"Spinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his time in the heart of his palace, perpetually surrounded with a company of women, whose dress and even manners he had adopted, applying himself with them to the spindle and the distaff, neither understanding nor doing any other thing than spinning, eating and drinking, and wallowing in all manner of infamous pleasure. Accordingly, a statue was erected to him, after his death, which represented him in the posture of a dancer, with an inscription ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... shoulder containing silvery fish that are still struggling; and to take a short cut climbs over his neighbour's broken fence and gives a tug to his coat which has caught on the fence. There a woman is dragging a dry branch along and from round the corner comes the sound of an axe. Cossack children, spinning their tops wherever there is a smooth place in the street, are shrieking; women are climbing over fences to avoid going round. From every chimney rises the odorous kisyak smoke. From every homestead comes the sound of increased bustle, precursor to ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... he had spoken the air was filled with spinning axes, ascending to the boughs and then falling to be deftly caught, each ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... a undershirt," he said, disgustedly, and started to say more, but paused, for there was something queer about that undershirt. His head was still spinning, and his eyes were sandy, but he perceived quite plainly that there were narrow blue ribbons running round the neck of that undershirt. He unrolled the socks and found them much longer in the leg than the kind habitually ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... spinning subtle webs to entangle human flies. He "lived along the line" of correspondence, keeping in touch with former associates and recent acquaintances. In his ark, seated at a rough table, he wrote to those he hoped to gain or feared ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... was the favorite gathering place of humble New England families and it was there they were best seen and understood; there the spinning wheel hummed while the pot was boiling or the bannock baking; there stockings and boots were dried by the open fire and the latter daily greased. With what pride did I see my first pair standing there ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... national production. There is more mind directing the machinery propelled by the forces of nature, and more mind directing the machinery of the human body. The result is, that a given product is furnished by less outlay of physical force. Formerly, with the old spinning-wheel and hand-loom, we put a great deal of bone and muscle into a yard of cloth; now we put in very little. We have substituted mind for physical force, and the question is, which is the more economical? Or, in other words, is it of any consequence to the employer whether ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high wages and the cost of living—oh, take what you like," I repeated, "it's all in the Times!" Again with infinite weariness she moved her head from side to side until, like a top exhausted with spinning, it ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... should spend His eternity—which might be so much better employed—in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a great child, with tops and teetotums—is not this a serious scandal? I wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... so to speak, on our account. At the age of sixty-five grandfather set himself to till the farm on a larger scale, and to renew his lumbering operations, winters. Grandmother, too, was constrained to increase her dairy, her flocks of geese and other poultry, and to begin anew the labor of spinning and knitting. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and darting to the four corners of the room, climbed like squirrels until they reached the tunnelled roofing, where, making their way to the centre with a dexterity that was marvellous, they threw their ropes over the timbers and came spinning down to the floor, like gigantic spiders, each suspended on his own line. The four men, looped nooses in hand, took up positions behind the four Electors, all of whom were now on their feet. Wilhelm saluted the Empress, bringing the hilt of his sword to ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... afterward that he felt as though he had gone into a spinning nose dive with a Boche aviator on his tail, while Jack admitted that he felt somewhat as he did the time his gasoline pipe was severed by a Hun bullet when he was high in the air and several ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... stranger's bows. As it was, by backing astern a few yards they gave the steamer good room to pass; and it was both interesting and novel to see the great mass go plunging heavily past with the long sea-grass waving and trailing from her bottom, and the great propeller spinning rapidly round, now completely immersed, and anon lifted almost entirely out of the water. Once clear of her, the Flying Fish sank to a depth of ten fathoms, and after a ten-mile run at full speed, once more paused ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... wont in the domestic life of all Grecian states, her handmaids were around the noble virgin. Two were engaged on embroidery, one in spinning, a fourth was reading aloud to Cleonice, and that at least was a rare diversion to women, for few had the education of the fair Byzantine. Cleonice herself was half reclined upon a bench inlaid with ivory and ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... board, and spent a long evening with us. They were a free, open-hearted, boastful, conceited, good-humoured set of fellows, and a jolly night we had of it in the forecastle, while the mates and captains were enjoying themselves and spinning ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... face of the dial—usually of paper—are various numerals, and between the face and its glass covering is a small marble or wooden ball. The appliance is used in lieu of dice or coins when two or more customers are "tossing" for drinks. Each in turn sends the dial spinning round, and wins or loses according to the numeral against which the ball rests when the dial stops. As I can find no English name for the appliance, I have thought ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... is how I came,—I put Here my knee, there my foot, Up and up, from shoot to shoot— And the blessed bean-stalk thinning Like the mischief all the time, Till it took me rocking, spinning, In a dizzy, sunny circle, Making angles with the root, Far and out above the cackle Of the city I was born in, Till the little dirty city In the light so sheer and sunny Shone as dazzling bright and pretty As the money that you find In a dream of finding ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... process in production that permitted the rise of a parasitical, or leisure, class. As long as both men and women were forced to produce things in order to live, an exploiting class, that lives off the labor of others, was impossible. But as spinning, weaving, canning, soap-making, butter, bread, candle, clothes-making and a hundred other functions formerly performed by women in the home, were absorbed into the factories, the young girls often ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... the good-natured Nabob allowed himself to be dazzled by those attitudes, that clattering noise as of an empty spinning-wheel; but to-day he found himself on a level with the others. As he sat at the centre of the green table, his portfolio before him, his two elbows firmly planted upon it, reading the report drawn by de Gery, the members of the committee ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... you will often see boys playing hopscotch or spinning peg-tops. They also play shuttlecock, but they have no battledore. They kick the shuttlecock with the sides of ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous
... of square open courts and long, tunnel-like, covered and uncovered corridors which formed the immense, rambling Zaouia, or sacred school of Oued Tolga. Things happened on these roofs which would have interested a stranger, for there was spinning of sheep's wool, making of men's burnouses, fashioning of robes for women, and embroidering of saddles; but the woman who looked towards the west with the sun in her eyes was tired of the life on sun-baked roofs and in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... men reeled from a port-hole, the blood spinning far out of their wounds. Indeed, through every aperture in the walls the bullets were now humming like ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cotton manufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domestic system in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularly Yorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also its spinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth when finished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets and fairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and 1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton, transformed the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... think from the slow and clumsy spinning of this tale that I could crowd the narrative of all that I had seen and heard into a niggard three-score words or less. But this I did, writing them upon the margin of the captain's map, and noting in an added ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... divided between these reflections, and doubtful of what he should do, Bruce was looking upward to the roof of the cabin in which he lay; and his eye was attracted by a spider, which, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was endeavoring, as is the fashion of that creature, to swing itself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which it meant to stretch its web. The insect made the attempt again and again without success; at length Bruce counted that it had tried to carry ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... other, as each tried to outdo the other in readiness to serve me. To-day, Charley, who was usually the last to rise in the morning, roused even me, and brought the horses before our breakfast was ready. Brown's fondness for spinning a yarn will soon, however, induce him to put an end to this feud with his companion and countryman. In the early part of our journey, one or other of our party kept a regular night-watch, as well to guard us from any ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... his young beginning, You are not here at his aged end; Off he coaxed you from Life's mad spinning, Lest you should see his form extend Shivering, sighing, Slowly dying, And a tear on ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... town." In Chintadripet to-day there are still many spinners and weavers; and one of the sights in Chintadripet—growing gradually more rare—is the spectacle of primitively-clad urchins or grown men spinning in the streets with primitive gear and in primitive fashion; and it is interesting to recall the fact that this has been going on in Chintadripet for nearly two centuries—an industry which ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... as it went spinning downward, it seemed to him that many seconds elapsed before it struck the bottom ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... easiest part of it. I've already caught him filling a fountain-pen as if he'd been brought up on them, and humming the spinning chorus from The Flying Dutchman; not to mention the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... their longest voyages in American and European boats which they have purchased. With the method of producing those commodities of civilized nations which they prize so highly, they are still as much as ever unacquainted. They possess sheep, and excellent cotton; but no spinning-wheel, no loom, has yet been set in motion among them; they choose rather to buy their cloth and cotton of foreigners for real gold and pearls; one of our sailors sold an old shirt for five piastres. Horses ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... through whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of line and colour. He was smitten with a love of the impossible—the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... 'There! there! ha' done wi' thee,' but had no more heart to show her disapprobation; and now they came back to their usual occupations until it should please their visitor to go; then they would rake the fire and be off to bed; for neither Sylvia's spinning nor Bell's knitting was worth candle-light, and morning hours are precious ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... game played with large tops is much practised for the purpose of taking omens in the season when the jungle is cleared in order to make new ladangs. The top (bae-ang) is very heavy and is thrown by a thin rope. One man sets his spinning by drawing the rope backward in the usual way; to do this is called niong. Another wishing to try his luck, by the aid of the heavy cord hurls his top at the one that is spinning, as we would throw a stone. To do this is called maw-pak, and hence the game gets its name, maw-pak bae-ang. ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... boy's. She could not write or read, was so ignorant as to astonish ladies, and had only the peasant arts. The earliest description tells of her "common red frock carefully patched." "I could beat any woman in Rouen at spinning and stitching," she said to her judges, who, to be sure, had no special knowledge of anything beyond theology. "I'm only a poor girl, and can't ride or fight," she said when first she conceived her mission, and she had just the common instincts of the working woman. We may suppose her ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight of snowflakes ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... in anger binding Ixion to a winged wheel made of fire, and sending him spinning through the air, we are merely dealing with a Greek variant of the Egyptian myth in which Re despatched Horus as a winged disk to slay his enemies. In the Hellenic version the sky-god is angry with the father of the centaurs for his ill-treatment of his father-in-law and his behaviour ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... table-boards and "cloathes," trestles, beds; bedding and bed-clothing, cradles, "buffets," cupboards and "cabinets," chests and chests of drawers, boxes of several kinds and "trunks," andirons, "iron dogs," "cob-irons," fire-tongs and "slices" (shovels), cushions, rugs, and "blanckets," spinning wheels, hand-looms, etc., etc. Among household utensils were "spits," "bake-kettles," pots and kettles (iron, brass, and copper), frying-pans, "mortars" and pestles (iron, brass, and "belle-mettle"), sconces, lamps (oil "bettys"), candlesticks, snuffers, buckets, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... morning I must divert myself." And he began to spin his golden penny in the sun, sometimes spinning it very dexterously from his elbow and never letting it fall. But the girls wouldn't look, or if they did, it was through stray bits of their hair; when they could not be ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... romantic and mystic love between man and woman. Through them the symbols of the mandarin duck and drake, the one-winged birds, the tree whose boughs are interwoven, are revealed. They are the earthly counterparts of the heavenly lovers, the Cow-herd and the Spinning-maid in the constellations of Lyra and Aquila. To them Chinese poetry owes some of its finest inspirations, and at least two of its greatest singers, Tu Fu and ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... spread rapidly, and a new era of manufactures was opening. The South—more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class—caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... horse. And then at once the will sprang up awake, And, like a necromantic sage, forbade What came unbidden to depart at will. So on that form he rested his sad thoughts, Till he began to wonder what her lot; How she had fared in spinning history Into a psyche-cradle, where to die; And then emerge—what butterfly? pure white, With silver dust of feathers on its wings? Or that dull red, seared with its ebon spots? And then he thought: "I know some women fail, And cease to be so very beautiful. And I have heard men rave of certain ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... the tablet presented in memory of the women of 1776 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. It represents one woman busy with spinning while another is making bullets at a fireplace. These noble and brave women deserve much credit for helping to win our independence, for while their husbands and sons fought they gathered in the crops, melted into bullets their ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... an elaborate prologue. The three Norns sit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their thread of destiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of his eye, and of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to make a heft for his spear, also how the tree withered after suffering that violence. They have also some ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... other's hand—but in time only to deflect the shot; too late to prevent it being fired. There was a flash in mid-air, the roar of the report went racketing through the silent house, and the revolver, spinning from the other's hands, struck against the wall ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... embroidered upon cloths spun if not actually woven by the housewife and her handmaidens. In the barrows containing remains of people of the Stone Age, and the peoples of the early Bronze Age, among the few ornaments and personal adornments buried with them were spinning whorls—the curiosities which remain to us of the earliest ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... to some high place to find the sunrise, and to send echoing eastwards the exultant greetings of his jubilant horn. And lo! the sunrise coming up from the echoes, and the plains new-lit by the day, and the leagues spinning by like water flung from a top, and that gay companion, the loudly laughing wind, and men and the fears of men and their little cities; and, after that, great rivers and waste spaces and huge new hills, and then new lands beyond them, and more cities of men, and always the old companion, ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... and banks, and rushes headlong down, carrying everything before it in a resistless whirl of devastation, tearing great trees up by the roots, crashing through villages and towns and factories, girding the world with a liquid tempest that sends the works of man spinning down upon its dreadful course, till it plunges into the abyss, a frantic chaos of indiscriminate destruction, storm, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... of each man, whether estatesman or farmer, formerly had a twofold support; first, the produce of his lands and flocks; and, secondly, the profit drawn from the employment of the women and children, as manufacturers; spinning their own wool in their own houses (work chiefly done in the winter season), and carrying it to market for sale. Hence, however numerous the children, the income of the family kept pace with its increase. But, by the invention and universal application ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... sun and moon Seem biding in a roadstead,—objects which, As plain fact proves, are really borne along. Between two mountains far away aloft From midst the whirl of waters open lies A gaping exit for the fleet, and yet They seem conjoined in a single isle. When boys themselves have stopped their spinning round, The halls still seem to whirl and posts to reel, Until they now must almost think the roofs Threaten to ruin down upon their heads. And now, when nature begins to lift on high The sun's red splendour ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... henceforth into a spinning-wheel! Torture your dog, that he may tell when last He lapped the blood his master shed...not me! My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, 65 And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall To see, in this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... himself, that his literary attainments were by no means of a high order. "We don't spin tops" is a favorite saying amongst artillery officers, indicating that they do not shirk their duty by frivolous pursuits; but it must be confessed that Servadac, being naturally idle, was very much given to "spinning tops." His good abilities, however, and his ready intelligence had carried him successfully through the curriculum of his early career. He was a good draughtsman, an excellent rider—having thoroughly mastered the successor to the famous "Uncle ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... where they were deposited for the service of the state. The foreign trade of the empire was regulated by this minister, who directed likewise all the linen and woollen manufactures, in which the successive operations of spinning, weaving, and dyeing were executed, chiefly by women of a servile condition, for the use of the palace and army. Twenty-six of these institutions are enumerated in the West, where the arts had been more recently ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... plenty time to ourselves. Most of the time we spent singing and praying 'cause master was sich a good Christian and most of us had 'fessed religion. Evenings we would spin on the old spinning wheel, quilt make clothes, talk, tell jokes, and a few had learned to weave a little bit from Missus. We would have candy pulls, from cooked molasses, and sing in the moonlight by the tune of an old banjo picker. Chillen was mostly seen, not heard, different from youngens ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States, From Interviews with Former Slaves - Virginia Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... truth about the death of Jesus, and nothing needs to be added to show how great an event in the dealings of God with men it must have been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological word-spinning only serves to obscure its true significance. Show to the world the real Jesus; tell men how it came about that He had to die, and they cannot help ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... dropped her sword, and beat upon the door with her little bare hands, weeping and screaming in a perfect ecstasy of rage, and showering curses and imprecations on her brother. The army joined in the torrent of abuse, and a very pretty set of phrases were sent spinning through the clean night air. At length, Tungku Aminah, finding that she only bruised her hands, again took up her sword, and, as soon as she could make herself heard, renewed her challenge to her ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... dancing in the quadrilles and Lancers is of a rather stately and ceremonious sort. In waltz or galop the English always dance the same step, the deux temps, and the aim of the dancing couple is to go as much like a spinning-top as possible. They make occasional efforts to introduce puzzling novelties like the trois temps, the Boston dip, etc., but, I am glad to say, without any success. The result is, that once having learned to dance in England, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was naturally enough the lion of the day. A thick head, bold, but bald, the consequence perhaps not of his dissipation; but of his worry in by gone days. His merit consists in the possession of the chartist slang; hence his cleverness in spinning, a yarn never to the purpose, but blathered with long phrases and bubbling with cant. He took up the cause of the diggers, not so much for the evaporation of his gaseous heroism, as eternally to hammer on the ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... rapid substitution of machinery for hand-labour in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized. It is reckoned that fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... not a pretty, face under a broad brim, and these females were remarkably ill- favoured; their complexions hardened, wrinkled, and bronzed, from the effects of hard toil, and the extremes of heat and cold. I heard the hum of spinning-wheels from many of the houses, for these industrious women spin their household linen, and the gray homespun in which the men are clothed. The furniture is antique, and made of oak, and looks as if it had been handed down from generation to generation. The men, largely ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... discovered in the weight, he was still more elated at heart; and on his way back, he first and foremost delivered Ni Erh's message to his wife, and then returned to his own home, where he found his mother seated all alone on a stove-couch spinning thread. As soon as she saw him enter, she inquired where he had been the whole day long, in reply to which Chia Yn, fearing lest his parent should be angry, forthwith made no allusion to what transpired with Pu Shih-jen, but simply explained that he had been in the western ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... goats; they told us that their parents lived not far off in the valley Omyle [Arabic]. We went there, and found two small tents, where three or four women and as many little children were occupied in spinning, and in collecting herbs to feed the lambs and kids, which were frisking about them. Ayd knew the women, who belonged to his own tribe of Mezeine. Their husbands were fishermen, and were then at the sea-shore. They brought us some milk, and I bought a kid ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... the population the winter used to be a busy time, for it was during these four or five months that the spinning and weaving had to be done, but now the big factories, with their cheap methods of production, are rapidly killing the home industries, and the young girls are not learning to work at the jenny and the loom as ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Cap'n Mike with admiration. When it came to spinning a convincing yarn right off the cuff, so to speak, Cap'n Mike was a master. Rick hid a smile. What had the old man said about ham actors a little ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... accelerator, sent us spinning round the curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... one black and most unfriendly day Grootver had caught her as she passed between The kitchen and the garden. She had run In fear of him, his evil leering eye, And when he came she, bolted in her room, Refused to show, though gave no reason why. The spinning of her future had begun, On quiet nights she heard the whirring ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... on a broken stone, in a strange, wild dress, and engaged in spinning a thread drawn from wool of three different colours. She was at the same time half singing and half muttering a kind of charm, which seemed to have reference to the child which had been born the night before; and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... There is a beautiful shadow there, and I heard the streamlet say that he would sing a little to you; he is not very big, he cannot sing very loud. By-and-by, I know, the sun will make us as dry as dry, and darker, and then the reapers will come while the spiders are spinning their silk again—this time it will come floating in the blue air, for the air seems blue ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... spinning-jenny, born at Standhill, near Blackburn; was a poor and illiterate weaver when in 1760 he, in conjunction with Robert Peel, brought out a carding-machine; in 1766 he invented the spinning-jenny, a machine which has since revolutionised the cotton-weaving industry, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... author of the "Treatise on the American Law of Real Property," and his merits as a writer have thus become so well known as to render any new commendation superfluous. His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying, unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have seen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in a two-room house made of native lumber. The houses were all small. A four or five room house was considered a mansion. We made our own clothes, had spinning wheels and raised and combed our own cotton, clipped the wool from our sheep's backs, combed and spun it into cotton and wool clothes. We never knew what boughten clothes were. I learned to make shoes when I was just a boy and I made the shoes for the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kansas Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... quaint conceit. All subjects that bring up home associations are pictorially told in what, as to the rule, is the best of engraving. The old water-wheel is there, making music in the village glen; the limpid stream winding near the farmhouse; the spinning-wheel, "merrily, noisily, cheerily whirring;" the baby of the home saying her evening prayer, and John asleep beneath the summer boughs. Everything that clusters about the fireside, breathes in farewells, sings in marriage and throbs in love, finds embodiment. The ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... release was easy. Very hastily she freed herself. She made one step from the tree, and her head was spinning. Her last conscious movement was towards him. She reeled, and dropped. Her hand fell upon his thigh. It was soft and wet, and gave way under her pressure; he cried out at her touch, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... its beautiful eyes to the boy, and wagged its tail gently on the ground; then it sighed, as if understanding all that was said. Noemi stopped spinning, leaned her head on her hand, and looked ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... and undisturbed, was spinning out his sleep. Mrs. Greening brought coffee and refreshments for the young widow from her own kitchen across the road, and the sun rose and drove the mists out of the hollows, as a shepherd drives his flocks out ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... my lad!" cried Grant, giving his oar a pull that sent the head of the boat spinning round in the opposite direction. Then the sturdy Norseman and the stalwart Scot gave a pull together with all their might, and sent the boat like an arrow into the creek, where, in a few seconds, her keel ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... the elegant revellers. Softly and slowly, led by their host, they glided along like spirits of air; but each time that the Duke passed the musicians, the music became livelier, and the motion more brisk, till at length you might have mistaken them for a college of spinning dervishes. One by one, an exhausted couple retreated from the lists. Some threw themselves on a sofa, some monopolised an easy chair; but in twenty minutes the whirl had ceased. At length Peacock Piggott gave a groan, which denoted returning energy, and raised a ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... upon deck. A number of these were now gathered in a knot on the forecastle, and while they were sitting cross-legged, picking old rope, and preparing it in suitable form for caulking the ship's seams, one of their number was spinning a yarn, the hero of which was evidently him who now filled the post of commander on board their vessel. The object of their remarks, meanwhile, stood once more quietly leaning over the monkey-rail on the weather ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... is an island twenty miles off the south of a South American republic. It is a port of that republic; and it sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea, toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant tropics where all things "ripen, cease and ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... your own hands,' hissed the wicked old man, rubbing his hands. 'Oh!' he cried, spinning round on his wooden leg, 'it's a lovely idea. Wait till we meet "Mr Right", just wait,' and he dropped into his chair quite overcome by the state of excitement he ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... seventy-eight thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine, and the manufactures consist principally of yarns, linen, with canvas and cotton bagging, great quantities of which are exported to France and North and South America. There are about sixty spinning mills and factories in the town and neighborhood, besides several iron founderies and manufactories of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... crowd one another out—the more one writes, the more one recalls. These random jottings, however, will call up many more to the reader's memory. Such is my hope—that, having started you in a reminiscent frame of mind you will now carry on "spinning ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... were taken up, and again six. Then came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger and finer, until it was ready for spinning. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... billows break in thunder on Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of Scotland was vocal—melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... care of their baby boy alone and unaided. Grief for this irretrievable loss drove the young widower away for a while from his accustomed field of work among the Tyneside coal-pits; he accepted an invitation to go to Montrose in Scotland, to overlook the working of a large engine in some important spinning-works. He remained in this situation for one year only; but during that time he managed to give clear evidence of his native mechanical insight by curing a defect in the pumps which supplied water to his engine, and which had hitherto defied the best endeavours of the local engineers. ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... he has heard about the waltzing from Eugene, who desires to put it in its true light. It occurs one evening when he and Miss Dayre have been spinning and floating and whirling through drawing-room and hall, while Violet plays with fingers that seem bewitched and shake out showers of delicious melody. They have paused to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... faculties. He then beheld the Virgin herself bodily present,—her who is fairest now in heaven, as she was on earth; and while his eyes were being painted with her beauty,[42] there fell on a sudden a seraphic light from heaven, which, spinning into a circle as it came, formed a diadem round her head, still spinning, and warbling as it spun. The sweetest melody that ever drew the soul to it on earth would have seemed like the splitting of a thunder-cloud, compared with the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... girl. Coming to Hoel Farm for the first time was for her like visiting an estate that was, in very truth, royal; and besides, she had come on an important "grown-up" errand. She was taking her mother's place and visiting Hoel as a spinning woman. ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... was given a slight pull, and away they went, coursing like a locomotive over the prairies, the wheels spinning round at a tremendous rate, while the extraordinary speed caused the wind thus created almost to lift the caps from their heads, and a slight swell in the prairie sent the wagon up with a bound that threatened ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... pixy-led. In going home, full of strong drink, across the hill above the cavern called the "Pixies' Hole," on a moonlit night, he heard sweet {511} music, and was led into the whirling dance by the "good folk," who kept on spinning him without mercy, till he fell ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... about half my time in Ayrshire with my "darling Jean," and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientifical questions; to be as ashamed of undue haste and partisan prejudice in the one case as in the other; and to believe that the machinery of society is at least as delicate as that of a spinning-jenny, and as little likely to be improved by the meddling of those who have not taken the trouble to master the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... occupied in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life, but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between small barons, which kept their women constant ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... was very sensible, the mere spinning of the magnet in the air, whilst one of the galvanometer wires touched the extremity, and the other the equatorial parts, was sufficient to evolve a current of ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... fork of lightning had transfixed him—a sharp white fire darting from head and feet and arms to his heart, and whirling there in a spinning ball. He spoke quietly: ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... He thanked me at intervals for some little service rendered, and nearly all the time his eyes were fixed upon the clock. He was reckoning with his own life. He did not want to die in the day, but in the night. He was deliberately spinning out his life till the night nurse came on duty. I suppose that in his superficial, happy-go-lucky ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... remind one of the "Napoleon of the Suffrage Movement" was a large escritoire covered with documents in the usual state of confusion—Miss Anthony never could keep her papers in order. In search of any particular document she roots out every drawer and pigeon hole, although her mother's little spinning wheel stands right beside her desk, a constant reminder of all the domestic virtues of the good housewife, with whom "order" is of the utmost importance and "heaven's first law." The house was exquisitely clean and orderly, the food appetizing, the conversation pleasant and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the colored particles in an old-fashioned kaleidoscope. Cubes, pyramids and cones of variegated hues. Swift-rushing spheres and long slim cylinders of brilliant blue-white; gleaming disks of polished jet, spinning.... ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... a fearful state of excitement and confusion that morning, but at last everything was ready, barring one or two trifles. Then I suddenly heard a wild yell, and, spinning round, I saw a team tearing off without a driver. The next driver rushed forward to help, with the result that his dogs made off after the others. The two sledges were on ahead, and the two drivers after them in full gallop; but the odds were too unequal ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... MARCH YE IX. We were sat this morrow all in the little chamber at work, and I somewhat marvelled what was ado with Mother, for smiles kept ever and anon flitting across her face, as though she were mighty diverted with the flax she was spinning: and I guessed her thoughts should be occupying somewhat that was of mirthful sort. At ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... there for a little while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less honoured, least of all conscious of any claim to honour; casting and craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet truth of time; spinning of wheel, and {167} slackening of rope, and swinging of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or pan; but dark-browed and silent, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... track, and now relieved as he beholds him after a pause of deliberation wind into the wrong,—even so, O pleasant reader! doth the sage novelist conduct thee through the labyrinth of his tale, amusing himself with thy self-deceits, and spinning forth, in prolix pleasure, the quiet yarn of his entertainment from the involutions which occasion thy fretting eagerness and perplexity. But as when, thanks to the host's good-nature or fatigue, the mystery is once unravelled, and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that her son would not follow his father's business, shut up the shop, sold off the implements of trade, and with the money she received for them, and what she could get by spinning cotton, thought to maintain herself and her son. Alla ad Deen, who was now no longer restrained by the fear of a father, and who cared so little for his mother, that whenever she chid him, he would abuse her, gave himself ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... the two little Sisters, years ago, no heavy sorrow. At Solituede, but for the general cloud of anxiety and grief about their loved and gifted Brother and his exile, their lives were of the peaceablest description: diligence in household business, sewing, spinning, contented punctuality in all things; in leisure hours eager reading (or at times, on Christophine's part, drawing and painting, in which she attained considerable excellence), and, as choicest recreation, walks amid ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... sunlight, but he soon saw that there were two oaken beds, closed up after the manner of the Welsh: in fact, the domitories of Ellis Pritchard and the man who served under him, both on sea and on land. There was the large wheel used for spinning wool, left standing on the middle of the floor, as if in use only a few minutes before; and around the ample chimney hung flitches of bacon, dried kids'-flesh, and fish, that was in process of ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... piece of card was let down upon it, the cephalothorax, with the legs of the spider, was upon one side of a partition, while on the other was the abdomen, bearing upon its posterior extremity the spinning organs. The head and horns of a cow to be milked are secured in a similar manner. By placing in a row, or one behind another, several spiders thus secured, a compound thread was simultaneously obtained from them, and wound upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various |
