"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have not been a doer, a faiseur, as the French would say, I do not wish to represent myself as a mere idle drone during the long years of my quiet life. Nor did I stand quite alone in looking on a scholar's life—even when I was living in a garret au cinquieme—as a paradise on earth. Did not Emerson write, "The scholar is the man of the age"? Did not even Mazzini, who certainly was constantly up and ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus, Ares, and Hermes, such as ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... among double-reed instruments the various bagpipes, cornemuses, and musettes, which are shawm or oboe instruments with reservoirs of air, and furnished with drones inclosing single reeds. I shall have more to say about the drone in the third lecture. In restricting our attention to the Highland bagpipe, with which we are more or less familiar, it is surprising to find the peculiar scale of the chaunter, or finger pipe, in an old Arabic scale, still prevailing in Syria and Egypt. Dr. A.J. Ellis' ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... while the engines were checked, turning at half speed for a number of revolutions, then ceasing as a bell rang. The only sound was the soughing gurgle of the water as it lapped along the steel plates, and the distant drone of the rapids. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... government on some primitive planet. Usually, they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... a kind cricket fluttered, Perched upon the place Vacant left, and duly uttered 'Love, Love, Love,' whene'er the bass Asked the treble to atone For its somewhat sombre drone." ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing into ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... so glad, not sorry," was her dreamy response. She lapsed into silence as the somnolent drone of the motor and the whirr of the wheels caused the tired ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... led the way into the parlour, took the book from the shelf, put it on the table within the little circle of light cast by a shaded candle, and began. It was dull enough, though I had borne such tribulations before, and the drone of my aunt's voice would have sent me to sleep, as it had done at other times, even in a straight-backed chair, had I not been so full of my discovery, and chafed at this delay. Thus all the time my aunt read of spiritualities and saving grace, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... The drowsy drone of honey-laden bees, The poppied breath of gardens blooming fair, The scent of elder blossoms, sweet and rare, Come stealing in on balmy southern breeze; And dying lays, whose long lost melodies Still haunt old storied ruins everywhere, Are dimly floating through the ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... The drone of the brook increased his agitation and the day was well-nigh spent when the doors of the cells opened and the brethren began to appear in their white garments; and when they had found seats about the table Paul related that he was ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... meaning a second grass or aftermath, not quite so rich or nourishing as the first growth; others, pointing at a kind of inferior bee, which receives the name of Foggie from its finding its nest among fog or moss; and others uncivilly insinuating that the Latin fucus, a drone, is the origin of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and the rattle ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... this business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain as this, falling in the black and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... bitterness—of court life. Women, wine, gambling, and fighting had given me the best of all the evils they had to offer. Was I now to drop that valorous life, which men so ardently seek, and was I to take up a browsing, kinelike existence at Haddon Hall, there to drone away my remaining days in fat'ning, peace, and quietude? I could not answer my own question, but this I knew: that Sir George Vernon was held in high esteem by Elizabeth, and I felt that his house was, perhaps, the only spot in England where my head could safely lie. I also had other plans concerning ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the far woods are dim, and the rooks cry and call. Down in the valley the lamps, and the mist, and a star over all, There by the rick, where they thresh, is the drone at an end, Twilight it is, and I travel the ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... narrow secret stair, pushed back, with much circumspection and caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... we could spare; we could watch without weeping A Tutor's extinction, a Dean's disappearance. And Professors who drone while their pupils are sleeping, Though they went at a loss, we should welcome ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... hundred and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive— 10 Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. 15 It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the Deacon ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the old drone ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... he surely shall accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Hebrides, Oct. 15, 1773). Not six months before his death he asked Dr. Burney to teach him the scale of music (ante, p. 263, note 4). That 'he appeared fond of the bagpipe, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone' (Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 15), does not tell for much either way. In his Hebrides (Works, ix. 55), he shews his pleasure in singing. 'After supper,' he writes, 'the ladies sung Erse songs, to which I listened, as an English audience to an Italian ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... a pragmatical moralist played upon by a sententious drone, he thought it politic to detach them, and vanquish Clara while she was in the beaten mood, as she had appeared ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that night in St. Peter's church. Oppressed with weariness of body, and awe of mind, they heard the monks drone out their chants through the misty gloom; they confessed the sins—and they were many—of their past wild lives. They had to summon up within themselves courage and strength henceforth to live, not ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us is ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... and there was a patch of vivid emerald where the water fell. To the north it was possible to make out the arms of a semaphore lying idle. There was no sound in the place. The river itself flowed silently. Only the occasional deep drone of a hornet or the note of a mosquito came to the ear. The sun seemed to be drawing the land together, sucking up all ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... my right stands the little brown mill, with its huge wheel, and wide blue pond, and foamy waterfall. On that day I heard its drone, and saw the geese bathing, and throwing up the bright sparkling drops with their wings, until ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... smote the gloom; And round about them swept a breeze, With faint breaths as of clover-bloom; A bird was heard, through drone of bees,— Then, far and clear and eerily, A child's voice from an orchard-tree— Then laughter, sweet as the perfume Of lilacs, could the hearing see. And he—O Love! he fed thy name On bruised kisses, while her dim Deep eyes, ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... moment. He spun his hunter round and dropped sheer for a thousand feet, coming up in a fairly thick bank of white cloud. He there flattened out again and began climbing, not being sure of his altitude. No sooner had his engine begun to drone out the rhythm of its full power, and the good hunter-plane begun to rise majestically, than what should he see but the second enemy fighter right in front of him! A new drum was in place on his Lewis gun, and he let go. The Boche pilot threw up both hands and fell back, and ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... but his merriment was shut off when I opened the gate. Behind the house, where the ground sloped toward the orchard, there were a number of cabins, old, but not deserted, for negro children were playing about the doors and from somewhere within came the low drone of a half-religious, half-cornshucking melody. An old dog got up from under a tree, but, repenting of the exertion, lay down again; a turkey loudly gobbled, a peacock croaked, and a tall, bulky, old man ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... room. By its light he could see the outline of the beds. Around him there ascended a choral harmony composed of snores of every degree, reaching from the mild, mellow intonation of Clive, down to the deep, hoarse, sepulchral drone of Uncle Moses. In spite of his vexation about his wakefulness, a smile passed over Bob's face, as he listened to those astonishing voices ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... little drama of serious interest was going on upstairs. There sat Kate before the looking-glass, with flushed cheeks and quivering mouth. The low drone of many voices came to her through the floor. Then a dull silence and one voice, and Nancy Joe coming and going between the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the home Of a lazy drone, And a bed on a cushioned knee; But in wild free ways I will spend my days, And at night on the roofs ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... down in the crystal cage, buzzed on audibly; and to one who heard it, the drone of the lazy wings seemed like the roars of ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... fear: They judge, from the experience of the dame, How hard a task it is to quench her flame; And who falls short of furnishing a course Up to his brawny predecessor's force, With utmost rage from her embraces thrown, Remains convicted as an empty drone. Thus often, to his shame, a pert beginner Proves in the end a miserable sinner. As for our youngster, I am apt to doubt him, With all the vigour of his youth about him; But he, more sanguine, trusts in one and twenty, And impudently ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... what I have is my own, if labour in getting, and care in augmenting, can make a right of property; and no drone shall feed on my honeycomb. Think on it well: what I have said is not without reflection, and what I resolve upon ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... band of plaits around the brow, was not unbecoming. Nevertheless, Aunt Emily was entirely modern, modern with that up-to-date femininity which with regard to men takes its key from the bee's impulse toward the drone, stinging him to death once he has ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there was no mill but many lights, came to the door and ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke
... of her thoughts the old man's voice reached her in a faint, indistinguishable drone. She had not the slightest interest in what he wished to say to Lady Clifford, nor in the effect it would have upon the latter. All at once she heard the Frenchwoman shriek out with a ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... for me, Joy I've none in single horn. When the mingled trumpets sound,[a] This is sweetest from the drone! ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... this respect one may perceive to exist between the bees of the Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... quite a romantic person. In the actuality she felt as frigid as if his marble forehead was chilling her, and what she remembered most acutely was his fishlike gasping. Then, too, the contradictoriness of his social attitude, his desire to make her a rich drone, his shame at his mother, his reclusive shyness—all the weaknesses of the man—came to obscure her sense of his literary idealism, if not, indeed, to reveal it as a mere coquetry with fine ideas and coarse clothes. And then for a moment ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... middle ages the name chorus was given to a primitive bagpipe without a drone. The instrument is best known by the Latin description contained in the apocryphal letter of St Jerome, ad Dardanum: "Chorus quoque simplex, pellis cum duabus cicutis aereis, et per primam inspiratur ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... hoards; but the bees were selfish and rude, justifying themselves on the ground that Tangle and Mossy were not subjects of their queen, and charity must begin at home, though indeed they had not one drone in their poorhouse at the time. Even the blinking moles would fetch them an earth-nut or a truffle now and then, talking as if their mouths, as well as their eyes and ears, were full of cotton wool, or their own velvety fur. By the time they got out of the forest they were very ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... said. "My prospects are of the dreariest nature. You will give me the living of Trewinion when Mr. Polperrow dies, and I shall drone out my life on your bounty. Ah! ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for Mr. Williams had gone off with her father ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... McCargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not with the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... we read in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws for little folks are made; But if an insect of renown, Hornet or beetle, wasp or drone, Be caught in quest of sport or plunder, The flimsy fetter flies in sunder. Your simile perhaps may please one With whom wit holds the place of reason: 10 But can you prove that this in fact is Agreeable to life and practice? ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... in the cottage Stuart built on the hills. A jaunty sailboat nods at the buoy near the water's edge. The drone of bees from the fruit trees in full bloom on the terraces promise a luscious harvest in the summer and fall. The lawn is a wilderness of flowers and shimmering green. The climbing roses on the southeastern side of the house have covered it to the very eaves ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... there was no need for candles to light us to bed. We slept heavily, too tired to worry about the morrow, or the menacing drone ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... from the linnets' bills, And thro' the sunny flowers the bee-wings drone, And white bells of convolvulus on hills Of quiet May make silent ringing, blown Hither and thither by the wind of showers, And somewhere all the wandering birds have flown; And the brown breath of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... Erlon?" he thundered. "Have you again dared to save life, and neglect the object of our expedition? Fool! you will yet be driven forth as a drone from the hive. The girl's dead; throw her into the sea; she will be a dainty ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until the noon hour; ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... evacuated of all their inhabitants. Foreign scientists had been flown to the United States and were at the temporary area command post not far from Boulder Lake. Rocket missiles were aimed and ready to blast the lake and the mountains around it should the need arise. A drone plane had been flown to the lake with a television camera transmitting back everything its lens saw. It arrived at the lake and its camera relayed back exactly nothing that had not been photographed and recorded before. But suddenly there was a crash of static and the drone went out of control ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... times did the Tonneraire thus prove herself a crack ship. A crack ship with a crack crew and officers, remember; for the best of ships is but a drone unless well managed. Not even a drone, indeed; for a drone is a most duty-full bee, and a most respectable member of the apiarian republic. There is a vast deal of very indifferent music in the very best of fiddles, ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But are their whole of being! If the breath Be Life itself, and not its task and tent, If even a soul like Milton's can know death; O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of Nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause, She formed with restless hands unconsciously. Blank accident! nothing's anomaly! If rootless thus, thus substanceless ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... brushes buzzed and fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming. The place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... face heralded it, it began with a contagious cackle, it deepened into a flabby guffaw, and after all the others roundabout had finished their cachinnatory tribute it wound up with what was between a roar and the lazy drone of a bagpipe. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... little country church, with the plaster peeling off the walls! the drone of a bewhiskered, bald-headed parson being the sole music which greeted her ears. The rain beating against the broken window-panes, through which icy cold draughts of damp air reached her shoulders and caused her to shiver beneath her kerchief. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... who are thus led, do not you see that if such a decree is gone forth, you are supporting an idle man in vain?[1]—What end is preaching to answer? Let him lecture with ever such state and assurance, if the time, the place, the manner be all fixed: I say he is an ignorant, lazy drone, who is picking his poor people's pockets; but, perhaps, it was decreed that ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... of the Argyle family is a modern structure, and boasts very few vestiges of the old romantic history attached to the name. The park and look-out upon the lake are beautiful, but except from the brief pleasure derived from these, the old cross from Iona that stands in the market-place, and the drone of the bagpipe which lulled me to sleep at night playing some melancholy air, there was nothing to make me feel that it was "a far cry to Lochawe," but, on the contrary, I seemed in the very midst of the prosaic, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... lazy drone upon the labours of the industrious bees, to his high content and their no small trouble, to whom his company was as offensive as his ravening was oppressive; nor could they get any relief by their complaining ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... is as much as a Brigade-Major's job is worth to confess ignorance at such a crisis. So, after sweeping the skies fruitlessly with his glasses and listening intelligently to the steady drone, he said, "Yes!" with as much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... but let th' "dank wynd" moan, "Shimmer th' woold" and "rive the wanton surge;" I ask not much; grant but an "eery drone," Some "wilding frondage" and a "bosky dirge;" Grant me but these, and add a regal flush Of "sundered hearts upreared upon a byre;" Throw in some yearnings and a "darksome hush," And—asking nothing more—I'll ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Copyright is defined by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. Regarding ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... up, all of a sudden, and started in to cure me of being a drone. The medicine you used was strong; it did the business pretty thoroughly. You've no kick coming at the result. I'm going to ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... Dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of strangers. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown, and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, he was helped grudgingly to soup, getting just enough to save him ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... hard at work upon the benches, while every now and then came a musical cyclone of "Incomparable! Divine!" from the trained phalanx who intoned their applause, their united voices sweeping over the tumult as the drone of the wind dominates the roar of the sea. It was madness—insufferable madness! If this were allowed to pass, there was an end of all musical justice in Greece. Policles' conscience would not permit him to be still. Standing upon his bench with waving hands and upraised voice, he protested ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... .... They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... cxerpi. drawer : tirkesto. drawers : kalsono, (chest of -s), komodo. dream : songx'i, -o; (day-), rev'o, -i. dredge : skrapegi. dress : robo; vesti, sin vesti. drill : bori; ekzerco, manovro. drink : trinki, (to excess) drinki. drive : veturi; peli. "—away", forpeli. droll : ridinda, sxerca. drone : abelviro; zumi. drop : gut'o, -i. drown : dron'i, -igi. drug : drogo. drum : tamburo. drunken : ebria. dry : seka. "—land", firmajxo. duck : anasino, anaso. duration : dauxro. duty : devo, (tax) imposto. "be on—", dejxori. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... you, Miss Drone," said Beatrice when the two girls had set themselves to rights, and recovered breath; "it was all the fault ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. Her ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the year, but the warmth was as that of a soft summer day in England. The lazy drone of bees hung on the air, and somewhere among the tamarisks a small, persistent bird, called and called perpetually, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "But it's not true," ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... the village a mill-wheel droned lazily as the boys swung at scout's stride down the road. Suddenly the drone died away, and by the time the comrades were abreast of the quaint old wooden water-mill the wheel was still, and its day's ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... your home, and lived over those evenings graced by your presence, and lit by a cheerful fire, time and again. Do not think me insincere when I assure you they were the most delightful ones I ever passed. If you find time to write a line to one who is now a worker in the hive instead of a drone, it will be gratefully ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... she would be looking for him. Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming. She ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... outside was breathlessly still, except for the drone of insects at the screens, attracted by the glow of the library lamp. A steeple clock clanged its ten sonorous strokes, and still the old men chatted on, and the Duke had ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... industry alone. Keep good company, my boy. Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and Miss Evans did not marry—they were too much alike—they might have gotten into competition with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... begin MacDonough's Song. It got no further than the first line, for the Victor Pirolo sent down a warning drone on one stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salad's Statue ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... made witty invectives against usury. They say that it is a pity the devil should have God's part, which is the tithe. That the usurer is the greatest Sabbath breaker, because his plough goeth every Sunday. That the usurer is the drone that Virgil ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... need of thee: Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws, Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily; But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy To embattail and to wall about thy cause With iron-worded proof, hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... west-wind singing to itself through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill fluted across the deepening silence that summoned all these murmurs into hearing. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... were those which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of that force. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought of those saws," ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and gratitude for the other; and as I had in a great measure ceased from participating in their adventures, or, during Lucy's illness, which lasted several months, joining in their festivities, they at length considered me as a drone in a hive, by no means compensating by my services as an ally for my admittance into their horde as a stranger. You will easily conceive, when this once became the state of their feelings towards me, with how ill a temper they brooked ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sixpence. Service for service: how have you bought your sixpences? A man of spirit desires certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile concern ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and swam easily, as I thought, shoreward. The song went on, but it seemed to ring in my ears as the drone of our miller's pipes comes up from the river on a still summer evening. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... the fringe of dark and mysterious woodland, hung a Virginia heaven, a cloudless blue, soft, pure, intense. The air was full of subdued sound—the distant hum of voices from the fields of maize and tobacco, the faint clink of iron from the smithy, the wash and lap of the water, the drone of bees from the hives beneath the eaves of the house. Great bronze butterflies fluttered in the sunshine, brilliant humming-birds plunged deep into the long trumpet-flowers; from the topmost bough of a locust, heavy with bloom, came the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... forth in his exclamation that he would stand by the Constitution though all around him should perish, would be measurably realized; and among the ruins of the nation a few haggard and ragged pedants would be left to drone out eulogies on "the glorious Constitution" which had survived unharmed the anarchy, poverty, and depopulation it had produced. An interpretation of the Constitution which thus makes it the shield of treason and the destroyer of civilization must be false both to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in neglect,—as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... jig—a tarantella, perhaps—always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... to know how to get part of the answer. He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger. Instantly the cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost continuous drone of sound. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... the Earl, becoming quite energetic as he defended his order. "I deny it utterly. I know no class of men who do work more useful or more honest. Am I a drone? Have I been so from my youth upwards? I have always worked, either in the one House or in the other, and those of my fellows with whom I have been most intimate have worked also. The same career is ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... then the old lady's lean fingers clinched into his arm; her eyes grew bright; her mouth opened and she stopped in the middle of her drone. Jerome grew rigid. And no wonder. From the middle of the room not ten feet away came the tone of a bell, a great silvery voluminous sound—and music. A church bell. Just one stroke, full toned, filling all the air till the whole room was choked with music. Then as suddenly it died out and faded ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,—not permanent way,—built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally whistled ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... the Sky Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts' top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom's space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and jetmarines were also ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... the vast room cool and quiet. The time was three o'clock—immediately, that is, after luncheon. Through the narrow open windows sweet airs and scents came in from the bright world outside. Sometimes a bee would wander up from the fruit-gardens below, and lazily drone round shady corners. Sometimes a flock of pigeons rose swiftly in front of the windows, with a flash of shining wings. Every quarter of an hour the cathedral clock down in the town sent up its slow chime. Voices of people boating on the river floated up ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... The rabble of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone of singing voices ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... life in it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe I was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the meaning of it all. I ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... able to rehearse My Ewie's praise in proper verse, I 'd sound it forth as loud and fierce As ever piper's drone could blaw; The Ewie wi' the crookit horn, Wha had kent her might hae sworn Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor far awa'; Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... earth is burdened by So many a fool, so many a drone, Whose thoughts and deeds are all awry— These trees of flesh, these forms ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... along roads and railways in our back area. Arras was often severely bombed. The German aeroplanes on any fine night came to be regarded as inevitable. Bombing might be continued until nearly dawn. When no bombs fell close there was always the constant drone announcing their possibility. To men in huts or in the open, without lights or any means of shelter, the terror carried nightly overhead was greater far than that which ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Muscadel!"— As the last canto ceased, the Mermaid Inn Chorussed. I flew from laughing voice to voice; But, over all the hubbub, rose the drone Of Francis Bacon,—"Now, this Muscovy Is a cold clime, not favourable to bees (Or love, which is a weakness of the south) As well might be supposed. Yet, as hot lands Gender hot fruits and odoriferous spice, In this ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... black night, and Trumet sidewalks were uneven and hard to navigate. But she stumbled on, up the main road to the Corners, down the "Turn-off," past the chapel of the Come-Outers, from the open window of which sounded the drone of a high, nasal voice. Josiah Badger was "testifying," and Keziah caught a fragment of the testimony ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... The drone of an approaching car reached his ears. Pencil in hand, he sat listening. The sound grew louder, then ceased. Either the car had passed or had stopped somewhere near the house. Came a ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... tobacco-pouch, began to smoke. Fire-boxes and spittoons, I should mention, were freely handed about; so that half-an-hour which passed before the sermon began was agreeably spent. In the meanwhile, mass was being celebrated in the main hall of the temple, and the monotonous nasal drone of the plain chant was faintly heard in the distance. So soon as this was over, the lay clerk sat himself down by the hanging drum, and, to its accompaniment, began intoning the prayer, "Na Mu Miyo Ho Ren Go Kiyo," the congregation fervently ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... that the room began to waver and spin about Dorothy Thornton, until with the drone of the hired man's voice diminishing in her ears she fell swooning, and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... With a drone like that of a huge night-beetle, or prehistoric thunder-lizard, the machine leaped forward as a race-horse jumps under ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... like a drone in a hive when, on leaving my room in the mornings, I met Mrs. Hollingford coming from her work in the dairy, John Hollingford arriving from his early visit to a distant part of the farm, Jane from her sewing closet ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... whom it would have been but a body without a soul. It was I who had uttered words which were painful and astounding to one conscious of unimpugnable motives. In the days of toil to come, we were reminded, the Young Person, to wit, myself, would have no share. She would be but skeptic, critic, drone in the busy hive. Thus it was obvious that the Young Person could not with any trace of justice claim part or lot in the treasure. Were it not well, then, that the Young Person be required to make formal and written renunciation ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... possunt—that is to say, that not every soil is suited to every tree, Senor Don Jose—to the exhaustive treatise on bees, in which the poet describes the habits of those wise little animals, defining the drone in these words: ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... big nigger," the preacher went on, his voice taking the high drone of prophetic utterance, "an' you's all cobered wit' gol' lace. De Good Book say—'Hab no respec' for dem dat wears fine apparel.' No! 'Deir garments shall be mof-eaten, deir gol' an' silver shall be cankered, ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... in grass and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the grass was scant, and that his bed was scratchy. For a moment he lay in ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... to tell you the whole story, jest like it was," she went on in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a long way off. "That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin' shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a political race, and ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... Registers" are all that the veracious chronicler, who will not let his imagination run riot, can find to put before us. But happily, in the wildest days of the Middle Ages, there were found some peace-loving souls who preferred to drone away their lives in quiet meditation behind the walls of the great monasteries, undisturbed by the clash of swords. Some outlet had to be found for their innate energies and their intense religious enthusiasm; missionary zeal had not yet been invented, and the writing of books would ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... eyes of ink and diamonds shot starry glances from passing carriage windows. Erect English women drove high dog-carts. Gordon Highlanders swung along in the kilt, more at home in Cairo then in Edinburgh, the droning of their pipes as Oriental as the drone of a raeita, or the beat of tom-toms. A wedding party with a hidden bride in a yellow chariot, met a funeral, and yashmaked faces peeped from curtained windows, in one procession, to stare at the wailing, marching men of the other, and to shrink back hastily ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... as it. Yet Margaret thought for long that he had tired of Harvie merely and gone back to sea, and not until two years had passed would she marry me. We lived in Adam's house. It was so near the little school that when I opened the window in summer-time she could hear the drone of our voices. During the weeks before you were born I kept that window open all day long, and often I went to it and waved my ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... a Drone-fly is nothing almost but eyes. 2. Those are of two magnitudes. 3. They are Hemispheres, and very reflective and smooth. 4. Some directed towards every quarter. 5. How the fly cleanses them. 6. Their number. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... drone if he were your son," replied Mrs. Brauner. She knew that if any one else had dared thus to attack their boy, his father would have been growling and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... breathless scamper of nearly a mile on a hot day in June was described with gusto. Doris, who knew the village constable well, laughed outright, while Furneaux cackled shrilly. None who might be watching the little group in that delightful garden, with its scent of old-world flowers and drone of bees, could have guessed that a grewsome ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... well," he said. "It is making a man of Walter. He has been a drone, hitherto. Now he has become a worker, and, though I may not like him better, for he was always near to my ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... delivery spiritless, and his candences ridiculous. His soul was so overlaid with brawn and dignity that, though it heaved, panted, and struggled, it could never once get vent. Speaking through his apoplectic organs, I could not understand myself: it was a mumbling hubbub, the drone of a bagpipe, and the tantalizing strum strum of a hurdy-gurdy! Never was hearer more impatient to have it begin; never was hearer better pleased to have it over! Every sentence did but increase the fever of my mind. Enoch himself ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... bowed before it—a weird chant rising into murmuring echoes along the high, dim ceiling. There were priests standing rigidly in front of the idol, their hands stretched high; and every eye was upon them. None saw the three in the doorway until a roar split the drone ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... I slept a little as my custom is, and the last sound that I heard, and the first upon awaking, was the drone of the bees. When I awakened I thought that I would walk down to Master Richard's house and see how all fared. So I took my staff ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... and sleep, and pray, in peace— By industry we thrive, sir; And if a drone won't do his part, We'll scout him from the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat. The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the men who were making merry without. Then suddenly the news of what had occurred spread among the guests, and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... drone of the strange car as it swooped down upon us, coming to a sudden halt a yard distant, with ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... seat, on the side of the hill, the moon had risen. It was almost at the full, and a few gently sailing scraps of cloud, which crossed it, made it seem to be coming towards them. The plains beneath were veiled in haze; detached sounds mounted from them: the prolonged barking of a dog, the drone of an approaching train. Round about them, the air was heavy with the scent of the sun-warmed pines. Maurice had taken her hand and sat holding it: it was the one thing that existed for him. All else was vague and unreal: ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... no wonder! Ten thousand paroquets shrieking passionately, like a hundred knife-grinders at work, is no joke; especially when their melodies are mingled with the discordant cries of herons, and bitterns, and cranes, and the ceaseless buzz and hum of insects, like the bagpipe's drone, and the dismal croaking of boat-bills and frogs,—one kind of which latter, by the way, doesn't croak at all, but whistles, ay, better than many a bird! The universal hubbub is tremendous! I tell you, reader, that you don't understand ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... as she thought how different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... frequent. And presently they ceased almost altogether, to be repeated only at rare intervals, when the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... phenomenon occurs. He cannot resist the soporific tendencies of the furnaces. By the time Mr. Work gets fairly into secondly, Farmer Faragon is sound asleep. So he does not even listen to the preaching. Is he then a drone? Suppose you make a calculation how many mouths he feeds indirectly by the products of his farm. I cannot even guess. But I know nothing ever goes from it that is not good. The child is happy that drinks his milk, the butcher fortunate who buys ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... Again the dull drone of the heavy stuff—the practised ear could gauge its fall, and I retreated a few yards into the passage. The courtyard outside caught it, and the entire chateau trembled violently at the concussion. But why, why these big guns? Another landed in the yard, ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... pastoral bleat, the drone of bees, The flail-beat chiming far away, The cattle-low at shut of day, The voice of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... confirmation of her fears in the drone of a distant motor humming in the stillness and gaining volume with every beat of her heart. Presently it was strident and near at hand; and then, standing like a frozen thing, not daring to stir (indeed, half petrified with fear) she saw the marauding taxicab wheel ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance |
