"Castanets" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wares to the public. Their Castilian merchandise added immensely to the attraction of their market and drew a larger number, between buyers and curious people, than usual. When the day's business was over, they called for some musical instruments—the templanaste—and taking out their own castanets and timbrels, they began to ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... them and mustard-bathed them and I wrote telegrams for Caliban to take in the launch—wrote them as well as I could in the clutches of a violent chill, with my teeth like castanets and my hands palsied—and even as I wrote, it came to me that Margarita had repeated monotonously, all the way home, in a hoarse, painful voice (but, mercifully, a low one) "get a rope, get a rope, get ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... 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, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... without grones.' 'If the wasting of our money might not dehort us, yet the wounding of our mindes should deterre us.' This next sentence, with its combination of K sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: 'Though Curio bee as hot as a toast, yet Euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a cocke of the game, yet Euphues is content to bee ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... with their hair in silken nets that hung in knots and tassels down their backs, their mantillas floating round their graceful forms, their slender feet peeping from under their basquinas, their arms tossed up in the air to play the castanets, had a beautiful effect on this airy height, with the rich evening ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... proceeded to give an excellent imitation of a police whistle, and concluded with that of the clicking of castanets. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... standing before the low door of his retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated little key which he always carried about him in the purse suspended to his side, a sound of tambourine and castanets had reached his ear. These sounds came from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as we have already said, had only one window opening upon the rear of the church. Claude Frollo had hastily withdrawn the key, and an instant later, he was on the top of the tower, in the gloomy and pensive attitude ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... The music caught at her homesick heart-strings, the old familiar scent of blossoming gardenias was in her nostrils and she was out under a Mexican night. Her pulses leaped to the throbbing notes, and she flung herself sinuously into the measures of the tango, snapping her fingers in lieu of castanets. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in the Spanish style, which is a free and joyous one, I am told, deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the chirping little castanets. As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding circle in the water. Their streaming hair ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... happen. I could hear Alphonse's teeth going like anything on the oiled rag, and turning my head round made an awful face at him. But I am bound to state that my own heart was at much the same game as the Frenchman's castanets, while the perspiration was pouring from my body, causing the wash-leather-lined shirt to stick to me unpleasantly, and altogether I was in the pitiable state known by schoolboys as a ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... intrusted with the often needed miscellaneous musical instruments which form no part of the regular band of a boulevard theatre. For a very small addition to his stipend, Schmucke played the viola d'amore, hautboy, violoncello, and harp, as well as the piano, the castanets for the cachucha, the bells, saxhorn, and the like. If the Germans cannot draw harmony from the mighty instruments of Liberty, yet to play all instruments of music ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... gauze skirt spangled with gold, her flesh-coloured tights, she was really charming. At that moment she was dancing, with wonderful lightness and grace, some lascivious fandango, while she accompanied herself with the castanets. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... over the heads of the assembled, a crystal aisle for satin feet, the row of soubrettes suddenly appeared, peering over the crystal rail, singing down upon the sea of marcelled, bald, and dead heads. Men, sheepish of their smiles but with the small heels overhead clanging like castanets into their spirits, dared ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... sistrum,—which they held uplifted in the attitude of their own divine Isis,—harmoniously timed the cadence of their feet; while others, at every step, shook a small chain of silver, whose sound, mingling with those of the castanets and sistrums, produced a wild, but not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... for a woman to be more ugly, with so fine a shape; but as a recompense, her ugliness was set off with every art. The use she was put to, was to dance with Flamarens, and sometimes, towards the conclusion of a ball, possessed of castanets and effrontery, she would dance some figured saraband or other, which amused the court. Let us now see in what ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on a sudden, into the beautiful and piquant air of Pedrillo, which he sang with a taste and spirit that made the assembled cavaliers gaze at him open-mouthed. At the same moment, a guitar and castanets were heard in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... demanded, had told her such a strange story? "But she does attract me," he admitted; "or, rather, she raises a great many questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets on a nail—Claire used them in an Andalusian dance—might almost be an offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... rattling of glass, nor the jarring sensation, nor yet the smoke and heat and lurid light. The walls shook with a dull vibration, and the window-panes were like castanets. Through the glass transom over the door I could see a shimmering, ruddy glow that rose and fell, and was brightened by bursting sparks and little darting tongues of yellow flame. Apart from this one lurid spot all was thickly curtained into darkness by ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... hearts beating as one, and in the accepted poetical sense of the words, of course Genevieve's and George's did. But as a matter of physiological fact, they didn't. At the end of twenty minutes or so George began turning a delicate blue and a clatter as of distant castanets provided an obligato when he spoke, the same being ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... favors and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little day ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... to our house on Saturday evening, and I must get up a Spanish song that Madame Strahlberg has taught me, to charm his ears and those of other people. Oh! I can do it very well. Won't you come and hear me play the castanets, if Monsieur Enguerrand can spare you? There is a young Polish pianist who is to play our accompaniment. Ah, there is nothing like a Polish pianist to play Chopin! He is charming, poor young man! an exile, and in poverty; ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... more than on the misery of others, with indifference, halted to enjoy this scene of simple pleasure. The group before him consisted of French and Spanish peasants, the inhabitants of a neighbouring hamlet, some of whom were performing a sprightly dance, the women with castanets in their hands, to the sounds of a lute and a tamborine, till, from the brisk melody of France, the music softened into a slow movement, to which two female peasants danced ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... companion. She had just sufficient education to enable her to understand her mistress when Lucy chose to allow herself to run riot in a species of intellectual tarantella, in which her tongue went mad to the sound of its own rattle, as the Spanish dancer at the noise of his castanets. Phoebe knew enough of the French language to be able to dip into the yellow-paper-covered novels which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade, and to discourse with her mistress upon the questionable subjects of these romances. The likeness which the lady's maid bore to Lucy Audley was, ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... had retired within the caravan, and emerged again with a pair of castanets in her hands. She advanced to Gonzague and made him a reverence. "Shall I dance for you, pretty ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... standing ankle deep in the snow that lay upon the stoop. I caught but a dim glimpse of her form, for the night was cloudy; but I could hear her teeth rattling like castanets, and, as the sharp wind blew her clothes close to her form, I could discern from the sharpness of the outlines that she was very ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... more than once. Another very graceful dance, the name of which I have forgotten, consists of four couples posturing to waltz time, changing from one partner to another as the dance progresses, and finally waltzing off with the original one, the motion of clinking castanets at different parts of the dance suggesting ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... is to be found among the birds, the peacock leading in conspicuousness and self-consciousness. What a contrast to the dull earthy-hued little hen, for whose slightest favour he neglects food to raise his Argus-eyed fan, clattering his quill castanets and screaming challenges to his rivals! He will even fight bloody battles with invading suitors; and, after all, failure may be the result. Imagine the feelings of two superb birds fighting over a winsome browny, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... are paid for by different institutions,) we saw the splendid painting by West, "Christ healing the Sick." We then visited the Musical Fund Hall, and heard the far-famed Ethiopian serenaders, Messrs. German, Hanwood, Harrington, Warren, and Pelham, upon the accordion, banjo, congo-tambo, and bone-castanets, in all of which they stand unrivalled in the world. They were representing Niggers' lives, with songs, &c. Home and to ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore |
