine, the instrumentalists performing, as they avowed, "not from notes but entirely by ear." Presently the company removed to Warwick for the race week. But here the managerial difficulties increased—no band whatever could be obtained! This was the more distressing ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... terms in Gypsy, might be carried to a great length—much farther, indeed, than the Gypsies are in the habit of carrying it: a slack-rope dancer might be termed bittitardranoshellokellimengro, or slightly- drawn-rope-dancing fellow; a drum, duicoshtcurenomengri, or a thing beaten by two sticks; a tambourine, angustrecurenimengri, or a thing beaten by the fingers; and a fife, muipudenimengri, or thing blown by the mouth. All these compound words, however, would be more or less indefinite, and far beyond the comprehension ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... as usually falls to the lot of a country community. Old black Ebenezer—but whose name had also been cut down for convenience sake to Sam, by the old Captain—did the orchestral duties upon his fiddle, which, aided by a youngster on the triangle and another on the tambourine, formed quite "a full band" for the occasion, and dancing ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... to give it a start, in the shape of 'fat-heads' and simpletons; that was a fair description, he said, of the Paphlagonians beyond Abonutichus; they were mostly superstitious and well-to-do; one had only to go there with some one to play the flute, the tambourine, or the cymbals, set the proverbial mantic sieve [Footnote: I have no information on Coscinomancy or sieve- divination. 'This kind of divination was generally practised to discover thieves ... They tied a thread ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... train. And while I was waiting for the next I must 'a' et something poison. I was awful sick. I guess it was ten days or so before I come to enough to know where I was. I've had hard luck, bo—I'll say I have. I was robbed while I was sick, and only for a tambourine queen I got acquainted with, I guess I'd 'a' died. They're treacherous as hell, though. Long as she thought I had money—oh, well, they's no use expecting kindness in this world. Or gratitude. I'm always helpin' folks out and gittin' kicked and cussed for my pay. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... same place was the singing of a novena not outside but within some of the village houses before a kind of altar gaily decorated and bearing at the top a waxen image of the Child Jesus. "Close to it the orchestra was grouped—a 'cello, two violins, a guitar, and a tambourine. The kneeling women huddled in front of the altar. All had on their heads their black mantelline. They began at once singing the novena stanzas appointed for that day; the tune was primitive and very odd: the first half of the stanza was quick and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... that instruments of percussion are the natural exponents of such primitive music, and that, therefore, the East has its drum, gong and cymbals, Arabia its tambourine, Spain its castanets. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... long fingers upon the goatskin of his instrument, while Kouidah, the boy who played upon the little glasses and shook the tambourine of reeds, slipped forth to tell in the city what ...
— Halima And The Scorpions - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the gulf, the admiral had sought to make friends with some Indians who approached him in a large canoe, by ordering his men to come upon the poop, and dance to the sound of a tambourine; but this, naturally enough, appears to have been mistaken for a warlike demonstration, and it was answered by a flight of ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... but one couple was dancing. Whether they had been sent there by advice of Agricola is not certain. Snatching a tambourine from a bystander as he entered, the stranger thrust the male dancer aside, faced the woman and began a series of saturnalian antics, compared with which all that had gone before was tame and sluggish; and as he finally leaped, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... have meant the Bhunjia tribe of Raipur, who as already stated are an offshoot of the Baigas. Colonel Dalton describes the dances of the Bhuiyas of Chota Nagpur as follows: [372] "The men have each a wide kind of tambourine. They march round in a circle, beating these and singing a very simple melody in a minor key on four notes. The women dance opposite to them with their heads covered and bodies much inclined, touching each other like soldiers in line, but not holding hands or wreathing arms like the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... morn till night, during which time I got half of my lozens broken, by their knocking one another's heads through, I was obliged to get quit of them at last, by selling them to a man and his son, that kept dancing dogs, Pan's pipes, and a tambourine; and that made a livelihood by tumbling on a carpet in the middle of the street, the one playing "Carle now the King's come," as the other whummled head over heels, and then jumped up into the air, cutting capers, to show that not a bone of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, which pervaded even the details of her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he felt that such accessories would ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... also witnesses of some proofs of the skill of a Tchouktchi conjurer, or chaman, who went behind a curtain, from which his audience soon heard a voice like the howl of a wild beast, accompanied by blows on a tambourine with a whale-bone. The curtain then rose, revealing the sorcerer balancing himself, and accompanying his own voice with blows on his drum, which he held close to his ear. Presently he flung off his jacket, leaving himself naked to the waist, took a polished stone, which he ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of this "delicate flower who lived upon sunbeams," we must shake off the spell of her strange personality and ask seriously what manner of mortal she was. This inquiry is the more imperative since the doings of the tambourine players and automatic writers, of whom so much is made in certain quarters to-day, pale into insignificance beside the story ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... awakened applause, her husband leaped up, and gave the signal: "Fire a volley!" Whereupon his troops gave a tremendous cheer, followed by a roll of drums and a blast of trumpets. The chief agency which the army employs to gather its audiences is music—whether it be the rattling of the tambourine, or the martial sound of a brass band. Some of their hymns are little better than pious doggerel, and they do not hesitate to add to Perronet's grand hymn, "All hail the power of Jesus name," such a ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the old reliable Tug was entered, among others; and in the Rope-Climb he ran up the cord like a monkey on a stick, and touched the tambourine that hung twenty-five feet in the air before any of his rivals reached their goal, and in better form than ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... Lincoln, George Washington, and other great departed whose names are taken in vain every day by small-bore politicians, do not return and whack these persons over the heads with a tambourine, is almost—as Anatole France remarked in an essay on Flaubert—is almost an argument against the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... flattering and tender cronies, had started celebrating even since last evening; had caroused the whole night through and now had carried their noisy merrymaking out to the market. The hired musicians—two fiddles, a first and a second, and a tambourine—were strumming a monotonous but a lively, bold, daring and cunning tune. Some of the wives were clinking glasses and kissing each other, pouring vodka over one another; others poured it out into glasses and over the tables; others still, clapping ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... fezzed Jew, watching him as a stoat watches a rabbit. When he moved the Jew followed and took position at a commanding angle. The old man glanced from me to him and renewed his solicitations. So one could imagine an elderly hare thumping wildly on a tambourine with the stoat behind him. They told me afterwards that Jews own most of the stalls in Assouan bazaar, the Mussulmans working for them, since tourists need Oriental colour. Never having seen or imagined a Jew coercing a Mussulman, this colour was ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... in his room which for some time aroused my curiosity. It was like no box I had seen before. But one afternoon Paragot took it down and extracted therefrom a violin which after tuning he began to play. Now although fond of music I have never been able to learn any instrument save the tambourine—my highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen" and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina—and to this day a person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the gutter, an executant ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... mother to daughter, and a wonderful sample of the handiwork that once made the country famous,—your numerous necklaces and other ornaments. You would carefully braid your heavy dark tresses and bedeck your shapely head with bright flowers, then with your panderetta or tambourine in hand, you too would join the merry throng that fill the air with mirthful songs and music on Noche-buena; ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... the rock was a dead thump near their heads. An uprooted tree had been hurled from some point above, like an enormous spear, and, striking the rock at a slant, slid over the rough surface like the finger of a player over the face of a tambourine and out beyond, hunting for some spot where it could penetrate. It found it on the ground, but it was instantly wrenched loose by the resistless power that had first thrown it forward, and went end over end into the ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... which had been selected by Sergeant Troy—ruling now in the room of his wife—for giving the harvest supper and dance. As Oak approached the building the sound of violins and a tambourine, and the regular jigging of many feet, grew more distinct. He came close to the large doors, one of which stood slightly ajar, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... a, b; c, d and e are three chairs placed in front of the curtain by the Medium, in one of which (e) he afterwards sat; g denotes the position of Mrs. Keeler; f is a small table, placed within the curtain, and upon which were a tambourine, a guitar, two bells, a hammer, a metallic ring; the asterisks show the positions of the spectators, who sat in a double row—the two marked (1) and (2) indicate the positions taken by Mrs. Kase and Col. Kase, according to the directions ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... instruments of brass, from trombones and bass kettledrums even unto trumpet and cymbal,—of instruments of wood, from winding serpents to octave flute,—and of fiddles of parchment, from the grosse caisse to the tambourine. Nor were ancient instruments wanting. These were of quaint forms and diverse constructions. Mr. Graeme would descant for hours on an antique species of spinnet, which he procured from the East, and which he vehemently averred, was the veritable dulcimer. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... set out a certain number of benches; and all who sat upon them were to pay a couple of sous for the accommodation. They were always quite full- -a bumper house—as long as nothing was going forward; but let the show-woman appear with an eye to a collection, and at the first rattle of her tambourine the audience slipped off the seats, and stood round on the outside with their hands in their pockets. It certainly would have tried an angel's temper. The showman roared from the proscenium; he had ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... meekly cast down, bends to receive the golden coronet he is about to place on her brow. The Dove is omitted, but eight seraphim, with rainbow-tinted wings, hover above her head. On the right, a most graceful angel strikes the tambourine; on the left, another, equally graceful, sounds the viol; and, amidst a flood of light, hosts of celestial and rejoicing ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... nodding at the fire. 'Tommo will like to have me go with him and sing, while he plays his harp in the streets. I know many songs, and may get money if I am not frightened; for people throw pennies to other little girls who only play the tambourine. Yes, I will try; and then, if I do well, the little ones ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Sidonie and Madame Dobson at the windows of the salon. The music from the neighboring Casino reached their ears, with the "Yo-ho!" of the boatmen and the footsteps of the dancers like a rhythmical, muffled drumming on the tambourine. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... passed with a tambourine in her hand and a bright coloured handkerchief over her head. She shook the tambourine and smiled kindly at baby, showing very ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... they spoke to him on his journey); provides Esmeralda with dresses and petticoats—not too long to hide her pretty ankles, red stockings, and her lovely little foot—gold and diamond rings, violin, tambourine, the guitar, Wellington boots, and starts upon his trip to Norway in the midst of summer beauty. Many times he must have said to himself, "Oh! how delightful." "As we journeyed onward, how fragrant the wild flowers—those wild flowers can never be ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above. 2. Interior of church. 3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a pipe. 4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine. 5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen through them. 6. Fifth Plague of Egypt. 7. Tenth Plague of Egypt. 8. Rivaulx Abbey. 9. Wye and Severn. 10. Scene with castle in center, cows under trees on the left. 11. ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... in Roman times played an important role in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat like a tennis racquet, with four wire strings on which rattles were strung. The sound of it must have been akin to that of our modern tambourine, and it served much the same purpose as the primitive drum, namely, to drive away Typhon or Set, the god of evil. Dead kings were called "Osiris" when placed in their tombs, and sistri put with them in order ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Episcopal Methodist Church in Oude has been lately pursuing the tactics of the Salvation Army. Accompanied by a band of native Christians, he has been entering villages and towns with song and drum and tambourine. The people in crowds have gathered round him. He and his brethren have preached Christ to them, have urged them to accept Him as their Saviour, and have given on the spot baptism, chin—the mark of the Christian Church, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... tell how Leo took to his new employment which he detested. We are only sure that the Girl loved him when and wherever he sang; even when, after the song was done, she went round with the equivalent of a tambourine and collected the pence for the daily bread. There were times, too, when it was Leo's very hard task to console the Girl for the indignity of horrible praise that people gave him and her—for the silly ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... colours, and a small skirt of the same material around the body. The Spaniards endeavoured to entice them on board, by showing them mirrors and glass trinkets; the sailors even executing lively dances, in the hope of inspiring them with confidence; but the savages, taking fright at the sound of a tambourine, which seemed to them a sign of hostility, discharged a flight of arrows, and directed their canoe towards one of the caravels, whose pilot endeavoured to reassure them by steering towards them; but in vain, the canoe soon made off, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... countries through which their race had passed—Turkey, Bohemia, Egypt, Italy, and Spain. They were enlivened by the sound of cymbals, which clashed on their arms, and by the hollow sounds of the "daires"—a sort of tambourine ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... cornet-a-pistons, cornopean^, clarion, trumpet, trombone, ophicleide^; French horn, saxophone, sax [Slang], buglehorn^, saxhorn, flugelhorn^, althorn^, helicanhorn^, posthorn^; sackbut, euphonium, bombardon tuba^. [Vibrating surfaces] cymbal, bell, gong; tambour^, tambourine, tamborine^; drum, tom-tom; tabor, tabret^, tabourine^, taborin^; side drum, kettle drum; timpani, tympani^; tymbal^, timbrel^, castanet, bones; musical glasses, musical stones; harmonica, sounding-board, rattle; tam-tam, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... musical instrument for use in sacred buildings, he certainly was not going to tolerate banjos and bones. This decision was a great disappointment to Benny Mallow, who had been selected by the managers to perform upon the tambourine, but in the revision of the programme Benny was assigned to duty in a tableau as a little fat goblin, and this so tickled his fancy that he did not suffer long ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... impose her customs on all the rest of the world; still there were some Spanish and Italian ones. Lucretia was a graceful dancer, and she was always ready to display her skill. She frequently descended from the tribune and executed Spanish and Roman dances to the sound of the tambourine.[168] ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... lazzarone sleeps under the arcade, whose pavement in old times was to be trodden only by the feet of high nobility. From the deep wells, and perhaps from the prisons by the Bridge of Sighs, rise the accents of woe, as at the time when the tambourine was heard in the gay gondolas, and the golden ring was cast from the Bucentaur to Adria, the queen of the seas. Adria! shroud thyself in mists; let the veil of thy widowhood shroud thy form, and clothe in the weeds of woe the mausoleum of thy ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... satisfied she was observed by all, she began a slow and stately dance, timing her steps to the soft jingle of her tambourine. The girl had a lithe gracefulness and stately bearing unusual in those of her class—whose exhibitions were rather of the fast and furious kind with a liberal display of their forms—and when with a last low curtsy she ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... was Daniel Steibelt, forgotten as a virtuoso, but not to be forgotten for his splendid vices which range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish. He married a young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. He succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy divorce law ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... tambourine band were sitting among the company, Quickear suggested why not strike up? 'Ah, la'ads!' said a negro sitting by the door, 'gib the jebblem a darnse. Tak' yah pardlers, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... are still so foolish? We left three months ago. I gave you two months for forgetting her—and that is enough! Come, now, perhaps some maid of the Mandans, on ahead, will prove fair enough to pipe to you, or to touch the bull-hide tambourine in such fashion as to charm you from your sorrows! No, don't be offended—it is only that I want to tell you not to take that old affair too hard. And now, it is time for you ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... Music-master, went to Ch'i; Kan, the conductor at the second meal, went to Ch'u; Liao, the conductor at the third meal, went to Ts'ai; Chueeh, the conductor at the fourth meal, went to Ch'in. The drum master Fang-shu crossed the River; the tambourine master Wu crossed the Han; Yang the second bandmaster and Hsiang, who played the sounding stones, ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius
... which was received with nine rounds of British cheers. Our party then formed a large circle by joining hands; and sang the national anthem, accompanied by the Goderich band, which was composed of two fiddles and a tambourine. "Rule Britannia" for our sailor-king was also played and sung—I was going to say in good style, but at all events ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... heard some of these noises produced in a living tree, in a large pane of glass, on a stretched wire, on a tambourine, on the roof of a cab, and in the box of a theatre. Moreover, immediate contact is not always necessary. I have heard these noises proceeding from the flooring and walls, when the medium's hands and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... Janaki sent the slave he had brought with him to the pastry-cook's while Musli skipped homewards and brought with him a tambourine of chased silver, which he could beat right cunningly and also accompany it with a voice not without feeling; and thus Halil's bridal evening flowed pleasantly away with an accompaniment of wine and music ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... is time to go to supper," she announced. "Form yourselves into a procession, children. Johnnie shall take this tambourine and Willy Parker these castanets, and we will march in to the sound ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... is heard no more on all the Bar, and silence reigns through the calico halls of the Humboldt. His bland smile and his dainty plats, his inimitably choice language and his pet tambourine, his woolly corkscrew and his really beautiful music, have, I fear, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... any right conclusion as to the authenticity of the African airs, especially as they have arranged the compositions of the great European masters in such a grotesque manner. The executants are five in number; one plays the tambourine, Mr. Germon, who is the leader; another the bone castanet; the third, the accordion; and the two others, the banjo, or African guitar. The castanet player does not sing; but his four colleagues have good voices, and, in glees, harmonize ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to go round with my uncle and hold out my tambourine, so! (Poses and holds out tambourine.) And then I will-a collect the pennies, just like-a Mr. Jocko used ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... drawing, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine. We must not, therefore, compare his concept with those masterpieces of the later classical imagination. Still, many of his contemporaries, vastly inferior to him in penetrative insight, a Giovanni da Udine, a Perino del Vaga, a Primaticcio, not ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... does not devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine but take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto wine in all France: the sun was set, they had done their work; the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My mule made a dead point. ''Tis the pipe and tambourine,' said I—'I never will argue a point with one of your family as long as I live;' so leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and t'other into that, 'I'll take a dance,' said I, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... coarse, stout, sun-burned Irish woman, with an immense straw hat flapping over her freckled face, tied with a gaudy ribbon under her three chins, singing, "I'd be a butterfly!" At her side, stood a little girl about six years old, holding an inverted tambourine, to catch windfalls in ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... Lewis were walking silently homeward, when they came upon an Italian street musician. The man ground at his movable piano, the wife held the tambourine, while his leggy little daughter danced with surprising grace on the stone walk. As she trotted about gathering her harvest of pennies, Parks put his hand on her shoulder ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the only way in which we can preserve civilisation is by behaving decently and intelligently. Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their customary porkishness, while we acquiesce and obey. The only hope is a maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a tambourine with the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a little ashamed of myself. However"—Mr. Scogan shrugged his shoulders and, pipe in hand, made a gesture of resignation—"It's futile to complain that ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... is your mourning, I'll mourn too!' cried the Prince, and seizing his tambourine, he began to thump on it with a will. Hearing the noise, the King came in, and ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl, with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head, produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step, and striking ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Provence. Lively and pensive, gay and sad, by turns, she was a good little worshipper, but given to harmless pranks withal. Between the long church services, if she went into the country with girls of her own age, she made no fuss about doing as they did, but would sing and dance away and flourish her tambourine. But such days were few. Most times her chief delight was to climb up to the top of the house, to bring herself nearer heaven, to obtain a glimpse of daylight, to look out, perhaps, on some small strip of sea, or some pointed peak in the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... apparatus of the modern orchestra includes a multitude of instruments scarcely deserving of description. Several varieties of drums, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, steel bars (Glockenspiel), gongs, bells, and many other things which we are now inclined to look upon as toys, rather than as musical instruments, are brought into play for reasons more or less ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
