"Falsetto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other fellow who was in the ascendant when I entered the farm sitting-room in answer to the summons of a falsetto bell. I was shy. I felt like an intruder. I was afraid that Farmer Banks would treat me as a distinguished visitor, and that my efforts to attain the happy freedom of an equal might—in the eyes of Anne—appear condescending. The new self I had ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... laid one of his tiny white forepaws lightly on the mite's fuzzy shoulder. Instantly, the puppy growled a falsetto warning to him to keep his distance. Lad's plumed tail began to wag at this sign of spirit in the pigmy. And, with his curved pink ribbon of tongue, he essayed to lick the shivering Lady. A second growl rewarded this attention. And Lady ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... me to tell her?" cried Banker, in a falsetto whine. "Yuh reckon if I knowed where it was I wouldn't have staked it long ago? I don't know nothin' ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... could have seen at the table how he towered above Jimmie Ford. And when he stood up to make a little speech in response to a toast from Dutton Ames, his voice rang out in such a—man's way. Do you remember Jimmie Ford's falsetto? ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... branches on the fire, which was enveloped in thick, whitish smoke. The damp branches, falling on the fire, crackled and rustled plaintively, and the accordion teasingly played a lively tune, while the falsetto of the singer reinforced ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... objection. His face at once assumed a different expression, his features wearing a mingled air of impudence, conceit, and irony. He caught up a ruler that was lying on the magistrate's desk, and, flourishing it wildly, began as follows, in a shrill falsetto voice: "Silence, music! And you, big drum, hold your peace! Now is the hour, now is the moment, ladies and gentlemen, to witness the grand, unique performance of these great artists, unequaled in the world for their feats upon the trapeze and ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking, groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers, cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of ash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... former ore vein. This alone was enough to get hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind-alley branches. Now and then we came upon another shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole a few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far down which came up the falsetto voices and the stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of heavy hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only started. Far back in the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred feet more, then wound off again through the mountain by more labyrinthian burrowings in the rock, winding, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... God—the only man that day In all our drunken crew. 'Come along, Kit,' Cried Puff, 'we'll all be friends now, all take hands, And dance—ha! ha!—the shaking of the sheets!' Then Archer, shuffling a step, raised his cracked voice In Kit's own song to a falsetto tune, Snapping one hand, thus, over his head ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... residence on the great Russell property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day. He then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp 'Well?' that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward. His leave of people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the curious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... courageous and more honest, proceeds by direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a moral attentat. Its leaders are two more professors, Stuart P. Sherman and H. W. Boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of the newspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is the only one of them who shows any intelligible reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a mere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladies fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... talking in a high falsetto voice, "to hit a man when his back is turned. I'll slap you for that," and he landed ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... principle of life to maintain himself at the height which his courage warranted. His thickness of wit was never a bar to the success of his irony. For the irony of the ignorant Scot is rarely the outcome of intellectual qualities. It depends on a falsetto voice and the use of a recognized number of catchwords. "Dee-ee-ar me, dee-ee-ar me;" "Just so-a, just so-a;" "Im-phm!" "D'ye tell me that?" "Wonderful, serr, wonderful;" "Ah, well, may-ay-be, may-ay-be"—these be words of potent irony when uttered ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... of the solemn language and the gay, could be sublime with Johnson, or blackguard with the groom; could dispute, could rally, could quibble, in our language. Baretti has, besides, some skill in music, with a bass voice, very agreeable, besides a falsetto which he can manage so as to mimic any singer he hears. I would also trust his knowledge of painting a long way. These accomplishments, with his extensive power over every modern language, make him a most pleasing companion while he is in good ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... character of extreme ferocity. A similar description is applicable to another man, excepting that he generally foams at the mouth and spits, dancing and jumping about in a strange rapid manner, shrieking out his maledictions in a shrill falsetto voice. ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... passed by the black dwarf, Selena. This small creature, after fulfilling her part in the social amenities, seated herself upon a small stool, joined in the conversation, and when amused (which was often) broke into a high falsetto laugh. In the last years of these two ladies she gained a most unholy influence over her charges and took cruel advantage ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... like the wildly weeping voice of Rachel; tragical, painful, gone quite to falsetto and above pitch; but with a melody in its dissonance like the singing of the stars. My poor ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... make sure that the constable and his wife were in the bedroom the other side of the flimsy wall, complied, and in a voice that rose gradually to a piercing falsetto told Mr. Grummit things that had been rankling in her mind for some months. She raked up misdemeanours that he had long since forgotten, and, not content with that, had a fling at the entire Grummit family, beginning with her mother-in-law and ending ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until, in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch"—vide the programme—wherein female roles were doubly coy by reason of the masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who promptly ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... of Moses afflicted the Jews at Mount Sinai. His audible prayers were made kneeling with clasped hands and upturned face. His eyes were closed tightly, his features were painfully contracted, and his voice was a falsetto squeak. I fancy the Governor must have sighed at the performance. The doctor never troubled to ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Gallilee proceeded, speaking in the oddest self-contradictory voice, if such a description is permissible—a voice at once high in pitch and mild in tone: in short, as Mr. Le Frank once professionally remarked, a soft falsetto. When the good gentleman paused to make his little effort of memory, his eldest daughter—aged twelve, and always ready to distinguish herself—saw her opportunity, and took the rest of the narrative into her ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... eh, my beauty!' said Marshall, in a queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of laughter in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... falling divinely round her—Randal was suddenly reminded of the exceeding bluntness with which, at their last interview, it had been his policy to announce his suit, and of the necessity of an impromptu falsetto suited to the new variations that tossed him again to and fro on the merciless gamut. However, he could not recoil from her father's proposition, though, in order to prepare Riccabocca for Violante's representation, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such occasions. Missy thought the interruptions, though proper and lending an atmosphere of fervour, rather a pity because they spoiled the effective rise and fall of the minister's voice. There was one recurrent nasal falsetto which especially threw you off the religious track. It belonged to old Mrs. Lemon. Everybody knew she nagged at and overworked and half-starved that ragged little Sims orphan she'd adopted, but here she was making the biggest noise ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... seven relatives were still beginners—but likewise treated everything so derisively and possessed a heart so full of tricks and surprises that there was no dependence to be placed upon him. The eternal smile hovering around his temples and thick lips, and the mocking falsetto voice, impaired the good impression that might otherwise have been made by his nobly cut face and a pair of large hands, from which New Year's presents, benefit performances, and gratuities were continually falling. Wherefore the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... character, the ladies being too much occupied with the more serious business of bewitching us with their pretty figures to be very amusing; whereas this wholesome man and brother, with his blonde wig, his panier, his dainty feminine simperings and languishings, his falsetto tones, and his general air of extreme fashion, was always exceedingly droll. He was the saving grace of these stupid plays; and I cannot help thinking that the cancan, as danced, in "Ivanhoe," by Isaac of York and the masculine Rebecca, was a moral spectacle; ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... bread, the little innocents dined. The mothers were rather kindly disposed, though, and occasionally allowed the youngsters to take sips out of their foaming glasses, or at least to drain them. Suddenly a woman with purple hair spied me and called in falsetto: ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... social mal-adjustment. She sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time." The writer has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of "service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to her home. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child "speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the globus hystericus is swallowed. The alertness and bonhomie of the voice of the tenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leaves ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... surprise, and the like. One of the worst instances is in 'In Memoriam', where what is appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should do, corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... In the shallow water of the ford down at the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much else of the life there, was ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... give you a slap on the wrist." "Naouw, Ed!" Delivered by those present in a chorus of catcalls and falsetto impersonations of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... to sing Pop Goes the Weasel in a falsetto voice and make one of those comic faces you do so well, and he'll gurgle at once. Well, that's settled. We ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... lead to something like an accommodation.—What was the event? A strange, uncouth thing, a theatrical figure of the opera, his head shaded with three-colored plumes, his body fantastically habited, strutted from the back scenes, and, after a short speech, in the mock-heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered the gentleman who came to make the representation into the custody of a guard, with directions not to lose sight of him for a moment, and then ordered him to be sent ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to her, and repeated it with outstretched finger, "Tip, tip, Pete!" He spoke in a falsetto voice. Did he mean Peter? Did he take her for a man? Behind him on a pillow lay something hairy; it was a toupet; she now saw that he was bald on the crown. "Tip, tip, Pete!" she heard ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... that she had come from Duluth,—probably of "ordinary" people. Surely not a girl's girl, nor a woman's woman! But one to be reckoned with when it came to men. Isabelle was conscious of her old reserve as she listened to Conny's piping, falsetto voice,—such a funny voice to come from that large person ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... friend said yesterday that the resolution meant initiation of money grants. When this announcement was made I heard a shout from the direction of my honourable friend, Mr. Partelow, in a tenor voice, and an honourable member in the rear [Mr. Barberie] joining in a sort of falsetto accompaniment. I think my honourable friend [Mr. Hazen] is much to blame for having accused his honourable colleague [Mr. Woodward] with writing an article in a city paper. What, suppose he did write it, do not some of ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential. People sit with their elbows in your sides; they squeeze past you every half-hour. It was one of my bad moments; I have a great many in Europe. The conventional perfunctory play, all in falsetto, which I seemed to have seen a thousand times; the horrible faces of the people; the pushing, bullying ouvreuse, with her false politeness, and her real rapacity, drove me out of the place at the end of an hour; and, as it was too early ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... referred to, entitled "Thou art a God that Hidest Thyself," there is an abundance of fictitious emotion and spurious rhetoric. From beginning to end there is a painful strain that never relaxes, reminding us of singers who pitch their voices too high and have to render all the upper notes in falsetto. An attempt is made to employ poetical imagery, but it ludicrously fails. The heaven of the Book of Revelation, with its gold and silver and precious stones, is nothing but a magnified jeweller's shop, and a study of it has influenced the style of later ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... Shakespeare's idea have been so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear in the play, as it did not in fact, till after his fall? This view will both explain and justify the strange disguise—a sort of falsetto ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... there was no laughing. Kohn's hump pressed hard and heedlessly, like the edge of a table, against the delicate others. It seemed as though he had the constant desire to press his hump against a dancer. He never failed to say, in a falsetto voice, "pardon," with unashamed courtesy, when a crazy woman cried out or someone blissfully snarled "damn." Lisel Liblichlein held on to the poet with one hand holding the hump like a handle, and with the other had she pressed Kohn's square ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... to know in advance that some brave answer was forthcoming. The man on the table with his hands behind him surveyed the crowd again with the gaze of simple dignity, looked down on the commandant, and raised his voice. It was an unexpected, high, almost falsetto note, that in the silence ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... The high, falsetto squeak of a gramophone was coming gaily through the portal, and without waiting for an answer Gilbert impatiently put his head through the doorway. Since the lawnmower had gone to its well-earned rest Mr. Munn lived only for this other instrument, the sound of whose music he found ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... the house gradually re-awakens. Doors begin to creak; the names of various servants are bawled out in all tones, from bass to falsetto; and footsteps are heard in the yard. Soon a man-servant issues from the kitchen bearing an enormous tea-urn, which puffs like a little steam-engine. The family assembles for tea. In Russia, as elsewhere, sleep after a heavy meal produces thirst, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... trying, in spite of numberless interruptions, to write a "Tribune" leader, he became aware that some one was standing behind his chair. Turning around suddenly, he saw a missionary well known in the city slums,—the Rev. Mr. Pease,—and asked in his highest, shrillest, most complaining falsetto, "Well, what do YOU want?" Mr. Pease, a kindly, gentle, apologetic man, said deprecatingly, "Well, Mr. Greeley, I have come for a little help. We are still trying to save souls in the Five Points." "Oh," said Mr. Greeley, "go along! go along! ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... around here, an' before you get the bark inside you'll be plumb out o' coal," Mr. McGuffey reminded them. "I know this old coffin like I know the back o' my own hand. Why, she lives on coal! Oh-h-h, Scraggsy, Scraggsy, poor old Scraggsy," he keened in a high falsetto voice and subsided on a crate of celery, the while he waved his legs in the air and affected to be overcome by his merriment. Scraggs turned the colour of a ripe old Edam cheese, while Mr. Gibney folded his ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... the door the mystery of the thumping noise which he and the Backslid Baptist had heard was explained. In a low falsetto the parrot was repeating the two military commands ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... alone in the bar, and Mr. Henshaw, after some persuasion, was induced to try a few experiments. He ranged from bass, which hurt his throat, to a falsetto which put Mr. Stokes's teeth on edge, but in vain. The rehearsal was stopped at last by the landlord, who, having twice come into the bar under the impression that fresh customers had entered, spoke his mind at some length. "Seem to think ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... flooded the box during that tempestuous ten minutes. Lady Maitland was there with an air of having written the play or at least of having discovered the author. And Gerald Deganway, who never missed a first night, simpering falsetto congratulations. And Colonel Waring and Agnes: he remembered them, because he was so much surprised to see them . . . and he had wanted to introduce Agnes to Babs, and there had been no opportunity. . . . ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... called, of Roads and Bridges was my principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specially to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge are the great ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed to respond to some inward monition of danger, of responsibility. "I be enough of a dead shot ter stop all that dad-burned talk of yourn!" he drawled in a languid, falsetto, spiritless voice, but with an odd intimation of a deadly intention. "Ye both done the deed the same ez ef ye hed pulled the trigger; ye holped ter plan it, an' kem along ter see it done an' lend a hand ef needed. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... activity of a monkey, and, raising his hat slightly in salute (which I of course scrupulously returned), gave a preliminary flourish or two with a speaking-trumpet almost as big as himself, and then, applying it to his lips squeaked out, in French of course, in a shrill falsetto which set all our people on ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... in a high-pitched, falsetto voice, "to express our regrets for what has occurred, and I wish to state on behalf of my associates here, and also personally, that there was no ill feeling toward your friend, and I am perfectly willing to overlook the small amount of indebtedness; and if there is anything ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... on end. How they would laugh and wax merry at my expense! How they would draw pictures of me in the book covers with long curls and petticoats! How they would address me as "Jemima," and talk to one another about me in a high falsetto voice! How they would fall into hysterics when they met me, and weep copiously, and ask me to lend them hairpins and parasols! I knew what it would be like only too well, and I ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... directed the chemist. He had to repeat this in a falsetto voice before June understood. "Make one for ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... diddling drone of Piqueur's quavering voice. In the clear sweetness of the May morning above the twittering of the birds it raised itself, the quaint measures delighting her ears. Even in Piqueur's thin falsetto the old melody sang itself—tender, graceful, spirited, never lagging—he was dropping pea seeds into the trench that Margot had prepared in the kitchen dooryard, he was always ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... came down out of the northwest, like a cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it screamed, screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old Mother Earth was in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really minute particles of ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the East, little sharp-angled diamond-points that stung the skin like fire. It came ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... reply has not been recorded. Enough that half an hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other evidence of mental and moral disturbance. His cordiality and oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of a child somewhere in the forest pricked our ears, the clear falsetto of its fright silencing the singer and leaving his mouth agape. I began drawing on my moccasins, but before I could finish a wonderful transformation had taken place in the clearing. As if the cry had been a prearranged signal, six ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Helen Grimes, chaparralish as she can be, is goaded beyond imprudence. She convinces herself that Jack Valentine is not only a falsetto, but a financier. To lose at one fell swoop $647,000 and a lover in riding trousers with angles in the sides like the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever patient is enough to make any perfect lady mad. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... cried The Cavalry; and the dominie started "Onward, Christian Soldiers," in which the others joined, the detective in a soft falsetto, indistinguishable from a half-cultivated woman's voice. He was combining business with pleasure, dissimulation with ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... clang of gongs, the shrilling of a Chinese pipe playing a mournful air in that five-toned scale Whose combinations suggest always the mystery of the East. About that corner swept the procession of the Good Lady, priests before, women worshippers behind. The priests set up a falsetto chant, the banner-bearers lifted their staves, and the parti-colored mass ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... born, as all good books, because its mother could not help it. Behind every page and between the lines you see the fevered toss of human emotion and hot ambition—these women were rivals. There were digs and scratches, bandied epithets in falsetto, and sounds like a piccolo played by a man in distress, before all this; and these are not explained, so you have to fill them in with your imagination. But the Bernhardt is the bigger woman of the two. She goes her splendid pace alone, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... heartless, contemptuous air of a boy who scorns tears and girls, Job stood there; and, posing dramatically, sang in a falsetto voice: ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... no sign had been placed on the building. He said, "Everybody will know it is A. T. Stewart's!" And they did. After his death the place was plastered with signs that called in throaty falsetto at the passer-by, like eager salesmen on the Midway who try to entice people to enter. The new management took all these signs down, and by the main entrance placed a modest tablet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... old woman's falsetto, Madame Prune sings all this, without omitting anything, at a pace which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... His voice rose to an excited falsetto. "She is awfully pretty—extravagantly, preposterously pretty. And she'll have to pay ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... invoice of the old ones, it was delectable to get back to the girls again, and in the old "best room" hear once more the lilt of the old songs and the stacattoed laughter of the piano mingling with the alto and falsetto voices of the Mills girls, and the gallant soprano ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our English friends ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... man, with a falsetto voice, moving into the circle; "Leonardo himself might have ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... I, in a falsetto voice which trembled, "since I am unknown to you, may I trust you will permit me to present myself? My name—though, indeed, I have a multitude of names—is for the occasion Frederick Thomasson. With my father's appellation ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... of the family with falsetto-thunderous barks of challenge as they came down the drive from the highway. But he would frisk out in joyous welcome to meet and fawn upon tramps or peddlers who sought to invade The Place. He could scarce learn his own name. He could hardly ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... of the barber in a hoarse falsetto: "Kimberley! That's the place for good men I'm always saying. There's Billy the Red back home with a fortune. And ould Corlett—look at ould Corlett, the Ballabeg! Five years away at the diggings, and left a house worth twenty pounds per year ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... up on the stone, and stood there, her scanty and patched garments fluttering in the bitter breeze, as, with face sharpened with want, and eyes fierce with misery, she began, in a querulous, 'scornful falsetto: ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... show up again, Zenie?" Miss Susie clipped her words off short to everyone. She was a wisp of a woman with little hands as dry and yellow as parchment. Her voice had a quavering falsetto break in it and her laugh, when there was occasion, was dry and withery and short-lived like a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Here was an hour or two of pause, time of day for rest with half-closed eyes. He looked over the pale rose wave of the almonds, he saw Peter's dome and St. Angelo. He was conscious of a fatigue of his powers, a melancholy that they gave him no more than they did. "How it is all tinsel and falsetto!... I want a clean, cold, searching wave—desert and night—not life all choked with wax tapers and harlequins! I want something.... I don't know what I want. I only know ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... heaven, calling upon the high gods for pity; then, with a sudden turn of fury, ran to the back of the stage and came mincing forward evidently intending saturnine mimicry, repeating the ingenue's speech in a mocking falsetto: "Now what are you two good people conspiring about?" After that he whirled upon her, demanding with ferocity: "You've got something you can think with in your head, haven't you, Missmiss? Then what do you think ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... years there was an excursion to Oxford to attend a reunion of a Greek-letter society, and perhaps twice in the winter certain ancient cronies came, drank musty ale, and smoked long clay pipes, and sang college songs in cracked falsetto. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... There was a moment of sickening silence; not so much as a leaf whirled in the gutter; it was broken by a great cheer from the assembled hundreds of workmen farther up the street, followed by a conglomerate of hootings, cat-calls, yells and falsetto hoorays from the fringe of small boys. The faces of the three men in front of the post-office grew white at their unspoken thought. Each waited for ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... to sing comes he, knowing only the old refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it the day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going down into a sad and closed valley, toward a solitary farm—and suddenly the ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... answered the criminologist in the best falsetto tone he could muster. Then he disconnected with a smile. This was turning the tables with a vengeance. But he knew that he must be getting away from the den before the possible investigation by Warren or his lieutenant. There ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... falls on your decision! This is a public charge! The people rely upon you! If you won't, for some reason of your own, come to the rescue now, when you are publicly called upon, you'll be a ruined man!" The voice of the Boss ascended in a shrill falsetto of remonstrance. ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... the word. He was banging on the door like a wild man. "Police! Murder! Help!" he shouted in a high falsetto. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... broke out in the falsetto notes of a puzzle solved in the mind. 'It was his father! Harry proclaiming his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that, my de-ar," came in sweet, falsetto tones from Phil. "We ought to have no end of sport, you know; ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... a shrill falsetto of terror, his eyes nearly dropping out of his head, and foam upon his lips. "Look!—look!—look! she's shrivelling up! she's turning into a monkey!" and down he fell upon the ground, foaming and ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... which were very pleasing, seemed the admirable instrument of an organ that was almost sweet in its middle tones, where its owner usually kept it, but which, in its higher key, vibrated on the ear like the sound of a gong. This falsetto was the voice of his nerves and his anger. His face, kept expressionless by an inward command, was oval in form. His manners, in harmony with the sacerdotal calmness of the face, were reserved and conventional; ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... profession. Bring then above all ignorance, to which add confidence, audacity, and effrontery; as for diffidence, equity, moderation, and shame, you will please leave them at home; they are not merely needless, they are encumbrances. The loudest voice you can come by, please, a ready falsetto, and a gait modelled on my own. That exhausts the real necessaries; very often there would be no occasion for anything further. But I recommend bright colours or white for your clothes; the Tarentine stuff that lets the body show through is best; for shoes, wear either ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... the rest of the world, a very different aspect from that under which we are wont to think of him. By them he was regarded as an illustrious declaimer, in an age when declamation was the most valued of all accomplishments. It was true that there was a sort of "tinkle," a certain falsetto tone in his style, which offended men of robust and severe taste; but this meretricious resonance of style was a matter of envy and admiration when affectation was the rage, and when the times were too enervated and too corrupt for the manly conciseness and concentrated force of an ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... Green?" he said in a high falsetto, meant to represent the feminine voice. "And how's the darling baby? Such a duck! I'm dying to see him again! Oh, Delia, darling! There you are! So glad you could come! What a perfect darling of a dress, ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... little tangle together, and sang Coo in soft voices. And then they felt relieved. Jay remembered the last Coo. It happened when Kew's voice was breaking ten years ago, and he found that he could no longer coo except in a funny falsetto. So, rather than become ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... certain spirit from whom she could learn all that Gladys and Shiel wanted to know. Accordingly, in the manner of most other two-guinea clairvoyants, she composed herself in a graceful and recumbent attitude, made a lot of queer grimaces and still queerer noises, and spoke in a falsetto voice, which purposed to be that of Tillie Toot, once a barmaid in Edinburgh, now one of Madame's familiar spirits. And the gist of what "Tillie" told them was that Hamar & Co. derived their powers from Black Magic; and that the secrets thereof could only be learned ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... boots ef I didn't furgit the password!" cried Nick Peters with his little falsetto laugh, that seemed keyed for a fleer, although it was most graciously modulated now. "Ye mought hev shot us ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... brethren dragged his torn body in their struggle to escape from this turmoil and danger. A young soldier astride one of the leaders swore and fumed in his saddle, and furiously jerked at the bridle. An officer screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke and ended the sentence in a falsetto shriek. ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... hands with his sister's daughter, took her satchel, and asked how he could serve her. The girl replied in a thin falsetto voice, which she realized immediately didn't go with the scowl so well as a gruff tone would have done, that she had only twenty-five minutes to get the train for New York and must say good-by at once and take a cab for the ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... turning over this offer in his muddled mind—for he had persuaded himself that the offer was a genuine one—the clown fidgeted on his high stool, and hummed an air from Faust in a falsetto ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... carry in screens, small tables, and an odd chair or two, to represent houses, city walls, and so on, or hand cups of tea to the actors when their throats become dry from vociferous singing, which is always in falsetto. All this in the face of the audience. Dead people get up and walk off the stage; or while lying dead, contrive to alter their facial expression, and then get up and carry themselves off. There is no interval between one play and the next following, which probably gives rise to the erroneous ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... from the farmyard were making angry answer. A very tall, old, white-headed man came, shading a candle, at the summons. He had been of great strength in his time, and of a handsome countenance; but now he was fallen away, his teeth were quite gone, and his voice when he spoke was broken and falsetto. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suit stolen," Advena finished for him. "As Disraeli said—wasn't it Disraeli?" She heard, and hated the note of constraint in her voice. "Am I reduced," she thought, indignantly, "to falsetto?" and chose, since she must choose, the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the word in a cracked falsetto, with the evident intention of mocking her, and at the same time hideously contorted his face into a grotesque idiocy of expression, pursing his lips so extremely, and setting his brows so awry, that his other features were cartooned out of all familiar likeness, effecting an alteration as ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the old hoe-handle he used for a staff. "What ridge?" He paused to thunder up at her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... one do? It is the way of the world—'lieto ricordo d'un amor che fu,'" sang Contini in the thin but expressive falsetto which seems to be the natural inheritance of men who play upon stringed instruments. He broke off in the middle of a bar and laughed, out of sheer delight at his ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... the widow, with a stress on the exclamation peculiar to herself—two notes of deprecating falsetto. 'How can you say it is good of me, when I'm sure there are no words for your kindness to us all! If only you knew our debt to your friend, Mr Earwaker! To our dying day we must all remember it. It is entirely through Mr. Malkin that we are able to leave ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... fortunate in my guess with her. It was a wedding chorus, which I was willing to wager was the Japanese "Miserere"; but this error may have its significance after all. To us, in short, the music was execrable. A falsetto, and a grinding, singsong falsetto at that—the most disagreeable sound I ever heard in music—is very common, and highly esteemed. The instruments resemble banjos, and there is a harsh kind of drum accompaniment; but there is one larger string instrument, the Japanese piano, upon which ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... of those sitting nearest to join in, but now sounded down by the door a light street song. Notes struggled against notes, words against words, guitar against whistle. The women's strong, trained voices contested with the boys' hoarse falsetto, with the men's growling bass. When the street song was almost conquered, they began to stamp and whistle down by the door. The Salvation Army song sank like a wounded warrior. The noise was terrifying. The women ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... Brower's boy?' he asked in a drawling falsetto, looking at me out of grey eyes and smiling ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... quivering silence settled down and every eye was wide to watch this strange, disappointing appearance, every ear alert to catch the first sound of his voice. Suddenly the voice came, in a queer, squeaking falsetto. The effect on the audience was irrepressible, ghastly. After Everett's deep tones, after the strain of expectancy, this extraordinary, gaunt apparition, this high, thin sound from the huge body, were too much for the American crowd's sense of humor, always stronger than its sense of reverence. ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and truly fatherly affection, and it is in writing to her and of her that we see him at his best; or rather one might say it is almost only then that we can distinguish the true notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto of sentimentalism which distinguishes most of Sterne's communications with the other sex. There was no subsequent issue of the marriage, and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly included in Madame de Medalle's ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... heave together, always have one to sing out; which is done in a peculiar, high and long-drawn note, varying with the motion of the windlass. This requires a high voice, strong lungs, and much practice, to be done well. This fellow had a very peculiar, wild sort of note, breaking occasionally into a falsetto. The sailors thought it was too high, and not enough of the boatswain hoarseness about it; but to me it had a great charm. The harbor was perfectly still, and his voice rang among the hills, as though it could have been heard for miles. Toward sundown, a good breeze having ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... person frequently entertains me with his amori, past, present, and future; he evidently thinks me very odd for having none to entertain him with in return; he points out to me the pretty (or ugly) servant-girls and dressmakers as we walk in the street, sighs deeply or sings in falsetto behind every tolerably young-looking woman, and has finally taken me to the house of the lady of his heart, a great black-mustachioed countess, with a voice like a fish-crier; here, he says, I shall meet all the best company in Urbania and some beautiful women—ah, too beautiful, alas! I find ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... quite ready to sail so soon as they should have clambered aboard and swung the long boat to its davits. Presently the attention of every man was drawn from his dreaming or his gossiping to the northern bank of the river. There, screaming at them in a cracked falsetto and with skinny arms outstretched, stood a strange apparition of ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... exceedingly pretty. Let me look at it,'" began Madame de Guiraud in a falsetto voice, as she rose with a silly expression on ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... a chair before his stove, scraping away on a Chinese fiddle, bringing the most unearthly cat-calls from the thing and singing to himself in a thin falsetto voice. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson |
