"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my mother I sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in one hand and an awl in the other. This was the beginning of my practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork. From a skein of finely twisted threads of silvery sinews my mother pulled out a single one. With an awl she pierced the buckskin, and skillfully threaded it with the white sinew. Picking up the tiny beads one by one, she strung them with the point ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... lights are on full blast, Aunty's right there prominent with her crochet, and on the other side of the table is me and Vee. And I couldn't be behavin' more innocent if I'd been roped to the chair. All I was holdin' was a skein of yarn. Uh-huh! You see, Vee got the knittin' habit last winter, turnin' out stuff for the Belgians, and now she keeps right on; though who she's goin' to wish a pink and white shawl onto in this weather is ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... round, his eyes delighting in the beauty of the light. Truly a light sent from beyond skies in which during the course of the day every shade of blue could be distinguished. A thin, white cloud would appear towards evening, stretch like a skein of white silk across the sky, to gather as the day declined into one white cloud, which would disappear, little by little, into the sunset. As Owen rode at the head of his cavalcade he watched this cloud, growing smaller, and its diminishing often ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... antagonist in the industrious subtlety with which he began to form a thousand combinations. Swift, secret, incapable of fatigue, this powerful and patient intellect sped to and fro, disentangling the perplexed skein where all had seemed so hopelessly confused, and gradually unfolding broad schemes of a symmetrical and regenerated polity. He had high correspondents and higher hopes in England. He was already secretly or openly in league with half the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There lies the mystery!" cried Elfreda, pointing toward the northern end of the campus, where considerable headway had been made in digging what appeared to be the cellar of a house. "But Sherlock will unravel the tangled skein!" ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... their gossamer bands, Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands, And slowly, thread by thread, Draw forth the folded strands, Than which the trembling line, By whose frail help yon startled spider fled Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed, Is scarce more fine; And as the tangled skein Unravels in my hands, Betwixt me and the noonday light, A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles The landscape broadens on my sight, As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell Like that which, in the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... earlier part of the passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had "unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to make their reader ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... to Your Honor. He has said that the British are helpless. He brought Your Honor a report from Palestine that was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing better; for he is one of those men who say always what the ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... reached the Governor-General himself it simply flabbergasted the poor man; and even the exceptionally clever and energetic secretary to whom he deputed the making of an abstract of the same very nearly lost his reason with the strain of attempting to lay hold of the tangled end of the skein. It happened that just at that time the Prince had several other important affairs on hand, and affairs of a very unpleasant nature. That is to say, famine had made its appearance in one portion of the province, and the tchinovniks ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... spoke at Jacob: "Perished you are now, Shacob. You have unraveled the tangled skein of eternal life. Pray I do you will find rest with the restless of big London. Annie and Jane fach, sorrowful you are; wet are your tears. Go you and drink a nice cup of tea in the cafe. Most eloquent I shall be in a minute and there's hysterics you'll ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... leafless trees, and answering to the faint sighing of the autumn wind. Morris enjoyed it very much, and but for the green glasses he still wore would have looked and appeared like his former self as he sat in his armchair, now holding the skein of yarn which Aunt Betsy wound, now talking with the deacon of the probable exchange of all the prisoners, a theme which quickened Helen's pulse and sent the blood to her pale cheeks, and again standing by Katy as she played his favorite airs, his rich bass voice ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... can be a mortal like the barbarians, for you have been a force ruling the sea, and the flowers, and the winds, and twisting the blood of man and woman in your fingers like a living skein of soft red silk. They will always worship you. It may not be in temples any longer, not with a studied liturgy, but wherever the sap rises in a flower, or the joy of life swims up in the morning through the ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... the spinner!" Straight uprose from her wheel the beautiful Puritan maiden, 885 Pleased with the praise of her thrift from him whose praise was the sweetest, Drew from the reel on the table a snowy skein of her spinning, Thus making answer, meanwhile, to the flattering phrases of Alden: "Come, you must not be idle; if I am a pattern for housewives, Show yourself equally worthy of being the model of husbands. 890 Hold this skein on your hands, ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... played out on the 28th January 1547, when the tyrant breathed his last, and left his two wives and two daughters to unravel the skein which he had so persistently entangled for them. Katharine Parr took her fate immediately into her own hands, and thirty-five days after Henry's death, secretly married her former admirer, Sir Thomas, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... thinking of the lesser princes when he tripped around with his legs tied; that he described the European balance of power when he tottered hither and thither like a drunken man; that he hinted at a Congress when he twisted his bended arms together like a skein; and finally, that he sets forth our altogether too great friend in the East, when, very gradually unfolding himself, he rises on high, stands for a long time in this elevated position, and then all at once breaks out into the most terrifying leaps. The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Nadine lived in the mean street with the so-called woodcarver and his wife? She was a widow, true, but widows of rank do not usually lodge in such humble places for pleasure. Then again, what was the mystery attaching to Irene? Would the tangled skein ever be ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... the Bayou Sauvage once had its rise, so to speak, in Toulouse street. Though depleted by the city's present drainage system and most likely poisoned by it as well, its waters still move seaward in a course almost due easterly, and empty into Chef Menteur, one of the watery threads of a tangled skein of "passes" between the lakes and the open Gulf. Three-quarters of a century ago this Bayou Sauvage (or Gentilly—corruption of Chantilly) was a navigable stream of ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... sweet carnation red, And rock the silver lining, And rock my baby softly, too, With skein of silk entwining. Come, O Sleep, from Chio's Isle! And ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... whisper: "There our cuckoo clock used to hang, and there our father's discharge from the army. And there the hanks of yarn that mother spun used to hang—she could spin even better than Black Marianne—Black Marianne has said so herself. She always got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—not a knot in it. And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling? It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there. If I had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... after a journey of two hours or so passed through Laventie, which had been rather badly mauled by shell-fire, and began to thread our way through the skein of roads and by-roads that enmeshes the two Richebourgs. The natural features of the country were inscrutable, and landmarks there were none. The countryside grew absolutely deserted and the solitary ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... and truth each breast. Now doubting hangs, by awe possessed, And homage pays to that dread might, That judges what is hid from sight,— That, fathomless, inscrutable, The gloomy skein of fate entwines, That reads the bosom's depths full well, Yet flies away ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... skein to unravel," rejoined Mr. Percival. "I do not see how anything can be done for the ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... the seine was being contracted and drawn into the boat, where it was laid up like some gigantic brown skein, the men who were gathering it in shaking out the sea-weed and small fish that had enmeshed themselves and had forced their unfortunate ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that thou hast ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... in the still but cheerless shade Of home unsocial, spends her age, And rarely turns a lettered page, Upon her hearth for thee lets fall The rounded cork or paper ball, Nor chides thee on thy wicked watch, The ends of raveled skein to catch, But lets thee have thy wayward will, Perplexing oft her ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... They slip and slide, and get their legs over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses, harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... document, over and over again; and the more she read it, the more was she confused by the mixture of the first and third person; the substitution of the 'i' for the 'T. I.;' and the transition from the 'I. T.' to the 'You.' The writing looked like a skein of thread in a tangle, and the note was ingeniously folded into a perfect square, with the direction squeezed up into the right-hand corner, as if it were ashamed of itself. The back of the epistle was pleasingly ornamented with a large red wafer, which, with ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... said Cleopatra, smiling her slow smile. "Has the golden skein of stars got tangled, my astronomer? or dost thou plan some new feat of magic? Say what is it that thou dost so poorly grace our feast? Nay, now, did I not know, having made inquiry, that things so low as we poor women are far beneath thy gaze, why, I should swear that ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... in His wooing. The web of life's daily run, with its strange mixing and blending, shadings and tints, is of His weaving. He sits at life's loom ever watching and weaving. Were He but recognized oftener and His hand allowed to guide the skein, how ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports with ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the parallel, were we permitted; but for that it is too soon, or perhaps it is too late. Here, for Lorne and for his country, we lose the thread of destiny. The shuttles fly, weaving the will of the nations, with a skein for ever dipped again; and he goes forth to his share in the task among those by whose hand and direction the pattern and the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... town-tired when they have first fled. She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen. With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes. Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked—a little womanish ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... to think of it, and soon brought a skein as thick as four persons, yet composed of thread so fine, that it broke if you only blew upon it, and so tangled that it had neither beginning nor end. Grognon, delighted, sent for ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... supposition—putting two and two together, don't you know, and hoping they will stick. But, in any event, we must not let any chance slip by. If he is interested, we must bring him to time. It may mean the unravelling of the whole skein, dear. Don't look so distressed. Be brave. It doesn't matter what we learn in the end, I love you just the same. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the top of the 'bus, I bite my pipe and look at the sky. Over my shoulder the smoke streams out And my life with it. "Conservation of energy," you say. But I burn, I tell you, I burn; And the smoke of me streams out In a vanishing skein of grey. Crash and bump ... my poor bruised body! I am a harp of twittering strings, An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand, And if I have not got phthisis it is only ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... self also. He had sworn to himself that he would not tell Elizabeth he loved her, until he had succeeded in unravelling the tangled skein of the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... "Three yards more would finish, and now I shall have to go down to the village and buy a whole skein, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... only picked up some leaders. We have a tangled skein to unravel, and we have got to do some pretty smart work. Those men are good ones; we are guarded at every point, and yet we have made a big stride toward a grand close-in some day, but our chance may come in some ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... steals out to look after her departing playmates. Stands at place where spinning-wheel was. Again shakes her head, as if in perplexity over the strange arts of the palefaces. Finds on grass part of a skein of flax. Tosses it lightly in the air. Catches it again as it falls. Begins a characteristic dance, swaying, tossing skein, catching it. Each step of the dance takes her further into background. Then she comes down center again, like a tossing bough ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... once when this was done, —Vanished the skein, the needle bare,— She dressed with wreaths vermilion Bright as a trumpet's dazzling blare. Nor knew that in Queen Dido's hair, Loading the Carthaginian air, Ancestral blossoms flamed as fair As any ever hanging there. While o'er her cheek their scarlet gleam Shot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... far-strayed wits. Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning it all as useless, he turned toward the door, yet arrested his dazed shambling ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... black sail was always carried by the ship that bore these victims to their death, he would, if he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, as he hoped to do, hoist a white one when coming home. When he reached Crete, he won the heart of Minos' daughter Ariadne, who gave him a skein of thread: by unwinding this as he went he would leave a clue behind him, by which he could find his way out of the labyrinth, after killing the monster. When this was done, by his great skill and strength, he took ship ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket, thou:— Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant; Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard, As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st." SHAK.: Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and the other all hulk—she's a dome and he's built like a glass-house—when they part, you wonder to see the steeple separate from the chancel, and were they to embrace, he must hang round her neck like a skein of thread on a lace-maker's bolster—to sing her praise you should choose a rondeau, and to celebrate him ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... fishing or doing laborious work, it was customary with The Lifter, as well as with our hero, to sit among the women and assist them in such offices as the peeling of turnips or potatoes; and holding the yarn skein whilst one of the women rolled the thread into a ball; or in scouring the knives and forks. One afternoon while all the men save The Lifter were absent, the group was seated round a small open fire. Hanging from the crane was ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Eleanor. He had been agreeably surprised at the development of the situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor's first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other's vicinity. After hurrying over the house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and afflicted Pekinese ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... and the yells came after them, Bolles looked seriously at Dean Drake; but that youth wore an expression of rising merriment. Bolles looked back at the dusk from which the yells were sounding, then forward to the spreading skein of night where the trail was taking him and the boy, and in neither direction could he discern ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... she went and sat down on the floor before an easy-chair, through a rent in the old covering of which the hair was escaping, and drawing from her pocket a needle and a skein of worsted, she set to work to mend it. For three days past she had been waiting for an hour's time to do this piece of mending, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... your Southern bowers, And weave, amid the incense of the flowers, The skein of fair ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... up erect. The latent heroism in her awoke. All her thoughts grew clear and bright. The tangled skein of her perplexed and troubled winter unwound suddenly. This, then, was the way. It was better so. God had provided himself a ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... very persons who justly admire your work, constantly complain of this fragmentary style of publication, which is the despair of those who have not the leisure to place your scattered sheets where they belong and disentangle the skein.* (* Owing to the irregularity with which he received and was forced to work up his material, Agassiz was often either in advance or in arrears with certain parts of his subject, so that his plates and his text did not keep pace ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... breath of pain through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her reddish hair-chestnut, if you will—let fall a skein over one of the rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges. Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook alternately ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are malicious jades. They delight in playing ill-natured pranks upon us. Not content with spinning and measuring and cutting the threads of our lives to suit themselves, they must also tangle the skein, causing us to cut capers to ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... are certainly not English; and we know that Catherine of Aragon brought wonders of Spanish stitchery with her, and she herself was devoted to the use of the needle. The story of how, when called before Cardinal Wolsey and Campeggio, to answer to King Henry's accusations, she had a skein of embroidery silk round her ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... got back from Paris utterly disgusted with life, sick with himself. Bitterly resentful against fate for creating such a tangled skein, and dangling happiness in front of him only to snatch it away again. He went up to Arranstoun and tried to play his part in the rejoicings at his return. He opened the house, engaged a full staff of servants, and filled it with guests. He shot with ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... out of the room to put on her things, upsetting as she did so, the work-box with which she had been masquerading, and quite unconscious of it. Winnington, smiling to himself, stooped to pick up the reels and skeins of silk. One, a skein of pink silk with which she had been working, he held in his hand a moment, and, suddenly, put in his pocket. After which he drifted absently to the hearthrug, and stood waiting for her, hat in hand. He was thinking of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with me," said Lambourne, "thou knave, with no more brains than are in a skein of ravelled silk? By Heaven, I will cut thee into fifty ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... it is so difficult to separate out the various threads which make up the tangled skein of our modern religion, it may be worth while to make the attempt to distinguish, first, those parts of current Christianity which are not Greek, in the wide sense which I have chosen for the word, and then those which, in the same sense, are Greek ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... that there is nothing on it,' answered she, 'but I can assure you that there is a large skein of wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... simplest and most at hand expedient was a dip in the universal indigo tub, which waited in every "back shed" of the Puritan homestead. One single dip in its black-looking depths and the skein of spun lamb's wool acquired a tint like the blue of the sky. Immersion of a day and night gave an indelible stain of a darker blue, and a week's repose at the bottom of the pot made the wool as dark in tint as the indigo ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... find a pleasing care In soft, warm wool their snowy flocks have bred; The distaff, skein and spindle they prepare, And reel, with firm-set ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... sense of colour, a picture on which various colours are painted is placed before the patient, as well as a skein of wool of the same shade as one of the colours in the picture, which he is requested to ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... but rather in the successive steps whereby his analytic observer is enabled to solve a problem that might well be dismist as beyond human elucidation. Attention is centered on the unraveling of the tangled skein rather than on the knot itself. The emotion aroused is not mere surprize, it is recognition of the unsuspected capabilities of the human brain; it is not a wondering curiosity as to an airless mechanism, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... still abroad in Burgundy?' And as Sir Giles replied to each inquiry in turn, and told all he could of political matters, she exclaimed: 'Ah! that is better than the hearing whether the black hen hath laid an egg, or the skein of yellow silk matches. I am weary, O! I am weary. Moreover, young Hal, I know as matters are that could I see George Nevil face to face I could do somewhat with him, and I laid my plans to obtain a meeting, but therewith, ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scraps were put in to welt the seams; and all this went off in great bundles to farmhouses to be sewed by the farmers' wives and daughters for the earning of pin-money. If the gloves were to be the most genteel members of the buckskin race, there was added to the bundle a skein of silk, with which a slender vine was to be worked on the back of the hand. The sewing was done with a needle three-sided at the point, and a stout waxed thread was used. A needle of this sort went in more easily than a round one, but even then it was rather ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... colored engravings arranged around its frame; notably, the "Choice of the Betrothed," the "Taking of Kurstrin," and the "Burial of the Cat by the Mice." Near the window sat an old woman in a mantilla, her head wrapped in a handkerchief. She was winding a skein of thread held on the separated hands of a little old man, blind of one eye, who was dressed ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... Alice, she felt herself more and more involved in the tangled skein of his mysterious life. His sudden and reckless abandonment of the old love which had ruined him, and the new and equally irrational regard which he now professed for her, filled her ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... to her home, but she was no longer the woman she had been. Her thoughts were like a confused, tangled skein; only one thread, only one thought was clear to her, namely that she must carry the spectre of the sea-shore to the churchyard, and dig a grave for him there; that by so doing she might win back her soul. Many a night she was missed ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a skein o' worsted stretched out on her hands," Sanders continued, "and a young leddy was winding it. I didna see her richt, but she ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... there such a sight in the world? Like a wonderful winding skein,— The way he tangles them up together ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... of the Queen upon Charles is the last strand in this tangled skein of human destiny brought out by Browning in the scene. The Parliament that Wentworth wants she is afraid of lest it should ask for a renewal of the persecution of the Catholics. The vacillating Charles, in an instant, is ready to repudiate his interview with ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... his binoculars obediently and scanned the west and north. His eyes traversed skein after skein of the brilliant colorful patternings, but he was unable to find a very closely netted region. He was about to announce his discovery to Caradoc when his lense focussed on another grim menace almost ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... and plain Hannah unrolled one heavy skein, threaded it through their own hoop, and lowered the two ends into the garden, where John stood at attention ready to throw them over the wall. Darsie and Lavender dropped their ends straight into the street, and then chased madly downstairs ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a Scottish legislator, The Scotch Kirk always has a Moderator; Meaning one need not ever be sojourning In a long Sermon Lane without a turning. Such grave old maids as Portia and Zenobia May like discourses with a skein of threads, And love a lecture for its many heads, But as for ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... at least two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The river-bed was here about a mile and a half broad and entirely covered with shingle over which the river ran in many winding channels, looking, when seen from above, like a tangled skein of ribbon, and glistening in the sun. We knew that it was liable to very sudden and heavy freshets; but even had we not known it, we could have seen it by the snags of trees, which must have been carried long distances, and by the mass of vegetable and mineral debris which was banked against ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... had left, we took to the caravel Nina, to which from another headland there was coming another little almadia, with a man who came to barter a skein of cotton. And some of the sailors threw themselves into the sea, because he did not wish to enter the caravel, and took him. And I, who was on the stern of the ship, and saw it all, sent for him and gave him a red cap and some little green ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... literary history of such a collection is difficult indeed, for it has drawn upon all civilizations and all literatures. But since Hammer-Purgstall and De Sacy began to unwind the skein, many additional turns have been given. The idea of the "frame" in general comes undoubtedly from India; and such stories as 'The Barber's Fifth Brother,' 'The Prince and the Afrit's Mistress,' have been "traced back to the Hitopadesa, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts into a riddle; the obscurity is marked, but not the value. That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in the fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap. There are words that do as much raise a style as others can depress it. Superlation and over-muchness amplifies; it may be ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... I came home. Then you can form your own mind on it and see how best to help my folks out their troubles; 'cause I ain't trying to hide that was my reason for wanting you to come. You'd helped us so much with the title affair I knew you'd unravel this skein. But I'm powerful glad to see you, all the same, and I do hope you'll get as much good for yourself out the visit as I want the mistress ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... sentiment towards Guildea. Strangely enough, it was a sentiment of pity. He pitied this hard-working, eminently successful man of big brain and bold heart, who never seemed depressed, who never wanted assistance, who never complained of the twisted skein of life or faltered in his progress along its way. The Father pitied Guildea, in fact, because Guildea wanted so little. He had told him so, for the intercourse of the two men, from the beginning, had been ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... those women who are never afraid of the light. Her face was of that strange, self-contained nature, colorless, apparently, yet capable of strange and rapid changes. Just now the last glow of sunlight seemed to have found a skein of gold in her hair, a queer gleam of light in her eyes. She stood there looking at the man whom ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was sitting in front of her with his elbows planted on his knees and both his hands stretched forwards. Extended on these two hands of his was a skein of thread, which the elegant little woman was winding ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... other one than a apple-pie is like a mug o' cider. An' then they both took it up, an' they swung it around between them, till it was all twisted an' knotted an' wound up, an' tangled, worse than a skein o' yarn in a nest o' kittens, an' then they give it to ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... babies, standing beside tiny graves, receiving pathetic confidences from wretched fathers and helpless mothers, without facing every problem of this workaday world; they cannot all be solved, even by the wisest of us; we can only seize the end of the skein nearest to our hand, and patiently endeavor to ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the red dress in my trunk, but they will meddle with my other things and look at Susie's blue dress, and then roll it up in such bad wrinkles," she said to herself. "Just like they will drop a skein of feather-stitching silk and tramp it with their feet till it is very dirty. Then some girl will pick it up to sew her doll clothes, and there will not be enough ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... young boy who looked a little older than Adele. He was mischievously occupied in knotting the skein of thread which his grandmother ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... staircase to another, in vain he called first to a doorkeeper, then to a passer-by. Porters even in Petersburg try to avoid the eyes of visitors, and in Moscow much more so; no one answered Bersenyev's call; only an inquisitive tailor, in his shirt sleeves, with a skein of grey thread on his shoulder, thrust out from a high casement window a dirty, dull, unshorn face, with a blackened eye; and a black and hornless goat, clambering up on to a dung heap, turned round, bleated plaintively, and went ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... foes more deadly wait Than Saladin's fierce crew. The lamp of love Was changed for one of hate, which threw Its false and fatal skein of light above. A shuddering shock, a fearful ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... and crowbars— Now they prick pins at a tissue Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue? Where is ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... started, all with the same air of weary disgust. Her voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of silver in a skein of brass. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... wound on its reel, but on the contrary never goes round more than six times, going off at one side as it comes on at the other, and going down into the hold of the Elba, to be coiled along in a big coil or skein. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to himself as he moves off. Every bit of this picture is suggestive: the closed door behind,—only a Brahman may open that door; the mythological carving,—only a Brahman has the right to understand it; the three-skein cord,—only a Brahman may touch it. Even the ragged old cloth is suggestive. In old India nothing but Caste counts for anything, and a reigning Prince lately gave his weight in gold to the Brahmans, as part payment for ceremonies which enabled him to eat with men of this old man's ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... shop people, to "Miss Coventry, Dangerfield Hall"? How my fingers trembled as I untied the thread and unfolded the paper; after all, it was nothing but a packet of worsteds! To be sure, I hadn't ordered any worsteds, but there might possibly be a note to explain; so I shook every skein carefully, and turned the covering inside out, that the document, if there should be one, might not escape my vigilance. How could my presentiments deceive me? Of course there was a note—after all, where was the harm? Captain Lovell had most politely sent me all these worsteds for a ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... will find round the victim's neck!' For this other half, which I hold in my hands at last, is finished off in the same way ... so I shall be able to see if it has a hiding-place too and what's inside it.... But look, my friend, isn't it cleverly made? And so simple! All you have to do is to take a skein of red cord and braid it round a wooden cup, leaving a little recess, a little empty space in the middle, very small, of course, but large enough to hold a medal of a saint ... or anything.... A precious stone, for instance.... Such ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... in this country for specifying the size of silk is based on the weight in drams (avoirdupois) of a skein containing 1000 yards. A skein, thus weighing 5 drams, is technically called 5-dram silk. The number of yards of 1-dram silk to a pound must accordingly be 256000. The formulas for figuring the amount of silk required for a piece of ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... discern an Interruption, within a sensible space, they may exhibit a Colour; as we see, that though a Slenderest Thrid of Dy'd Silk do's, whilst look'd on Single, seem almost quite Devoyd of Redness, (for instance) yet when numbers of these Thrids are brought together into one Skein, their Colour becomes notorious. ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... heir obey weight bare their prey freight fare there weigh neigh hair where sleigh veins fair stair reign whey chair pear skein rein pair ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... first place, Mrs. Capella is leaving London for the North. She must not be regarded in our operations. The woman is weighted with a secret. I am sorry for her. I prefer to allow events as supplied by others to unravel the skein. Secondly, Jiro and his wife, and all who visit them, or whom they visit, must be watched incessantly. Get all the force required for this operation in its fullest sense. You, with one trusted associate, must keep a close eye on No. 37 Middle Street. On no ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... rusty-coloured lichens; yet the whole place was admirably spick and span, free of litter. Many cats, as Dickie noted, meditated in sunny corners, or prowled in the open with truly official composure. Over all stretched a square of bluest sky, crossed by a skein of homeward-wending rooks. While above the roofs, on either side the archway, the high-lying lands of the park showed up, broken, here and there, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... thick mop of fine, bright hair, rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of the pale brown ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... prairie trail when the wheels begin to bite through the sod, and sink into ruts, a new track is made beside the old—there is plenty of room; and in turn another and another, spreading wide on each side, crossing and interweaving like a tangled skein of black cotton flung down ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... of which the whole Yosemite could be packed away and lost. Thus one of them, the Marble Canon, is of itself more than three thousand feet deep and sixty-six miles long. In every direction I beheld below me a tangled skein of mountain ranges, thousands of feet in height, which the Grand Canon's walls enclosed, as if it were a huge sarcophagus, holding the skeleton of an infant world. It is evident, therefore, that all the other canons of ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... great lover of equine perfection, swung about upon its captor, its eyes blazing, just a little quiver of the clean-cut nostrils showing the red satin of the skin lining them. The mane was like a tumbled silken skein, the ears dainty and small and keen pointed, the chest splendidly deep and strong; the forelegs small, so slender that to a man who did not know a horse they would have seemed fragile but only because they were all bone and sinew like steel and muscle hardened and stripped clean ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... trials of needlework amongst her ladies. In the days of her disgrace and solitude, Catherine turned to her embroidery for solace and occupation. She came forth to meet the Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio with a skein of red silk round her neck.[603] Taylor, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... when at school, had shrunk aloof. At other moments there was something so absent and distracted about her, or so fantastic and incoherent, that Vaudemont, with the man's hard, worldly eye, read in it nothing but melancholy confusion. Nevertheless, if the skein of ideas was entangled, each thread in itself was a thread ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the saints to rain it back on him some day," cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. "But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?" asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... chance of better things; and I say once more I like not the thoughts of the close quarters they intend for us. An' you will not run for it yourself, at least help a poor fellow, whose ideas are like a skein of tangled silk, to ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... large a place in my life. I have such a strong admiration for her that it would have been a real pain to have parted coldly. But to keep her as my friend, to know that her affection is unchanged, and yet to be free to seek my own happiness is such a marvellous unravelling of the skein that I can hardly realise my good fortune. I came back last night, and could hardly wait until this morning to tell you my news. Una, you understand! I ask nothing of you to-day, it is not the time to speak of ourselves. I shall go back to my uncle, and stay with him ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... even than his hair, giving effect to every freckle on his honest face. A little behind was Mary, winding one of Blanche's silks over the back of a chair, and so often looking up to revel in the contemplation of Harry's face, that her skein was in a wild tangle, which she studiously concealed lest the sight should compel Richard to come and unravel it with those wonderful ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I wish you could have seen the eggs and the great dishes of meat. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any, and had no night-sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits, and haven't ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... scarlet, four ditto of crimson, four ditto of amber, four ditto of peach, three ditto of stone-colours, three ditto of blue, three ditto of blue greens, three ditto of yellow greens, and one skein of white embroidery silk ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... time,' he says, in winding up that knotted skein of prophecy, which he leaves for Merlin to disentangle, for 'he lives before his time,' as he takes ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... her meal with a big lump in her throat. She had not meant to rebel openly, but she had lost her temper, and the words had flashed out. Beatrice's threat alarmed her. Through all the tangled skein of Gwen's character there ran, like a thread of pure gold, the intense passionate love for her father, and the desire to preserve his good opinion. She could not bear to see the grieved look that came into his eyes when he was forced to reprove her. What indeed would he think of her when he heard ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... the sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that close flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades' water-bottles slung on his shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only last night that the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No doubt we are the first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead. Perhaps he will be scattered before ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... to be answered. Had he known at the moment how deeply the two of them were to be enmeshed in the skein of Europe's destiny he would have risen and faced the anger of his host, or, risking detection, incontinently fled. But Marishka's hand clasped his own, and lucklessly, ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... offer good chances for humor, particularly the funny story, for humor with a genuine point is not trivial. But do not spin a whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable. There is no way, short of sheer power of speech, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... seemed to pierce the sky, That was an awful deep of empty blue, Save that the wind was in it, and on high A wavering skein of wild-fowl tracked it through. He marked them not, but went with movement slow, Because his thoughts ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... related all the particulars of her ill-omened vision to her husband; and the latter, after a short pause, informed her and his friend that a terrible calamity was about to befall them. He then drew from his travelling wallet a skein of thread. This he divided into three parts, one for each, and told his companions that in case of grievous bodily injury, the bit of thread wound round the wounded part would instantly make it whole. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... hour, and skein on skein Weave the vain mesh, in which thy subtle soul Broods on its venom! Lo! behind, before, Around thee, like an armament of cloud, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... right, nor wish to disobey; but she had become very much interested, and was a good deal annoyed at having such a sudden stop put to her pleasure. She said nothing, and went on with her work. In a little while Alice asked her to hold a skein of cotton for her while she wound it. Ellen was annoyed again at the interruption; the harpstrings were jarring yet, and gave fresh discord to every touch. She had, however, no mind to let her vexation be seen; she went immediately ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... manuscript to find him dozing. They took a few walks together, during which he rarely spoke, but seemed glad of her silent company. Once he called with her on Mrs. Farraday, and actually held an enormous skein of wool for the old lady while she, busily winding, told them anecdotes of her son James, and of her long dead husband. He made no effort to talk, seeming content to sit receptive under the soothing ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Altogether the skein was too tangled for us to attempt to unravel it. They had seen vessels evidently, both sailing ships and steamers, but whether it was yesterday, or ten years back, there were no means of ascertaining; but to make certain that we were not being deceived, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... Broadway, you of the chorus, Who sing in the hope of forgetting your pain: I turn to a sister of Sainted Cecilia, A white bird escaping the earth's tangled skein:— The music of God is her innermost brooding, The ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... veins of leaves, and other distinguishing marks. To work the embroidery it is necessary to line the Tussore with fine unbleached muslin, and to work with Tussore silk and Japanese gold thread. The Tussore silk costs 1d. the skein, and is dyed in every shade of Oriental colouring. Three to four shades of a colour are used to work in a flower, and two shades of green for the leaves. The stitch is crewel-stitch worked very close. No shading about each leaf is necessary, but different greens are used ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... and still the rapture Woven through the tangled skein, And the joys we still shall capture At the turning ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... with the hot young blood glowing through it like the faint red tinge we sometimes see on the inner side of a white rose leaf. Her hair was a very light brown, almost golden, and fluffy, soft, and fine as a skein of Arras silk. She was of medium height, with a figure that Venus might have envied. Her feet and hands were small, and apparently made for the sole purpose of driving mankind distracted. In fact, that seemed to be the paramount object in her creation, for she had the world ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... unpainted table, with his legs tucked under him like a Turkish pasha. His feet were bare, after the fashion of tailors who sit at work; and the first thing which caught the eye was his thumb, with a deformed nail thick and strong as a turtle's shell. About Petrovitch's neck hung a skein of silk and thread, and upon his knees lay some old garment. He had been trying unsuccessfully for three minutes to thread his needle, and was enraged at the darkness and even at the thread, growling in a low voice, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... it so imperceptibly that I don't think I shall mind much. She is the sort of woman who knows how to rule well. In fact, I rather like it, for she winds one round her finger as softly and prettily as a skein of silk, and makes you feel as if she was doing you a favor all ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... obscure allusions of the bard, no one could doubt that they were lovers; especially if he marked the calm and well-pleased smile that stole from time to time across the proud features of that patrician lady; who, sitting but a little way apart, watched—while she reeled off skein after skein of the fine Byssine flax in silence—the quiet happiness of the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... more superstitious than any one else. Hanging to her neck by a skein of plaited horse-hair was the polished shell of a minute turtle—smaller ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... life of the English people. Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject, the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject interesting, but he himself did wonders in promoting this ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... anything we ever dreamed at Hamley, Faith? Yet here am I set, and here shall I stay till the skein be ravelled out. Soon I shall go into the desert upon a mission to the cities of the South, to Dongola, Khartoum, and Darfur and beyond; for there is trouble yonder, and war is near, unless it is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... youngest and most practical Miss Morton a look of quick intelligence. "Don't you fret; Ruthie, I'm hog tied by the silken skein of love. She's going to resign her ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... approach the dwelling, the housewife's handy-work is displayed in a pole hung with many a skein of snow white yarn, glistening in the sunlight. Four years have passed since Sybel was a bride—-her cheek has lost the bloom of girlhood, and has already assumed the hollow form of New Brunswick matrons; her dress is home-spun, of her own manufacture, carded and spun ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... abundantly throughout the islands. It is spun and sold in the skein to the Chinese and other nations, who come to get it. Cloth of different patterns is also woven from it, and the natives also trade that. Other cloths, called medrinaques, are woven from ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... yes! and yet I have tangled among The fray'd warp and woof of this brief life of mine Other lives than my own. Could my death but untwine The vext skein... but it will not. Yes, Duke, young—so young! And I knew you not? yet I have done you a wrong Irreparable!... late, too late to repair. If I knew any means... but I know none!... I swear, If this broken fraction of time could extend Into infinite lives of atonement, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith |
