"Trapeze" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gymnast to the less sympathetic slaves, he commands that ever after a bed shall be laid beneath the rope as a protection against such fatal falls. This became the rule; and, when next you see the safety-net spread beneath the rope-walkers, the trapeze performers, and those who perform similar "terrific" feats, remember that its use dates back to the humane order of Marcus, the boy magistrate, seventeen ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... depend for its success upon being heard perfectly. Therefore a 'sight' act is chosen, an animal act maybe, to please the children, or a Japanese troupe with their gorgeous kimonos and vividly harmonizing stage draperies, or a troupe of white-clad trapeze artists flying against a background of black. Whatever the act is, it must be a showy act, for it closes the performance and sends the audience home pleased with the program to ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... all-around acrobatic exhibition. The Dodo performed on the trapeze. The Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat took turns on a diminutive springboard. The March Hare and the Dormouse energetically jumped over a small barrel. The Queen and the Duchess had a fencing match, the Queen using her sceptre, the Duchess the rag baby she carried, and to which she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... man has made a mistake in getting his arms shortened. I have seen many wild animals in their native wilds, but never have I seen anything to equal gorillas going through bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly perfect hand-trapeze performance. {208} ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... itself, and check itself in the act of some new paroxysm. It remembers the European War that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly. The eastern sky becomes once more its highway instead of its trapeze. It collects its wits, emits a few contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... posters," went on Harry, for Bert had pointed to the bright-colored pictures advertising the performance. There were shown men jumping through paper hoops or hanging from dizzy heights on trapeze bars, ladies riding galloping horses, and all sorts of wild animals, from the long-necked giraffe to the hippopotamus, who appeared to have no neck at all, and from the big elephant to ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Meadow Brook • Laura Lee Hope
... muscles of the back, the suspended insect raises itself and fixes the talons of the anterior limbs in the empty skin above it. Never did acrobat, hanging by the toes to the bar of a trapeze, raise himself with so stupendous a display of strength in the loins. This gymnastic feat accomplished, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... into the sky, accompanied by the cries of the peanut "butchers," the popcorn boys, the lemonade venders,{sic} and the exhortations of the side-show "spieler," whose flying banners bore the painted reproductions of his "freaks." Here and there stood unhitched chariots, half filled trunks, trapeze tackle, paper hoops, stake pullers or other "properties" necessary to ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... coarser view of the actress; he had somehow always looked more poetically at that priestess of art. Yet what was she, the priestess, when one came to think of it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She didn't literally hang by her heels from a trapeze and hold a fat man in her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eyes, of the imitative trick, that her muscular sister made of leg and jaw. It was an odd circumstance that Miss Rooth's face seemed to him to-day a finer instrument than old Madame Carre's. It was doubtless ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... lash. The roaring sputter of gasoline flares was no more to him than the sound of a running brook. He had learned that it was safe to kick a mere canvasman when you felt like doing so, but that a real artist, such as a tumbler or a trapeze man, was to be respected, and that the person of the ring-master was most sacred. Also he acquired the knack of sleeping at odd times, whenever opportunity ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... even quicker with her than before. "It's all over," he said briskly. "The first warehouse is gone; the second will go, but they'll save the others easily enough, now that you have pointed out that the lines may be utilized otherwise than as adjuncts of performances on the high trapeze!" They were standing by a picket-fence, and he leaned against it, overcome by mirth in which she did not join. Her gravity reacted upon him at once, and his laughter was stopped short. "Will you not accept me as an escort to your home?" ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... assumed attitudes which I should have said beforehand were impossible for any creature with bones. Then a large net was stretched some six feet from the ground and several trapezes which had been tied to the roof were allowed to hang down. The acrobats climbed up by a ladder and swung from one trapeze to another. The business was commonplace enough, but I became aware that Ascher was very much interested in it. He became actually excited when we reached the final act, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... astonished at the violence of uproar that this provoked. The tumult about the descending stairway rose to furious violence. He became aware of crowded balconies, of men sliding along ropes, of men in trapeze-like seats hurling athwart the space. He heard voices behind him, a number of people descending the steps through the archway; he suddenly perceived that his guardian Howard was back again and gripping his arm painfully, and shouting ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... betrayer of friendship. "Some of his happiest lines," meditated Democrates, walking away, to be held a moment by the crowd around Lamprus the master-harpist. But now, feeling that he had dallied long enough, the orator turned his back on the two female acrobats who were swinging on a trapeze and struck down a long, straight road which led toward the distant cone of Acro-Corinthus. First, however, he turned on Bias, who all the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the floor. She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be checked in her indulgence in them. The Professor of gymnastics at the University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a source of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in which ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time, thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would have thrown ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... only light gymnastics and folk dancing from this on," announced Helen. "There is to be a new gym instructor; a young man. He is a physical culture expert and an acrobat. He is to teach bar and trapeze work." ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... had a rope-trick or two contrived by means of a long piece of knotted together clothes-line, doubled, and hung from the rafters to form a swing or trapeze. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... your place. You and him are probably the only two men in the profession who can do the somersault trapeze act with old Benares. That puts you out of a job, for you're ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... on their trapeze almost above Pa's head, sprang lightly to the stage, near an old ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne |
