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More "Pedal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in surprise at her own feet, and I observed the slight roughening of the side of the sole caused by the friction of the edge of the pedal. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... naturally the decreasing amplitude of the vibration may in itself tend to create a diminuendo, yet it is possible to make up for this in some degree by causing the air-blast to increase in force, through the use of any suitable means, modified by an extra pedal as ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... poet. Some maintained the justness of Shakspear's delineations of aerial beings, while others denied it. By no violent transition, Ariel and his songs were introduced, and a lady, celebrated for her musical skill, was solicited to accompany her pedal harp with the song of "Five fathom deep thy father lies"... She was known to have set, for her favourite instrument, all ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... turn pale, and clutch the banisters; he was racing out of the hotel. He ran to the coach-house, wheeled his bicycle into the courtyard, mounted, and rode down the street. He went at a moderate pace through the town, but once on the Corniche road, he drove the machine as hard as he could pedal. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... unobserved out of the drawing-room where Miss Burton was "performing" on my mother's piano, and crept slowly and sadly upstairs. I went slowly, partly out of my heavy grief, and partly because I carried Rubens in my arms. Had not the lawyer kicked him because he lay upon the pedal? I was resolved that after such an insult he should not so much as have the trouble of walking upstairs. So I carried him, and as I went I ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that a woman sobbed, but his eyes, used by now to the obscurity, told him that it was neither Mrs. Bruce nor Barbara. The piano burst into a storm of sound, under cover of which Rose, still at her post, torn with jealousy, continued to pedal at the direction of her lord and master, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Devils filled the room, whirling in mad dances; they screamed and yelled; the souls of the damned screeched in torment; and the face of him who invoked the inferno, swollen, streaming with ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... raises the damper of the string. If the key is held down, the vibrations continue for a long time after the blow; but if released at once, the damper stifles them as the hammer regains its seat. A bar, L, passing along under all the damper lifters, is raised by depressing the loud pedal. The soft pedal slides the whole keyboard along such a distance that the hammers strike two only out of the three strings allotted to all except the bass notes, which have only one string apiece, or ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... Hastens adown to subdominant key, Where melody mellow-like Singing so 'cello-like Rises and falls in a wild ecstasy. Scarce is this finished When chords all diminished Break loose in a patter that comes down like rain, A pedal-point wonder Rivaling thunder. Now all is mad agitation again. Like laughter jolly Begins the finale; Again does the 'cello its tones seem to lend Diminuendo ad molto crescendo. Ah! Rubinstein only could ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... same!" she cried, so loud that I had half to drown it in the pedal. "He's taken to following the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gentleman who is accompanying a lady holds her wheel; she stands on the left side of the machine and puts her right foot across the frame to the right pedal, which at the time must be up; pushing the right pedal causes the machine to start and then with the left foot in place, the rider starts ahead—slowly at first, in order to give her cavalier time to mount his wheel, which he will do in the briefest ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... echoing aisles. There is a hush of expectation. A few quiet worshippers assemble; the western light grows low, and lights spring to life, one after another, in the misty choir. Then murmurs a voice, an Amen rises in full concord, and as it dies away the slumberous thunder of a pedal note rolls on the air; the casements whirr, the organ speaks. That fills, as it were, to the brim, as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content into the flowing, the aspiring tide, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Denys!" she exclaimed. "I have borrowed your machine—I have bent my pedal somehow, and ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... Winifred flung a swift glance round, and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress that the glare of light fell shimmering on. The sweet voice was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on. He, however, was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with startling ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... and piano of Love's Old Sweet Song (words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam Antoinette Sterling) open at the last page with the final indications ad libitum, forte, pedal, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Mark climbed into the saddle. He began to pedal, and then threw in the gasolene and spark. The ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... tears," and "breath," and "smiles," and "Eden zephyrs," "sighs of seraph lovers," and "lyres of slumbering cherubs," dancing away to "the Pedal Harp!" How strange it is that Thomson, in his stanzas on the AEolian lyre (see the 'Castle of Indolence'), never dreamed of such things, but left all these prettinesses to the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking wife—for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... his voice in that act! Why, it’s a scene to be played with the soft pedal down! This is the way it should be done!” Dropping into a chair in the middle of the room my host began miming the gestures and expression of Robespierre as the phantoms (which, after all, are but the figments of an over-wrought brain) ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... turtle shell with side pieces like horns, an instrument having but little effective resonance. The later form was the so-called cithara, the most common shape of which is that made familiar to all by the pedal piece of the square pianoforte. This instrument rarely had more than six strings, and as it had no finger board it could have had no more notes than strings. Chappell, the English historian, attempts to demonstrate that certain ones of these instruments had a bridge ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Bob's dog that bothered you the other day," she told him as he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... various superscriptions naturally cause the sonata to be ranked as programme-music, but of a very simple kind. It is easy to suggest pastoral scenes: a few pedal notes, a certain simplicity of melody, and a few realistic touches expressive of the waving of branches of trees, or the meandering of a brook, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... again, and I shall turn over for you. Bring out that forte passage properly! Remember there's a pedal on the piano!" ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... coterie at Rome that was running the Church and the world pretty much as they pleased, or against the brutal "Hans Wurst" (Duke Henry of Brunswick). Erasmus and his school of gentle reformers always counseled a slackening of the pace and the use of the soft pedal. Where is Erasmus to-day in the world's valuation? Even Rome, in whose bosom he nestled, and who fondled him for a season, has cast him aside as worthless. Luther lives yet, to the delight not ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the pedal of power, and decision in the conscious action of the chin (not the jaw) will induce by reflex action that stroke which expresses well-aimed will-power. It may be noticed in connection with this suggestion that when a person means what he says the action of the ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from our taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier, who had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch. He was the color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face under its dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial enthusiasm endured, and when we dropped him ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... but he is not my man. He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes pot-pourris on "La Muette" ["Masaniello"], plays the forte and piano with the pedal, but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds. Moscheles does not at all astonish him; therefore it is no wonder that only the tuttis of my concerto have pleased him. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... pedal. "Oh, dear, yes. It is quite, quite easy. I shall get there all right—if the Matabele don't burst ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... clapping when she finished, and when this was over, as an encore, she gave a piece which imitated the sea; there were little trills to represent the lapping waves and thundering chords, with the loud pedal down, to suggest a storm. After this a gentleman sang a song called Bid me Good-bye, and as an encore obliged with Sing me to Sleep. The audience measured their enthusiasm with a nice discrimination. Everyone was applauded till ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... by sight an' started in to give you the tip to put the soft pedal on the wiggle stuff, when, zowie! I guess you didn't reach out an' soak me—a cop!" He tapped the bandage upon the aggressively ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... up a couple of conversations on their own hook—kind of side issue, soft pedal dialogues—and they wa'n't takin' the slightest notice of my brilliant efforts. At the other end of the table Sadie is havin' more or less the same experience; for every time she tries to cut in with some cheerful observation she finds she's addressin' either Marjorie's ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... a motor bicycle, which saves you the trouble of working the pedals. It can go quite fast, but if it breaks down it is very heavy to pedal home. ...
— The Motor Car Dumpy Book - The Dumpy Books for Children #32 • T. W. H. Crosland
... shuddered; then they dodged through an opening where the mud-guards missed by an inch and were whirling west toward Broadway. At 109th Street a bicycle officer stared in amazement at the dwindling number beneath the rear axle, then ducked his head and began to pedal. He overhauled the speeding machine as it throbbed before the doors of Mercy Hospital, to be greeted by a grinning chauffeur who waved him toward the building and told of a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... that spins no more! old death with open eyes! old devil's cradle! vile lantern of an old town-crier too! Old wretch whose look kills! old moustache of an old theriacler! old wretch to make dead men weep! old organ-pedal! old sheath with a hundred knives! old church porch, worn out by the knees! old poor-box in which everyone has dropped. I'll give all my future to be quit of thee!" As he finished these gentle thoughts the pretty bride, who ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... I saw the corporal at the gate repeat the gesture; then a big bicycle corps, four abreast, guns on their backs, slid round the corner and came gliding down the hill. There was not a sound, not the rattle of a chain or a pedal. ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... to come out openly and say what they thought. The chief facts had already been in the hands of the various editors and publishers for a week and more, but word had gone around from Mollenhauer, Simpson, and Butler to use the soft pedal for the present. It was not good for Philadelphia, for local commerce, etc., to make a row. The fair name of the city would be smirched. It was ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... of being played alone or in connection with each other. Four manuals, or hand key-boards, and two pedals, or foot key-boards, command these several systems,—the solo organ, the choir organ, the swell organ, and the great organ, and the piano and forte pedal-organ. Twelve pairs of bellows, which it is intended to move by water-power, derived from the Cochituate reservoirs, furnish the breath which pours itself forth in music. Those beautiful effects, for which the organ is incomparable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... by its black and white diagonals and by the little sentry hut half hidden behind the other car that it marked the frontier. A man with a rifle on his shoulder stood there. They drew up to it fast, but his foot automatically eased up on the floorboard pedal until the ...
— Double Take • Richard Wilson
... the evening. He had never heard Madame Arnaud playing again: she was too shy to play in company: and even when she was alone, now that she knew she could be heard on the stairs, she kept the soft pedal down. But Christophe used to play to them, and they would talk about it for hours together. The Arnauds used to speak of music with such eagerness and freshness of feeling that he was enchanted with them. He had not ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... piano, and began softly playing, with the hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not touched, the string of the key that the ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... there would be faraway looks and sighs, and the notings down of the titles of books that conducted the pilgrim on the Way. Perhaps as they softly assembled for departure, a little music would be suggested to round off the evening, and she saw herself putting down the soft pedal as people rustled into their places, for the first movement of the "Moonlight Sonata." Then at the end there would be silence, and she would get up with a sigh, and someone would say "Lucia mia"! and somebody ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... is making her way through the sailors to where Tristan is standing at the helm, an interlude made of the sailors' song phrase is played on four horns and two bassoons over a pedal bass, the strings coming in in strongly marked rhythm on the last beat of each bar, marking the hauling of the ropes to clear the anchor. Tristan is in a reverie, scarcely conscious of what is going on around him; the love-motive once in the oboe shows ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... the uproar that its own activities have brought about, will welcome the soft pedal that Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the gun silencer, is preparing to put on the hubbub in which every great urban community has condemned itself ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... nearer the mark to say, since you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that Struthers' attentive ear was just ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... toe was presented to us for adoration, but as we did not seem to "ad," he withdrew his pedal attachment and talked about the "relics" ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... we don't drift the way we ought to," said Harry, pressing on his clutch pedal and trying ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... vibrations, and we know no better than to make the whole series leading up to them. It is as though, in order to sound some little shrill octave of pipes in an organ, we are obliged to depress every key and every pedal, and to blow a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... that he must interject an "in short" and summarize his meaning in a phrase amusing through its homely contrast. But humor based on ponderous diction is too often wearisome. Better say simply "He died," or colloquially "He kicked the bucket," than "He propelled his pedal extremities with violence against the wooden pail which is customarily employed in the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the reply, "by means of a pedal attachment a fulcrumed lever concerts a vertical reciprocating motion into a circular movement. The principal part of the machine is a huge disk that revolves in a vertical plane. Power is applied through the axis of the disk, and work is done on the periphery, and ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... working the pedal and I was sailing around very fast," said Raggedy Andy, "and all of a sudden the ...
— Raggedy Andy Stories • Johnny Gruelle
... and he never forgot about John, in Browning's poem, scorning ale. But many years afterward, reading Browning, he found that the words really were: "John's corns ail," meaning apparently that John was troubled by pedal callouses.) Peter, we repeat, and to avoid any further misunderstanding and press diligently toward our theme, having mentioned his garden, who should come up to us but Pete Corcoran, also of the composing room force, and a waggish friend of ours, and gazing ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... he has," retorted Joe. "But when it's that kind of opinion he ought to put on the soft pedal. Any one has a right to have a club foot or a hunched back or cross eyes, but he doesn't usually go round ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... household. There, according to reports, Chopin and Liszt were in friendly rivalry—are two pianists ever friendly?—Liszt imitating Chopin's style, and once in the dark they exchanged places and fooled their listeners. Liszt denied this. Another story is of one or the other working the pedal rods—the pedals being broken. This too has been laughed to scorn by Liszt. Nor could he recall having played while Viardot-Garcia sang out on the terrace of the chateau. Garcia's memory is also short about this event. Rollinat, Delacroix and Sand have written abundant souvenirs ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... When at last a stray musician with a worn face, long hair, and an eyeglass stuck into his contorted eyebrow sat down to the grand piano and flinging his hands with a sweep on the keys and his foot on the pedal, began to attack a fantasia of Liszt on a Wagner motive, Aratov could not stand it, and stole off, bearing away in his heart a vague, painful impression; across which, however, flitted something incomprehensible to him, but ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... master played the same bars for the second time. He was still able to sustain, if it were necessary, a quavering, imperfect phrase. But John delivered the second repetition without a mistake, singing easily from the chest. The master put his foot upon the soft pedal. Nobody was watching him. Had any one done so, he would have seen the perspiration break upon the musician's forehead. The piano purred its accompaniment. Then, in the middle of the phrase, the master lifted his hands and held them poised above the instrument. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... such comparatively recent times is almost incredible. As Hilary was telling me of such things as we sat in his house one evening, there grew upon our ears a peculiar sound, a humming deep bass, somewhat resembling the low notes of a piano with a pressure on the pedal. It increased and became louder, coming from the road which passed the house; it was caused by a very large flock of sheep driven slowly. The individual 'baa' of each lamb was so mixed, as it were, with the bleat of its fellow that the swelling sound took a strange, mysterious ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... the control pedal at his foot and the small ship shot out into the black void of space. Ahead of them, thousands of yards away, he could see the ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... with one quick turn of the head and made no answer. But she played the air over again—the girls sing it to this day over their household work at Farlingford to other words—with her foot on the soft pedal. The Marquis hummed it between his teeth at the other end of ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Kranich & Bach Small Grand. Although only 5'4" long it produces, in a manner almost unbelievable, all the magnificent qualities of tone that make "grands" infinitely more satisfying than "upright" pianos. With its new full-tone scale and the marvelous "Isotonic Pedal," this superb instrument IS the Small Grand leader of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... evening which would inevitably run into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The numerous screened windows ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... in his love to notice such mere sublunary matters. The girl had promised nothing positive for the future. She kept him on the brittle edge of nervous expectation. The opposition of the dancer had been successfully met by threats of dismissal; Hugh continued to lose flesh and gain in vocal and pedal agility. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... ears dear," she ordered, "my pillows aren't unpacked yet and you may find Neddie's last year tacks in that burlap. There now, you look almost human. But the wistful whimper lingers. Jane, what has happened? You are simply smothered in the soft pedal. Tell your Judy all ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... weighed nearly 30 tons. There are 4 keyboards, 71 draw stops, and over 4,000 pipes of various forms and sizes, some long, some short, some trumpet-like in shape, and others cylindrical, while in size they range from two or three inches in length to the great pedal pipe, 32ft. high and a yard in width, with an interior capacity of 224 cubic feet. In the "great organ" there are 18 stops, viz.: Clarion (2ft.), ditto (4ft.), posanne, trumpet, principal (1 and 2), gamba, stopped diapason, four open diapasons, doublette, harmonic flute, mixture sesquialtra, fifteenth, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... the hour he spent on Sweet Sorrow laid over anything that the town had ever seen for sadness. Put 'em through every stage of grief from the snuffles to the snorts. Doc always was a pretty noisy preacher, but he began work on that head with soft-pedal-tremolo-stop preaching and wound up with a peroration like a steamboat explosion. Started with his illustrations dying of consumption and other peaceful diseases, and finished up with railroad wrecks. He'd been at it two hours ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... who has made several important innovations in writing for bass brass instruments, requires an octave bass trombone in B flat; an octave lower than the tenor one, in the "Nibelungen." The fundamental tones of the trombone are called "pedal" notes. They are difficult to get and less valuable than harmonics because, in all wind instruments, notes produced by overblowing are richer than the fundamental notes in tone quality. Valve trombones do not, however, find favor, the defects of intonation being more prominent than in ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... Arthur Sullivan, in the struggling years of his career, once showed great presence of mind, which saved the entire breakdown of a performance of 'Faust.' In the midst of the church scene, the wire connecting the pedal under Costa's foot with the metronome stick at the organ, broke. Costa was the conductor. In the concerted music this meant disaster, as the organist could hear nothing but his own instrument. Quick as thought, while he was playing the introductory ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... of the machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. A second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to do. I sewed frantically into ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the ramifications of your society are like a net-work of wires, all over the earth, penetrating everywhere, and at every point touching the most deadly explosives of human passions and hates; and that it needs but the pressure of your finger upon the pedal to blow up the world. The folly of centuries has culminated in the most terrible organization that ever grew out of the wretchedness of mankind. But oh, my friend—you have a broad mind and a benevolent soul—tell me, is there no remedy? Cannot the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... one of your feet off?" asked Grant, soberly looking down at the pedal extremities of the mechanic, as ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... he asked again: "What was there before the world was born?" That was an easy one; so I said in a tone of finality: "There wasn't anything." Then I went on with my meditations, thinking I had used the soft pedal effectively. Silence reigned supreme for some minutes, and then was rudely shattered. His thumb flew from his mouth, and he laughed so lustily that he could be heard throughout the house. When his laughter had spent itself somewhat, I asked meekly: "What are you laughing at?" His answer ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... when it happened. "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge of the freeway. Then, and only then, she heard the squeal of agonized tires and saw the cumbersome semitrailer coming from the opposite direction rock dangerously, ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... that time a few cycling beginners used the circle for practice, and their alarming performances were gradually depleting the number of equestrians. One of these novices came down the hill, having an arm round the neck of his instructor, and one leg on the pedal, the other in mid air. He was unable to steer the machine, and as I cantered up, the performer's hat, which had been over one eye, fell off, disclosing the features of Professor Bryce. The next moment the machine, its rider and his ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... and buildings may be here mentioned. The County Court occupies what was then a tinker's shop and a farm-yard behind; the pedal stone of the ancient Cross, now in the Institute garden, was then at the back entrance to the Bull Yard, near Mr. Innes' shop, having been removed from the Cross a few years before; the market place could only be approached from the High Street, through the inn yards. Of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... hat went back on his head; his long arms dangled, pendulum-like, by his sides, while his lanky legs, dragging along anyhow, were ever lagging behind one another. But when he opened the piano and put hands and feet to keys and pedal, he was not the same individual. He would turn on nerve and muscle-power, and would hurl avalanches of music and torrents of notes at his audience till he, in his turn, was overwhelmed with thunders of applause. And those were the days, we must remember, when but few men could play at a greater ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... trousers, and boots, not forgetting his stockings; and then deliberately planting his chair in the open entry of the door, and gathering up one foot on the seat thereof, was amusing himself by cutting and picking the horny excrescences of his pedal digits, for the benefit of the passengers in the gentlemen's saloon; and, unfortunately, you could not be sure that his hands would be washed before he sat next to you at breakfast in the morning,—for I can testify that I have, over and over again, sat next ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... follow his course after he left the field he would soon have known that Frank was rather heading for town than intending to pedal in the direction of his own house, which was situated ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... derivation of the word appears both ingenious and correct. Roger North shrewdly conjectured that the "rude and gross" Gothic Fiddle "used to stir up the vulgar to dancing, or perhaps to solemnise their idolatrous sacrifices." In the Dark Ages dancing may have been regarded as bi-pedal trembling. I have remarked in another place,[19] "In the early ages of mankind dancing or jigging must have been done to the sound of the voice, next to that of the pipe, and, when the bow was discovered, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... and crank. He did it quietly, not looking at her. She could see that his hand trembled on the crank. When he did glance at her, as he drove off, it was apologetically, miserably. His foot was shaking on the clutch pedal. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Weaver at his loom is sitting, Throws his shuttle to and fro; Foot and treadle, Hand and pedal, Upward, downward, Hither, thither, How the weaver makes them go! As the weaver wills they go. Up and down the web is plying, And across the woof is flying; What a rattling! What a battling! What a shuffling! What ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... it?—and my tone seemed rich and virile. I played the first theme, and all went well until the next interlude for the orchestra; I looked about me confidently, feeling quite like a virtuoso, and soon spied my parents, when suddenly my knees began to tremble, trembled so that the damper pedal vibrated. Then my eyes blurred and I missed my cue and felt Richter's great spectacles burning into the side of my head like two fierce suns. I scrambled, got my place, lost it, rambled and was roused to my position by the short rapping of the conductor's stick on his desk. The band stopped, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... right at the start. We had a suicide the other day who left an apologetic note that was played up by some of the papers. Now comes this affair. The management are just as anxious to have the crime cleared up as any one - if it is a crime. But can't it be done with the soft pedal? We will stop at nothing in the way of expense - just so long as the name of the Vanderveer is kept in the background. Only, I'm afraid the coroner will try to rub it in ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... had been to give vent as he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Then he'd pedal away, shaking his head. Later on the handyman would come around to swap sanitary tanks under the trailers and Joey would ask him the same question. Once a month the power company sent out a man to read the electric meters and he was part ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... the most beautiful melody of bells I ever heard is toning through the air. They are the bells of S. Michael's church, and I am told that the musician plays them by a set of pedal keys, and works himself into a mighty heat and flurry in the operation. But we cannot think of the wild manner and mad motions of the player in connection with those beautiful sounds, so clear and melodious; that half plaintive music so sweetly ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... in motion. Rick dropped into the seat next to Scotty and his pal pushed the gas pedal all the way. The nose lifted and the ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... lessons in flying. The catbird's nest, with four greenish-blue eggs, is in a wild gooseberry bush and the catbird is up among the shad-trees feasting on the ripening June berries. The gentle notes of soft pedal music come floating sweetly down. Did you ever stop long enough to listen to the full song of the catbird? First, the brilliant, ringing strains, often softening into a subdued sympathetic melody, and then, just as the music seems almost divine, the long cat-like ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... keys have small wire eyes attached to their undersides near the front. A corresponding slot is cut through the inner and outer cases, allowing the eyes to be connected to a short pedal keyboard which has ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... to bear too hard on this pedal. It is easier to look at things from the commonplace standpoint. One thing or another prevented any of my companions in the jail from doing what it was desirable to do, and circumstances quite unforeseen ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... below seemed to float up lazily to the little group in the open window, as the smoke of their pipes and cigars floated up lazily to the ceiling above. The gentle hum of the traffic made a pleasant accompaniment to their conversation, as the holding down of a soft pedal fills in and supports dreamy organ music. But for the six young men in the bow window the room was untenanted, save for a waiter who had just brought some fresh drinks, and who was now clearing away empty ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... hit out a tune or two with the soft pedal on?' I asks Marilla. 'Uncle Cal has begged you so often. It would please him a good deal to hear you touch up the piano he's bought for you. Don't you think ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... studying the exhibits in the distillery got the idea in his head that my foot was the loud pedal on a piano and he started to play the overture from William Tell ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... argument which makes me pause, if it does not convince me. No! I can't answer it. I—I don't want to answer it. I simply surrender. He shall have his way with you—and with me. Only," he added in a gloomy lowered tone which struck Mr Powell as if a pedal had been put down, "only it shall take a little time. I have never lied to you. Never. I renounce not only my chance but my life. In a few days, directly we get into port, the very moment we do, I, who have said I could never let you go, I shall ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... note. They put the soft pedal on me. They 'muted' me," he amended, in deference to her ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Dohong learned to pedal and to guide a tricycle in about three lessons. He caught the two ideas almost instantly, and soon brought his muscles under control sufficiently to ride ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... group of students and was being made the butt of a good-humoured jest. And beneath the high, laughing tones, the perpetual hum of a thousand talking voices neither rose nor fell, but droned unceasingly like the long pedal in a fugue, whose full deep note stands still amidst the strife of moving sounds, as the sun stood while the battle was fought out in Ajalon. The very life of the multitude seemed to produce a sound of its own, in the breathing of a thousand ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... an entirely different matter. The moment you begin to "paddle your own canoe," lively and—to the lookers-on—mirth-provoking exercises ensue. When you stick your hand under to make a stroke your feet decline to stay anywhere but on top; and when, after an exciting tussle with your refractory pedal extremities, you again get them beneath the surface, your hands fly out with the splash and splutter of a half-dozen flutter wheels. If, on account of your brains being heavier than your heels, you chance to turn a somersault, and your head goes under, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... second supper with undiminished appetite. Then Esther mounted the platform where the band had been seated, and played a last waltz, and a very last waltz, and "really the last waltz of all." The squire's son played a polka with two fingers, and a great deal of loud pedal, and the fun grew faster and more uproarious with every moment. Even Rosalind threw aside young ladylike affectations and pranced about without thinking of appearances, and when at last the others left the room to prepare for ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... suppose that iambic verse may drop its initial short syllable, and still be iambic, still be measured as before, is not only to take a single long syllable for a foot, not only to recognize a pedal caesura at the beginning of each line, but utterly to destroy the only principles on which iambics and trochaics can be discriminated. Yet Hiley, of Leeds, and Wells, of Andover, while they are careful ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... All your janglings now; Notes false-chorded, slithering slaps, Pedal-aided row! Where is Minx, we wonder? Ah! those scrambling skips! Back she's come to torture us With ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... wished to dwell with emphasis on a particular theme, he almost invariably resorts to some form of fugal treatment, strict or free. The most effective media for rendering fugues are the chorus of mixed voices, the organ (by reason of its pedal key-board always making the subject in the bass stand out majestically) and the stringed orchestra which, with the "bite" of the strings, brings out—with peculiar sharpness—the different entrances ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress. The sweet voice was still rising and the interested listener hoped that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put on the loud pedal. The pianist, however, was gazing at his music, and played on until, with ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... but very clearly, very concisely, the Senior Surgeon called out to the White Linen Nurse just how every lever, every pedal should be ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... clutch, and slipped in first speed. Then releasing the clutch pedal gradually she felt the car move slowly forward. A flush of pleasure came to her face; for, though she had several times performed this feat of late, the demonstrator had always sat beside her. Now she was ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... motion songs is outgrown, especially with boys. During many years there has remained in memory the expression in the face of a boy, head and shoulders taller than any other child in the primary department, as he stood pointing to pedal extremities, not less than number fours, and singing, "Little feet, be very careful where you take me to." The sentiment could not possibly have been wrung from him had not ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... speaking voice a range of pitch from high to low, with a great many shades between the extremes. With all these notes available there is no excuse for offending the ears and taste of your audience by continually using the one note. True, the reiteration of the same tone in music—as in pedal point on an organ composition—may be made the foundation of beauty, for the harmony weaving about that one basic tone produces a consistent, insistent quality not felt in pure variety of chord sequences. In like manner the intoning voice in a ritual may—though it rarely ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... line with that distant planet and Seaton stepped down hard, upon a pedal. Instantly they seemed infinite myriads of miles out in space, the green system barely visible as a ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... opening. It is to fill the recess behind the spacious platform, and is described as containing pneumatic wind-chests throughout, and having an AEolian attachment. It is of three-manual compass, C.C.C. to C.4, 61 notes; and pedal compass, C.C.C. to F.30. The great organ has double open diapason (stopped bass), open diapason, dulciana, viola di gamba, doppel flute, hohl flute, octave, octave quint, superoctave, and trumpet,—61 pipes each. The swell organ has bourdon, open diapason, ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... the boys threw themselves down upon the ground and gave way to merriment that was none the less overpowering because it had to be indulged in "with the soft pedal on," as Arthur ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... in a clump of bushes, he drew out a bicycle and prepared to mount. He was in the act of driving the gear around with his foot for the purpose of getting the opposite pedal in position, when he heard the thud of a heavy body that landed lightly and evidently on its feet. He did not wait for more, but ran, with hands on the handles of his bicycle, until he was able to vault astride the saddle, catch the pedals, and start a spurt. Behind he could hear the quick thud-thud ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... reputation for such, a battalion adjutant, a tall and handsome fellow with a slight partiality for legs, came dashing up on a native pony. His knees were bent and elevated toward his chin in order that his pedal extremities might not collide with the frail limbs of ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... are some—there are half a dozen—" muttered Marzio, relapsing into sullen discontent and slowly turning the body of the chalice beneath the cord stretched by the pedal on which he pressed his foot. Having brought under his hand a round boss which was to become the head of a cherub under his chisel, he rubbed his fingers over the smooth silver, mechanically, while he contemplated the red wax ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... not content with refusing to be ruled, must needs set up as a ruler, and manifested a determination to keep, not only his sisters, but his governess in order, by violent manual and pedal applications; and, as he was a tall, strong boy of his years, this occasioned no trifling inconvenience. A few sound boxes on the ear, on such occasions, might have settled the matter easily enough: but as, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... sixty-five in Berlioz's 'Dance of the Sylphs,'" said Dr. Dubbe. "The spirits hover over Faust, who has fallen asleep. The 'cellos are sawing away drowsily on their pedal point D (probably in sympathy with Faust), and what sounds like Herr Thomas tuning the orchestra is the lone A of the fifth. The absent third represents the sleep of Faust. This is a trick common to the new school. Wagner uses it in 'Siegfried,' in the close of the Tarnhelm motive, to illustrate ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... started now to pedal out into the great world, I was icily sober, and the old skill, in consequence, had deserted me entirely. I found myself wobbling badly, and all the stories I had ever heard of nasty bicycle accidents came back to me with a rush, headed by Jeeves's Uncle Cyril's ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... inspections are held—in many instances daily. This simple preventive, coupled with a copious supply of socks sent out by the people at home, has helped the great majority of 'Tommies' to keep their pedal extremities in going order. ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would stay. The doctor laughed at him. "Ten fellows like you couldn't hold him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands full. Guess I'd better put the soft pedal on him." He pulled ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... not be absolutely erect, but leaning slightly forward, so as to allow the weight to be distributed between the handle-bars, the pedal, and the saddle. This slightly inclined attitude also maintains the proper and harmonious relation of the internal organs, so that the bowels do not crowd down on ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... serviceable shoes, such as would astonish the Parisian makers of bottines. But these shoes were only for show. The ladies walked painfully about in the unaccustomed leather. They seemed to have innumerable corns, to wrestle with bunions huge and dire, to suffer from unknown pedal infirmities. Outside the town the ladies put on their shoes. Outside the town, after the fair, they took them off again, sitting on the roadside, stripping their shapely feet, bundling the obnoxious, crippling abominations into Isabella-colour handkerchiefs, which they tucked ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... that," he said, putting on the husky conversational pedal, "I was naturally trusted. And I ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... at him as he started to speak, and Jack's finger shot out to the forbidden wheel on the instant. Elizabeth saw it at a point when she could not control the pedal with her foot. Mother love brought a scream to her lips, and to save the child she gave him a shove with her hand. Jack fell on the floor in a heap, striking his head on the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... bread and green water, in an unknown dungeon. My part shall be to discover her imprisonment. Sounds of strange music attract my attention to a part of the castle which I have not before frequented. There I shall distinctly hear a female voice chaunting the 'Bridesmaids' Chorus,' with Erard's double pedal accompaniment. By the aid of the confessors of the two families, two drinking, rattling, impertinent, most corrupt, and most amusing friars, to wit, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... any movement of the arms, depending entirely upon his narrow feminine hands and slender fingers. The wide arpeggios in the left hand, maintained in a continuous stream of tone by the strict legato and fine and constant use of the damper-pedal, formed an harmonious substructure for a wonderfully poetic cantabile. His delicate pianissimo, the ever-changing modifications of tone and time (tempo rubato) were of indescribable effect. Even in energetic passages he scarcely ever ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... it all, like a throbbing pedal note, ran his need of this girl. He would do anything, suffer anything, make any sacrifice, momentary or lifelong, if he could but see her again, hold her hand for one instant, look into her eyes mysterious with the secret of death. He had but three ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... is a hundred pounds of male rheumatism to every square inch of cold female foot, and the Philadelphia doctor should be thanked by men of rheumatic tendencies as well as by women of arctic pedal extremities for this timely discovery. There is no woman who enjoys seeing her husband in the throes of rheumatic pains, and now that they know that their cold feet have brought about so much suffering, we trust they will try and ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... times, Elizabeth Stirling, who died in 1895, was considered one of the very best of English organists. Her works for that instrument include two grand voluntaries, a half-dozen excellent pedal fugues, eight slow movements, and many other pieces. She has done much unselfish labour in arranging selections of Bach and the other great organ masters, besides publishing songs, duets, and piano works of her own. In 1856 she tried for a musical degree at Oxford, presenting an orchestral setting ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... tally of the girls within riding distance from camp. Jennie Miller was reported engaged to an AJ man, and besides, she lived too far away and was not pretty enough to be worth the effort of a twenty-five mile ride just to hear her play hymns distressingly on an organ with a chronic squeak in one pedal. There was Alice Boyle at the AJ, and there was Mary Hope Douglas, who was growing to be quite a young lady,—pretty good-looking, too, if she wouldn't peel her hair back so straight and tight. Mary Hope Douglas, Tom decided, was probably the girl. It struck Tom ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... it now. You began it, and I want it finished now," I added, cracking the whip once more in the neighborhood of his pedal extremities. ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... I pedal slowly and hotly back through the tangle of Brooklyn and figure, well, that's a week's research wasted. I still don't know where Tom lives, so I don't know how I can get a hold of him again. Anyway, how do I know he wants to be bothered with me? He ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... chaos, this peaceful fancy was disrupted,—her heart ravished from its rest, its calm torn from it. Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise; and vast as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... more boarders than usual in the parlor. The young woman from the notion counter had company; and one of her guests was playing "He sut'nly was Good to Me" on the pianola with loud and steady tread of pedal. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Barons" was a term applied to an implement used by the ancient shoemakers. The pedal members of the old English barons were of a peculiar aristocratic conformation, and lasts were made expressly for them. This is a curious fact not ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... powers; lever, leverage; mechanical advantage; crow, crowbar; handspike^, gavelock^, jemmy^, jimmy, arm, limb, wing; oar, paddle; pulley; wheel and axle; wheelwork, clockwork; wheels within wheels; pinion, crank, winch; cam; pedal; capstan &c (lift) 307; wheel &c (rotation) 312; inclined plane; wedge; screw; spring, mainspring; can hook, glut, heald^, heddle^, jenny, parbuckle^, sprag^, water wheel. handle, hilt, haft, shaft, heft, shank, blade, trigger, tiller, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Without a cessation A chaste modulation Hastens adown to subdominant key, Where melody mellow-like Singing so 'cello-like Rises and falls in a wild ecstasy. Scarce is this finished When chords all diminished Break loose in a patter that comes down like rain, A pedal-point wonder Rivaling thunder. Now all is mad agitation again. Like laughter jolly Begins the finale; Again does the 'cello its tones seem to lend Diminuendo ad molto crescendo. Ah! Rubinstein only ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... vibration may in itself tend to create a diminuendo, yet it is possible to make up for this in some degree by causing the air-blast to increase in force, through the use of any suitable means, modified by an extra pedal as ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... sight an' started in to give you the tip to put the soft pedal on the wiggle stuff, when, zowie! I guess you didn't reach out an' soak me—a cop!" He tapped the bandage upon ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... once raised refused to go down, and thus was produced the curious effect of a man stumping about on his heels! To overcome this difficulty the heels of the feet were made to project almost as much behind as the toes did in front somewhat after the pattern of Ebony's pedal arrangements, as Rosco remarked when they were being fitted on for another trial. At last, by dint of perseverance, the wooden legs were perfected, and Rosco re-acquired the art of walking to such perfection, ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... joy at this intelligence knew no bounds. He dreamed of those shoes at night, and they formed the theme of his conversation by day. His sister, who was the oldest of the children, had been the happy possessor of three pairs of shoes, and she often discussed knowingly the good qualities of pedal coverings and of their advantages in travelling through brambles or over stones. Often as he contemplated his scratched, chapped and bruised feet, the child had asked himself if it were possible that he should ever be able to afford ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... guards to the plainclothes man and back, in frustration. Finally he spun on his heel again and re-entered the car. He slapped the elevation lever, twisted the wheel sharply, hit the jets pedal with his foot ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... have "angels' tears," and "breath," and "smiles," and "Eden zephyrs," "sighs of seraph lovers," and "lyres of slumbering cherubs," dancing away to "the Pedal Harp!" How strange it is that Thomson, in his stanzas on the AEolian lyre (see the 'Castle of Indolence'), never dreamed of such things, but left all these prettinesses to the last of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... her coverlid. There she lay at night, but in the day-time she used to play about on the table; here the woman had put a bowl, surrounded by a ring of flowers, with their stalks in water, in the middle of which floated a great tulip pedal, and on this Thumbelina sat, and sailed from one side of the bowl to the other, rowing herself with two white horse-hairs for oars. It was such a pretty sight! She could sing, too, with a voice more soft and sweet than had ever ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... lay upon the steering wheel, panting, fighting back his weakness; then he thrust forward his control lever and the car began to move. The motion, the kindly touch of the cool night air against his head, stimulated him; he stepped on the gas pedal and the car leaped forward as ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... temple, silhouetted duskily, in the cool, shadowy room, against the open window; the slender figure, one arm curving between you and the strings, the other gleaming behind them; the delicate little sandal stealing from the white froth of silk and lace to caress the pedal; the nimble hands fluttering across the long strands, "Like white blossoms borne on slanting lines of rain;" and the great gold harp rising to catch a javelin of sunshine that pierced the vines at the window where the honeysuckles swung ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... those under your ears dear," she ordered, "my pillows aren't unpacked yet and you may find Neddie's last year tacks in that burlap. There now, you look almost human. But the wistful whimper lingers. Jane, what has happened? You are simply smothered in the soft pedal. Tell your Judy all about ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one, probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium arch of music was forming over ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... bothered you the other day," she told him as he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't got a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... prepared by the 6/4 chord, now become so hackneyed from its perpetual and wearisome repetition in popular church music, seems to be especially disliked by Mr. Paine, as it occurs but once or twice in the course of the work. In the great choruses the cadence is usually reached either by a pedal on the tonic, as in the chorus, "Awake, thou that sleepest," or by a pedal on the dominant culminating in a chord of the major ninth, as in the final chorus; or there is a plagal cadence, as in the first chorus of the second part; or, if the 6/4 chord is introduced, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... hapless Feodor during an evening call he interned him in the vitals of a tuneless Baby Grand, and for three hours played on him CHOPIN'S polonaise in A flat major, with the loud pedal down. On his release Feodor had lost his reason and rushed to the nearest police-station to ask to be sent to the Front immediately. His object, he explained, was to end the War. The Bulgar authorities thought the plan worth trying and sent him off as a comitadjus; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... shoulders, and his hat went back on his head; his long arms dangled, pendulum-like, by his sides, while his lanky legs, dragging along anyhow, were ever lagging behind one another. But when he opened the piano and put hands and feet to keys and pedal, he was not the same individual. He would turn on nerve and muscle-power, and would hurl avalanches of music and torrents of notes at his audience till he, in his turn, was overwhelmed with thunders of applause. And those were the days, we must remember, when ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... and Pedal Organ (except the two stops Bourdon and Bass Flute of the last) are placed in four bays of the north triforium of the nave; the choir organ and the two Pedal stops are in the first bay of the north aisle, and the Console in ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but the rich ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to bring Solomon that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of "With thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often tried ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... without even distinguishing them, and then stared obstinately at his own feet. When at last a stray musician with a worn face, long hair, and an eyeglass stuck into his contorted eyebrow sat down to the grand piano and flinging his hands with a sweep on the keys and his foot on the pedal, began to attack a fantasia of Liszt on a Wagner motive, Aratov could not stand it, and stole off, bearing away in his heart a vague, painful impression; across which, however, flitted something incomprehensible to him, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... chorus over, will you?" growls the writer. Obediently the composer pounds away, with the soft pedal on, and the writer sings his words so that the composer can hear them. There comes a line that doesn't fit. "No ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress that the glare of light fell shimmering on. The sweet voice was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on. He, however, was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with startling suddenness, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... different matter. The moment you begin to "paddle your own canoe," lively and—to the lookers-on—mirth-provoking exercises ensue. When you stick your hand under to make a stroke your feet decline to stay anywhere but on top; and when, after an exciting tussle with your refractory pedal extremities, you again get them beneath the surface, your hands fly out with the splash and splutter of a half-dozen flutter wheels. If, on account of your brains being heavier than your heels, you chance to turn a somersault, and your head goes under, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or after him knew how to make that instrument speak so eloquently. By ingeniously scattering the notes of a chord over the keyboard while holding down the pedal, he practically gave the player three or four hands, and greatly enlarged the harmonic and coloristic possibilities of the pianoforte. Liszt, Rubinstein, Paderewski, and others have gone farther still in the same ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... some unlucky burgher had found his way into a group of students and was being made the butt of a good-humoured jest. And beneath the high, laughing tones, the perpetual hum of a thousand talking voices neither rose nor fell, but droned unceasingly like the long pedal in a fugue, whose full deep note stands still amidst the strife of moving sounds, as the sun stood while the battle was fought out in Ajalon. The very life of the multitude seemed to produce a sound of its own, in the breathing of a thousand pairs of strong young lungs, in the beating ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... and seeing, at the other end of a long hall, Gerrit Smith in quiet conversation. In a moment we heard his voice, and my friend was greatly impressed by it, declaring he had never imagined such an utterance possible. It was indeed amazing; it was like the deep, clear, rich tone from the pedal bass of a cathedral organ. During his career in Congress, it was noted that he was the only speaker within remembrance who without effort made himself heard in every part of the old chamber of the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... imprisonment. Sounds of strange music attract my attention to a part of the castle which I have not before frequented. There I shall distinctly hear a female voice chaunting the 'Bridesmaids' Chorus,' with Erard's double pedal accompaniment. By the aid of the confessors of the two families, two drinking, rattling, impertinent, most corrupt, and most amusing friars, to ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... returning procession was re-formed. Louis pushed the bicycle on its front wheel, and Rachel tried to help him to support the weight of the suspended part. He had attempted in vain to take the pedal off the crank. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the soft pedal on me. They 'muted' me," he amended, in deference to her own branch ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... to play any note loud or soft at pleasure; hence the name piano-forte. But the pianoforte itself required many years before all its possibilities of tone-production were discovered. The instruments used by Mozart still had a thin short tone, and there was no pedal for prolonging it, except a clumsy one worked with the knee—a circumstance which greatly influenced Mozart's style, and is largely responsible for the fact that his pianoforte works are hardly ever played to-day in the concert hall. For, as ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... silent, silent, All your janglings now; Notes false-chorded, slithering slaps, Pedal-aided row! Where is Minx, we wonder? Ah! those scrambling skips! Back she's come to torture ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... to the piano, and began softly playing, with the hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not touched, the string of the key that ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... is held down, the vibrations continue for a long time after the blow; but if released at once, the damper stifles them as the hammer regains its seat. A bar, L, passing along under all the damper lifters, is raised by depressing the loud pedal. The soft pedal slides the whole keyboard along such a distance that the hammers strike two only out of the three strings allotted to all except the bass notes, which have only one string apiece, or two, according ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table-linen the Harlings had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... speak after her. She will play various kinds of music upon the piano with a uniform vigour that would serve well for the beating of carpets, and will express much scorn for the feeble beings who use the soft pedal, or indulge in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... Uhlans." If you came to see me, you had to hear it. As arranged for the pianola, it was marked to be played throughout at a lightning pace and with the loudest pedal on. So one would play it if one wished to annoy the man in the flat below; but a true musician has, I take it, a higher aim. I disregarded the "FF.'s" and the other sign-posts on the way, and gave it my own interpretation. As played ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[355] He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... pleasure heightened by an intermingled strangeness and even terror—qualities which bring out the quality of pleasure in the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point passage brings out the quality of what a German would, I think, call the over-work. I was at Canterbury, where the great central tower is wreathed with scaffolding, and has a dim, blurred outline from a distance, as though ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... safe miles out to sea. When he approached a passing vessel he presented the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the water, for the float was almost completely submerged. If it became necessary for his wife to attend him on his marine excursions, she was towed behind, and used her own pedal power. Possibly this primitive raft is the pathetic expression of man's first struggle against the restrictions of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... asked again: "What was there before the world was born?" That was an easy one; so I said in a tone of finality: "There wasn't anything." Then I went on with my meditations, thinking I had used the soft pedal effectively. Silence reigned supreme for some minutes, and then was rudely shattered. His thumb flew from his mouth, and he laughed so lustily that he could be heard throughout the house. When his laughter had spent itself somewhat, I asked meekly: "What are you laughing at?" His answer came ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... great in the manner in which he attunes nature to a human mood, in which he gives you the sunlight muffled, in some way, like the sunlight during a partial eclipse, and keys turbulence down to quietude, like the soft pedal that falls on a noisy street when a ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... me we don't drift the way we ought to," said Harry, pressing on his clutch pedal and trying ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... (about 1300-1375), the occasional use of thirds and sixths in the diaphonies previously explained led to an entirely different kind of singing, called falso bordone or faux bourdon (bordonizare, "to drone," comes from a kind of pedal in organum that first brought the third into use). This system, contrary to the old organum, consisted of using only thirds and sixths together, excluding the fourth and fifth entirely, except in the first and last bars. This innovation has been ascribed to the Flemish singers attached to the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... disappointed with the lay-out! What's the blithering sense of being in such a consuming fever about moving the fiendish furniture? I'm certain you'll hate the very sight of this corn-crib out among the ant hills. Can't you back-pedal on the furniture gag and give yourself a chance to hear the answer to what ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... political and financial powers of the city that they did not dare to come out openly and say what they thought. The chief facts had already been in the hands of the various editors and publishers for a week and more, but word had gone around from Mollenhauer, Simpson, and Butler to use the soft pedal for the present. It was not good for Philadelphia, for local commerce, etc., to make a row. The fair name of the city would be smirched. It was the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... shoes has rubbed my heel till it's sore," fretted Steve, taking off his shoe to sympathetically rub that portion of his pedal extremity. "If I expect to be able to toddle around, and have any sort of fun while we're up here I ought to keep quiet the balance of the day; and also put some sort of lotion on my heel ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... about to shout aloud in actual terror at the disaster that seemed unavoidable, there was a sharp "click" as Frank closed the circuit with his emergency foot pedal and the engine began to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... likely enough to occur within an incredibly short space of time, particularly if he does not take into account the tremendous force and power which he controls merely by the moving of a tiny lever, or by the depressing of a pedal. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... Shaw's in her head, let the preacher run the sewing machine and Doctor Shaw preach the gospel of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come. If God fitted Anna Shaw's brain and tongue for the platform, it would be unwomanly in her to make herself the pedal power of a sewing machine. We want successful, useful men and women; and in fields for which God has fitted woman, don't be afraid to give her the freest, broadest liberty, or be uneasy about her unsexing herself. She has entered two hundred fields in the last one hundred years. Yes, I guess ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... alone or in connection with each other. Four manuals, or hand key-boards, and two pedals, or foot key-boards, command these several systems,—the solo organ, the choir organ, the swell organ, and the great organ, and the piano and forte pedal-organ. Twelve pairs of bellows, which it is intended to move by water-power, derived from the Cochituate reservoirs, furnish the breath which pours itself forth in music. Those beautiful effects, for which the organ is incomparable, the crescendo and diminuendo,—the gradual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... appears in the orchestration which surrounds it; at times even this maintains an archaic simplicity. Thus in the coda of the vivace of the Seventh Symphony, a simple melody is reiterated eleven times in succession, with no other orchestration than the pedal-point on E by ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... musical, was particularly interested by the circumstance, and Emma could not help being amused at her perseverance in dwelling on the subject; and having so much to ask and to say as to tone, touch, and pedal, totally unsuspicious of that wish of saying as little about it as possible, which she plainly read in the fair ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the opening. It is to fill the recess behind the spacious platform, and is described as containing pneumatic wind-chests throughout, and having an AEolian attachment. It is of three-manual compass, C.C.C. to C.4, 61 notes; and pedal compass, C.C.C. to F.30. The great organ has double open diapason (stopped bass), open diapason, dulciana, viola di gamba, doppel flute, hohl flute, octave, octave quint, superoctave, and trumpet,—61 pipes each. The swell ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... editions is the abuse of the pedal. Mozart never indicated the pedal. As purity of taste is one of his great qualities, it is probable that he made no abuse of the pedal. Beethoven indicated it in a complicated and cumbersome manner. When he wanted the pedal he wrote "senza sordini," which means without dampers, ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best—the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... suggestion of the young man in the bottle-green roundabout, I mount and ride, wheeling slowly along between the little files of soldiers. The soldiers are delighted at the novelty of their duty, and they swing briskly along as I pedal a little faster. They smile at the exertion necessary to keep up, and falling in with their spirit of amusement, I gradually increase my speed, and finally shoot ahead of them entirely. Kiftan Sahib comes galloping after me on the gray, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... replied Mr. Goyte. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. He looked at his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and dark, before the peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a moment along her lap. In spite of his grey moustache and thin grey hair, the elderly ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... provided the usual cycle pitched chain so that, in the event of a breakdown, the rider can propel his machine with the pedals. Indeed, this is always necessary in starting, though a few strokes with the pedals suffice, and as soon as the engine is started the pedal clutch is thrown out of gear. In mounting a steep gradient the pedals are also useful as an auxiliary to the motor. The mechanical power provided is sufficient to drive the machine on a good and level road ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... conquered, and, in a burst of triumph from a full orchestra, the soul attains the serene summit. But the rest is only for a moment. Even in the highest places are temptations. The sunshine fails, clouds roll up, growling of low, pedal thunder is heard, while sharp lightning-flashes soon break in clashing peals about the peaks. This is the last Alpine storm and trial. After it the sun bursts out again, the wide, sunny valleys are disclosed, and a sweet evening hymn ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... don't wish to bear too hard on this pedal. It is easier to look at things from the commonplace standpoint. One thing or another prevented any of my companions in the jail from doing what it was desirable to do, and circumstances quite unforeseen ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... : kortusxa. patience : pacienco. patriot : patrioto. pattern : modelo, desegno. pause : halteti, pauxzi. pave : pavimi. paw : piedego. pawn : garantie doni; (chess) soldato. pay : pagi; salajro. pea : pizo. peace : paco. peach : persiko. peacock : pavo. peak : pinto. pear : piro. pearl : perlo. pedal : pedalo. pedestal : piedestalo. peel : sxelo, sensxeligi. pen : plumo, skribilo. pencil : krajono, ("slate"—) grifelo; ("hair"—) peniko. pendulum : pendolo. penetrate : penetri peninsula : duoninsulo. pension ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... achievements was the conversion of a barrel organ, purchased from a neighbouring church, into a manual, obtaining the wind therefor by a pedal arrangement which worked a large wheel attached to a crank working the bellows. On all great festivals and especially on Christmas Day he was wont to rouse the neighbourhood as early as three and four o'clock, remarking of the ungrateful, complaining neighbours that they had ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... which does not watch the conducting-stick has no conductor. Often, after a pedal-point for instance, the conductor is obliged to refrain from marking the decisive gesture which is to determine the coming in of the orchestra until he sees the eyes of all the performers fixed upon him. It is the duty of the conductor, during rehearsal, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... never walked nor stood alone. It has a power of grasping to some extent, and is used instinctively like a hand. The great toe has a certain independent working, like a thumb, and the wrinkles of the sole resemble those of the palm. These markings disappear when the pedal extremity has come to be ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... calmly, "but not the way you did it. Kissing should be done upon the soft pedal mon ami, adagio, con amore. Your technique is rusty. Is it a ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... were: ten rims broken, seven tires punctured, twenty spokes, two bearings, a handle-bar, and a pedal broken. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... when the fact, that if I laid much longer I would actually freeze to death, would come over me with such overpowering force as to break the icy spell, and starting to my feet, I would endeavour to go through the combined manual and pedal exercise to restore the circulation. The first fling of my benumbed arm generally struck me in the face, instead of smiting my chest, its true destination. But in these cases one's ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... conjectured that the "rude and gross" Gothic Fiddle "used to stir up the vulgar to dancing, or perhaps to solemnise their idolatrous sacrifices." In the Dark Ages dancing may have been regarded as bi-pedal trembling. I have remarked in another place,[19] "In the early ages of mankind dancing or jigging must have been done to the sound of the voice, next to that of the pipe, and, when the bow was discovered, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... another. If the right hand thrusts the flute, it is the duty of the left to see that the alternate and the limiting threads of the warp are properly lifted. First comes a pressure of the foot on a long, lath-like pedal which is attached to the bar holding in turn the loops which pass ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... first year they had arrived on Baron IV. Slowly Pete turned Mario's words over in his mind, allowing himself to worry a little. There had been rumors of trouble back on Earth, persistent rumors he had taken care to soft-pedal, as mayor of the colony. There were other things, too, like the old newspapers and magazines that had been brought in by the lad from Baron II, and the rare radio message they could pick up through their atmospheric ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... noisy ring of the cyclist. At that time a few cycling beginners used the circle for practice, and their alarming performances were gradually depleting the number of equestrians. One of these novices came down the hill, having an arm round the neck of his instructor, and one leg on the pedal, the other in mid air. He was unable to steer the machine, and as I cantered up, the performer's hat, which had been over one eye, fell off, disclosing the features of Professor Bryce. The next moment the machine, its rider and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... tremble somewhat. The young inventor was so surprised that he did not open the gasolene throttle, nor switch on his spark. As a consequence his motor-cycle lost momentum, and he had to take one foot from the pedal and touch the ground, to ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... up against a case of labor union jealousy, and they found themselves involved in a complex race problem, dealing with three aggressive applicants for places at the councils of rulers governing the world. California was ordered to turn on the soft pedal and do it quick, and officially, at least, she did for a time. Canada was ordered to lay both hands across her mouth and never to speak above a whisper of the whole Brown Brother problem; and England—well—England openly took the Jappy-Chappy at ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... words, he began to talk hurriedly of an important order. Sidonie had disappeared after exchanging a few unmeaning words with the impassive Frantz. Madame Dobson continued her tremolos on the soft pedal, like those which accompany critical situations at ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... his head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would stay. The doctor laughed at him. "Ten fellows like you couldn't hold him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands full. Guess I'd better put the soft pedal on him." ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... by the uproar that its own activities have brought about, will welcome the soft pedal that Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the gun silencer, is preparing to put on the hubbub in which every great urban community has condemned itself ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... explosion chamber, the magnet flashes its sparks to ignite it, the cooling water bathes the hot walls of the cylinders—a thing of nerves, and ganglions, and tireless muscles is panting eagerly at your service. You move this lever, you press your foot lightly on this pedal; the engine transfers its power to the wheels; you move. The carriage with you and your friends is borne at railway speed across continents. You can hurl yourself at sixty miles an hour along the great ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... age are rendered possible by being taken on a drone or pedal of cant, common form and conventionality. This drone is, as it were, the flour and suet ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... foot on the soft pedal and played the old love song, and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen, through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he might never hear, even in his dreams. When he finished, she stood beside him and cried with all ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... morning, and the most beautiful melody of bells I ever heard is toning through the air. They are the bells of S. Michael's church, and I am told that the musician plays them by a set of pedal keys, and works himself into a mighty heat and flurry in the operation. But we cannot think of the wild manner and mad motions of the player in connection with those beautiful sounds, so clear and melodious; that half ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... makes his living with his hands; but they won't do if you're depending on your head or your feet. If one end of you gets tangled, so does the other. That's why beer and cigarettes don't hurt piano players and picture painters. But you've got to cut 'em out if you want to do mental or pedal work. Now, have a cracker, and ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... dispossessed himself of his jacket, waistcoat, trousers, and boots, not forgetting his stockings; and then deliberately planting his chair in the open entry of the door, and gathering up one foot on the seat thereof, was amusing himself by cutting and picking the horny excrescences of his pedal digits, for the benefit of the passengers in the gentlemen's saloon; and, unfortunately, you could not be sure that his hands would be washed before he sat next to you at breakfast in the morning,—for I can testify that I have, over and over again, sat next ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... presence was a surprise to the audience, and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as impressive as the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Mr. Goyte. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. He looked at his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and dark, before the peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a moment along her lap. In spite of his grey moustache and thin grey hair, the elderly man had a face young and almost ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... resolved to dismount. He tightened the brake, and the machine stopped dead. He was trying to think what he did with his right leg whilst getting off. He gripped the handles and released the brake, standing on the left pedal and waving his right foot in the air. Then—these things take so long in the telling—he found the machine was falling over to the right. While he was deciding upon a plan of action, gravitation appears to have been busy. He was still irresolute when he found the machine on the ground, himself kneeling ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... energetic melody. There was a great deal more clapping when she finished, and when this was over, as an encore, she gave a piece which imitated the sea; there were little trills to represent the lapping waves and thundering chords, with the loud pedal down, to suggest a storm. After this a gentleman sang a song called Bid me Good-bye, and as an encore obliged with Sing me to Sleep. The audience measured their enthusiasm with a nice discrimination. Everyone was applauded till he gave an ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... as he started to speak, and Jack's finger shot out to the forbidden wheel on the instant. Elizabeth saw it at a point when she could not control the pedal with her foot. Mother love brought a scream to her lips, and to save the child she gave him a shove with her hand. Jack fell on the floor in a heap, striking his head on the bedpost ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the water, for the float was almost completely submerged. If it became necessary for his wife to attend him on his marine excursions, she was towed behind, and used her own pedal power. Possibly this primitive raft is the pathetic expression of man's first struggle against the restrictions of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... calm, her external envelope as a woman of Academic fashion, lay a certain thing that exists in all women, fashionable or not, and that thing is passion. It is the pedal which works the feminine instrument, not always discovered by the husband or the lover, but always by the son. In the dull story with no love in it, which makes up the life of many a woman, the son is the hero and the principal character. To her beloved Paul, especially since he had reached ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... those big pink-and-white chaps, Jarvis was, with nice blue eyes and ashes-of-roses hair. There was a lot of him, and it was well placed. He had sort of a soothing, easy way of talking, too, like a church organ with the soft pedal on. ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... of the jet boat, Tom pressed down on the acceleration pedal, sending the tiny ship rocketing out of the Polaris like a projectile. As they circled their mother ship, Roger pointed out the vessel they were going to and Tom settled down to full throttle in the direction of Roald colony vessel Number Twelve. The huge converted luxury ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... father, pressing his foot on the self-starting pedal. Thirty minutes later you roll away from the curb and the picnic has begun. The intervening time has, of course, been profitably spent by you in walking to the nearest garage for two ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... decoration is like a pedal-point in music; it must support the whole fabric, whether you are planning a house, a room ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... mattress, and a rose-leaf her coverlid. There she lay at night, but in the day-time she used to play about on the table; here the woman had put a bowl, surrounded by a ring of flowers, with their stalks in water, in the middle of which floated a great tulip pedal, and on this Thumbelina sat, and sailed from one side of the bowl to the other, rowing herself with two white horse-hairs for oars. It was such a pretty sight! She could sing, too, with a voice more soft and sweet than had ever ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... green water, in an unknown dungeon. My part shall be to discover her imprisonment. Sounds of strange music attract my attention to a part of the castle which I have not before frequented. There I shall distinctly hear a female voice chaunting the 'Bridesmaids' Chorus,' with Erard's double pedal accompaniment. By the aid of the confessors of the two families, two drinking, rattling, impertinent, most corrupt, and most amusing friars, to wit, our ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... if recollecting himself, he suddenly stammered out something about the necessity of changing his boots, and limped off accordingly for that purpose. He was not gone more than five minutes, but in that time had contrived not only to supply his pedal deficiency, but also to take a drink by way of calming himself; and after the drink he took a turn with Miss Friskin, and whirled her about the room, till he knocked over two or three innocent bystanders, all of which tended very much to compose his feelings. Ashburner had a presentiment ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... before commencing to hammer it. The hammer weighs 15 lb., and has a stroke variable from 21/2 in. to 91/2 in., and makes 250 blows per minute. The driving shaft, A, is fitted with fast and loose belt pulleys, the belt fork being connected to the pedal, P, which when pressed down by the foot of the workman, slides the driving belt on to the fast pulley and starts the hammer; when the foot is taken off the pedal, the weight on the latter moves the belt quickly on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... had been studying the exhibits in the distillery got the idea in his head that my foot was the loud pedal on a piano and he started to play the overture from William Tell ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual, and even the original Puritans, for all their fire, felt its throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has humorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams all winter that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... motor bicycle, which saves you the trouble of working the pedals. It can go quite fast, but if it breaks down it is very heavy to pedal home. ...
— The Motor Car Dumpy Book - The Dumpy Books for Children #32 • T. W. H. Crosland
... operator sits before a small steel stake, having a cavity, into which one half of the intended head will fit; immediately above is a steel die, having a corresponding cavity for the other half of the head: this latter die can be raised by a pedal moved by the foot. The weight of the hammer is from seven to ten pounds, and it falls through a very small space, perhaps from one to two inches. The cavities in the centre of these dies are connected with the edge of a small groove, to admit of the body of the pin, which is thus prevented ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... before, the first year they had arrived on Baron IV. Slowly Pete turned Mario's words over in his mind, allowing himself to worry a little. There had been rumors of trouble back on Earth, persistent rumors he had taken care to soft-pedal, as mayor of the colony. There were other things, too, like the old newspapers and magazines that had been brought in by the lad from Baron II, and the rare radio message they could pick up through their atmospheric ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... with a man once. I said to him: 'What would happen if you trod on that pedal thing instead of that other pedal thing?' He said, 'I couldn't. One's the foot-brake, and the other's the accelerator.' 'But suppose you did?' I said. 'I wouldn't,' he said. 'Now we'll let her rip.' ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Grooves made in Smith's Operation for Side-bones (viewed from the Side). 149. Foot showing the Grooves made in Smith's Operation for Side-bones (viewed from Below). 150. Periostitis involving the Pedal and Navicular Bones. (Litt) 151. Periostitis involving the Pedal and Navicular Bones. (Litt) 152. Effects of Periostitis on the Os Pedis. (Smith) 153. Effects of Periostitis on the Os Pedis. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... and pulled himself into the seat. For a moment he lay upon the steering wheel, panting, fighting back his weakness; then he thrust forward his control lever and the car began to move. The motion, the kindly touch of the cool night air against his head, stimulated him; he stepped on the gas pedal and the car leaped forward as though ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... contemplative and ever-sagacious Tomlinson tossed off his bumper; and the pair, having kindly rolled by pedal applications the body of Long Ned into a safe and quiet corner of the room, mounted the stairs, arm-in-arm, in search ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... magnesia. Sure enough, he came in, darkly suspicious, thought he had me all right, but he found a wreck that melted him. His wife sent me a bunch of violets next morning. For my part I don't like the Faculty for intimate friends," and Pellams played "Comrades" with the soft pedal down. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... early this morning, and, as the road out there seemed so hard and firm, the snow being packed down solid, I just jumped on my wheel, and took a little run up in that direction. It wasn't so easy, once I struck in on that side road, but I managed to pedal along somehow." ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... mixed up with little bits o' mahogany an' nuts an' bolts an' little scraps o' red flannel an' leather, an' pegs an' bits o' iron that didn't look as if it had ever been any part o' the machine. It was the dernedest mess! I picked up somethin' Jess said was a pedal,—a little piece o' shiny iron about as long as that,—'n' that was the only thing that seemed to have any shape left to it. The litter didn't make any pile at all—jest a lot o' siftin' sawdust-stuff scattered aroun' ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. A second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to do. I sewed frantically into the middle of shirts. I watched ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... about it, Mr. Trimmins," the young girl said, with her eyes on the road ahead and her foot on the gas pedal. "I hope you will make a ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... freedom. Used to give a brooch (hank) or two to weave at night. I'se sometimes thread de needle for my Ma, or pick out de seed out de cotton, an' make it into rolls to spin. Sometimes I'd work de foot pedal for my Ma. Den dey'd warp de thread. If she want to dye it, she'd dye it. She'd get indigo—you know dat bush—an' boil it. It was kinder blue. It would make good cloth. Sometimes, de cloth wuz kinder strip, one strip of white, an' one of blue. I remember how dey'd warp de thread across de yard ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... he cut one of your feet off?" asked Grant, soberly looking down at the pedal extremities of the mechanic, ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... was still able to sustain, if it were necessary, a quavering, imperfect phrase. But John delivered the second repetition without a mistake, singing easily from the chest. The master put his foot upon the soft pedal. Nobody was watching him. Had any one done so, he would have seen the perspiration break upon the musician's forehead. The piano purred its accompaniment. Then, in the middle of the phrase, the master ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... decidedly uncivil. They ventured a platitude about the beautiful Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking wife—for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if with inward embarrassment. But I resented their uncouth ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... Sir Arthur Sullivan, in the struggling years of his career, once showed great presence of mind, which saved the entire breakdown of a performance of 'Faust.' In the midst of the church scene, the wire connecting the pedal under Costa's foot with the metronome stick at the organ, broke. Costa was the conductor. In the concerted music this meant disaster, as the organist could hear nothing but his own instrument. Quick as thought, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... the toes having been once raised refused to go down, and thus was produced the curious effect of a man stumping about on his heels! To overcome this difficulty the heels of the feet were made to project almost as much behind as the toes did in front somewhat after the pattern of Ebony's pedal arrangements, as Rosco remarked when they were being fitted on for another trial. At last, by dint of perseverance, the wooden legs were perfected, and Rosco re-acquired the art of walking to such perfection, that he was to be ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress that the glare of light fell shimmering on. The sweet voice was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on. He, however, was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with startling suddenness, the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Solo, and Pedal Organ (except the two stops Bourdon and Bass Flute of the last) are placed in four bays of the north triforium of the nave; the choir organ and the two Pedal stops are in the first bay of the north aisle, and the Console in the second bay ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... already in motion. Rick dropped into the seat next to Scotty and his pal pushed the gas pedal all the way. The nose lifted and the stern ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... and correct. Roger North shrewdly conjectured that the "rude and gross" Gothic Fiddle "used to stir up the vulgar to dancing, or perhaps to solemnise their idolatrous sacrifices." In the Dark Ages dancing may have been regarded as bi-pedal trembling. I have remarked in another place,[19] "In the early ages of mankind dancing or jigging must have been done to the sound of the voice, next to that of the pipe, and, when the bow was discovered, to that of a stringed instrument ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... to make his first essay with the Brogue. They did not get as far as the pigs at Lockyer's farm; the rectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been white a year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at this particular point of the road. Subsequently, there being apparently no further call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard, where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchard found the coop almost intact, but very little ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... thus when the fact, that if I laid much longer I would actually freeze to death, would come over me with such overpowering force as to break the icy spell, and starting to my feet, I would endeavour to go through the combined manual and pedal exercise to restore the circulation. The first fling of my benumbed arm generally struck me in the face, instead of smiting my chest, its true destination. But in these cases one's muscles have their ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... bored until somebody proposed playing 'The Prince of Paris Lost his Hat' or some game like that. When the old folks went to bed, our hostess would find a pack of cards—authors, most likely—or play a waltz on the soft pedal for two couples to dance. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... mother of perlamoto. Peasant vilagxano, kamparano. Peat torfo. Pebble marsxtono, sxtoneto. Peccadillo peketo. Peculiar stranga. Pecuniary mona. Pedagogue pedagogo. Pedagogy pedagogio. Pedal pedalo. Pedant pedanto. Peddler kolportisto. Peddle kolporti. Pedestal piedestalo. Pedestrian piediranto. Pedigree deveno, genealogio. Pediment fruntajxo. Peel (fruit, etc.) sxelo. Peel sensxeligi. Peep rigardeti. Peer nobelo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... hand ensuring that nothing shall clash or be inappropriate. Into this scheme she introduces the song of birds and the sighing of the breeze, with perhaps in the dull distance the roar of the sea growling away and refusing to be driven from its obstinate pedal bass. Into our life she brings affection rose-colour, and for openness and truth the blue of the sky. She paints hatred dark, and passion fiery. Energy she portrays as red, and purity white. Could we but see ourselves in this colour-scheme we should realise that, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... arose in the distance, where some unlucky burgher had found his way into a group of students and was being made the butt of a good-humoured jest. And beneath the high, laughing tones, the perpetual hum of a thousand talking voices neither rose nor fell, but droned unceasingly like the long pedal in a fugue, whose full deep note stands still amidst the strife of moving sounds, as the sun stood while the battle was fought out in Ajalon. The very life of the multitude seemed to produce a sound of its own, in the breathing of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... convenience of work the blowpipe should be mounted on a special table connected up with cylindrical bellows operated by a pedal. That figured (Fig. 12) is made by mounting a teak top 60 cm. square upon the uprights of an enclosed double-action concertina bellows (Enfer's) and provided with a ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... him splitting wood in the cellar beneath, and indulging in some very hard language with his soft pedal down, Mrs. Keyser being the object of his objurgations. After a while he came into the parlor again, took his seat, wiped the moisture from his brow, put his handkerchief in his hat, his hat on ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table-linen the Harlings had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets. Old Mrs. Shimerda ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that Struthers' attentive ear was just below the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the suggestion of the young man in the bottle-green roundabout, I mount and ride, wheeling slowly along between the little files of soldiers. The soldiers are delighted at the novelty of their duty, and they swing briskly along as I pedal a little faster. They smile at the exertion necessary to keep up, and falling in with their spirit of amusement, I gradually increase my speed, and finally shoot ahead of them entirely. Kiftan Sahib comes galloping after me on the gray, and with good-humored anxiety motions ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... simplicity, and the masterwork appears in the orchestration which surrounds it; at times even this maintains an archaic simplicity. Thus in the coda of the vivace of the Seventh Symphony, a simple melody is reiterated eleven times in succession, with no other orchestration than the pedal-point on E by the rest of ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... Dick dismounted, and Mark climbed into the saddle. He began to pedal, and then threw in the gasolene and spark. The ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... has made several important innovations in writing for bass brass instruments, requires an octave bass trombone in B flat; an octave lower than the tenor one, in the "Nibelungen." The fundamental tones of the trombone are called "pedal" notes. They are difficult to get and less valuable than harmonics because, in all wind instruments, notes produced by overblowing are richer than the fundamental notes in tone quality. Valve trombones do not, however, find ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... character came out in his reply. "Not much," he said. "Pedal got a bit loose in Stamton, O' Man. Couldn't ride it. So I looked up the cousins while ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Everett Hale's. This sturdy old man, with his towering form, rugged face and echoing bass voice, would open up the stops and give his blessed "Mesopotamia" like a trumpet call. He never worked the soft pedal. His first words always made me think of "Boots and Saddles!" Be a man—do something! Why stand ye here all the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Opus (Kreisleriana, etc.) published by yourself and Mechetti, together with Bach's six Pedal Fugues, in which I wish to steep myself more fully. If the three Sonnets (both voice and pianoforte editions) are already re-corrected, kindly send me also ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... one quick turn of the head and made no answer. But she played the air over again—the girls sing it to this day over their household work at Farlingford to other words—with her foot on the soft pedal. The Marquis hummed it between his teeth at the other end of ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... shore, Paul discovered a most unique and lazy style of angling. Happening to look up at the bank, he saw two pair of bare feet of heroic size, from which two fishing lines hung, the corks bobbing on the surface a few yards from the shore. The broad bottoms of their pedal extremities turned to the river, the line passing between the great and second toes to the water, and there they lay enjoying delicious sleep, waiting for a fish to swallow the bait, when the pull on the line would be felt between their toes and awaken them to attend to business. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... buildings may be here mentioned. The County Court occupies what was then a tinker's shop and a farm-yard behind; the pedal stone of the ancient Cross, now in the Institute garden, was then at the back entrance to the Bull Yard, near Mr. Innes' shop, having been removed from the Cross a few years before; the market place could only be approached from the High Street, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... so far relented as to go up to him and pant in his face. Music, too, made him restless, inclined to sigh, and to ask questions. Sometimes, at its first sound, he would cross to the window and remain there looking for Her. At others, he would simply go and lie on the loud pedal, and we never could tell whether it was from sentiment, or because he thought that in this way he heard less. At one special Nocturne of Chopin's he always whimpered. He was, indeed, of rather Polish ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hour he spent on Sweet Sorrow laid over anything that the town had ever seen for sadness. Put 'em through every stage of grief from the snuffles to the snorts. Doc always was a pretty noisy preacher, but he began work on that head with soft-pedal-tremolo-stop preaching and wound up with a peroration like a steamboat explosion. Started with his illustrations dying of consumption and other peaceful diseases, and finished up with railroad wrecks. He'd been at it two hours when he got through burying ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Joe. "But when it's that kind of opinion he ought to put on the soft pedal. Any one has a right to have a club foot or a hunched back or cross eyes, but he doesn't usually go ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... a position differing from that of most others in England, although not unusual in Continental Cathedrals. The pedal and swell organs have been placed in the triforium on the north side, and the great organ, with the choir organ beneath it, project in front of the third bay, resting upon an over-hanging chamber behind the stalls. The organ was reconstructed, with great additions, ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... and frosted green cordials, so much the better. Reporters are almost human, you know. It would help too if you'd happen to be just startin' for the op'ra, with all your pearl ropes on. And whisper,—soft pedal on Djickyns here, but heavy on his suff'rin' countrymen! That's ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... University of Louvain, against the sacrilegious coterie at Rome that was running the Church and the world pretty much as they pleased, or against the brutal "Hans Wurst" (Duke Henry of Brunswick). Erasmus and his school of gentle reformers always counseled a slackening of the pace and the use of the soft pedal. Where is Erasmus to-day in the world's valuation? Even Rome, in whose bosom he nestled, and who fondled him for a season, has cast him aside as worthless. Luther lives yet, to the delight not only of Coleridge, but of millions of the world's best men, who, with the British ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the floor, or, what is more evident, the case of the piano, on which her hand rests. But she seems to feel the pulsation of the air itself. When the organ was played for her in St. Bartholomew's, the whole building shook with the great pedal notes, but that does not altogether account for what she felt and enjoyed. The vibration of the air as the organ notes swelled made her sway in answer. Sometimes she puts her hand on a singer's throat to feel the muscular thrill and contraction, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... to the side of the deep gully, across the road that was slippery with snow, slid Mr. Brown's automobile. Bunny and Sue's father's hands held tightly to the steering wheel, and he pressed his foot down hard on the brake pedal. ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... plays famously, but he is not my man. He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes pot-pourris on "La Muette" ["Masaniello"], plays the forte and piano with the pedal, but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds. Moscheles does not at all astonish him; therefore it is no wonder that only the tuttis of my concerto have pleased him. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... out choke button all the way. Advance spark lever about half way and throttle lever about one-quarter way and depress starter pedal. ...
— Marvel Carbureter and Heat Control - As Used on Series 691 Nash Sixes Booklet S • Anonymous
... had this well-poised, coldly observant spinster to do with that quaintly ironic ruffler, that romantic cynic, that rowdy Don Quixote, that impossible Enriquez? Presently she ceased playing. Her slim, narrow slipper, revealing her thin ankle, remained upon the pedal; her delicate fingers were resting idly on the keys; her head was slightly thrown back, and her narrow eyebrows prettily knit toward the ceiling in an effort ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... copious signs of affluence upon every side he gets ambitious and would abuse the sacred right of hospitality about half to three-quarters of an hour too soon. Out of the tail of my eye I sees him reaching in his pocket for the educated pasteboards and I gives him the high sign to soft pedal, but he don't mind me. Out he comes ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... I'm well on my way. He may try to follow me. Good-by, old chap," he added, bending down and taking the collie's silken head affectionately between his hands. "You're a good dog, and a good pal. But put the soft pedal on the temperamental stuff, when you're near Simon Cameron. That's the best recipe for avoiding a scratched nose. By the way, Miss Standish, don't encourage him to roam around in the palmetto scrub, on your outings with him. The rattlesnakes have gotten ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the open window; the slender figure, one arm curving between you and the strings, the other gleaming behind them; the delicate little sandal stealing from the white froth of silk and lace to caress the pedal; the nimble hands fluttering across the long strands, "Like white blossoms borne on slanting lines of rain;" and the great gold harp rising to catch a javelin of sunshine that pierced the vines at the window where the honeysuckles swung their skirts to the refrain—it was a picture to return ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... dusty odour of poudre de riz, and the many acidities of evaporating perfume; the sugary sweetness of the blondes, the salt flavours of the brunettes, and this allegro movement of odours was interrupted suddenly by the garlicky andante, deep as the pedal notes of an organ, that the perspiring armpits of a ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Jennie. "There ain't any such an animal! You know that in this day and generation shoe makers have ceased to make sensible shoes. I look at 'em in the shop windows," pursued the aching girl, "and I wonder what sort of foot the human pedal extremity will become in a generation or two. Those ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... divans and prayer rugs, on which nobody ever prayed. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both played the piano in an easy, tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the soft rather than with the loud pedal. Lord Reggie played a hymn of his own, which he frankly acknowledged was very beautiful. He described it as a hymn without words, which, he said softly, all hymns should be. There was archaic simplicity, not to say baldness, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... be called for later, and pushed off on his bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o'clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon—anywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... went, the machine flying noiselessly along and gathering pace every yard. I had nearly reached the bottom and was just getting ready to pedal, when all of a sudden, I caught sight of something that almost paralyzed me. Right ahead, in the centre of the village square, stood a prison warder. His back was towards me and I could see the moonlight gleaming on ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... down the pedal and bent over the wheel as if urging the machine to its utmost. Then there was jolt—a roar! a ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss who seats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there is no one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without a rider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planets to reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the rider in terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is: even a rider ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... you, does it? Never fear," added Pa, in a good-humored voice, "that sort of thing won't happen to any of you Woolley-legs; a good Irish stew is better than a kick of the pedal, eh?" ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... to counterchord Her notes no more In those old things I used to know, In a fashion, when we practised so, "Good-night!—Good-bye!" to your pleated show Of silk, now hoar, Each nodding hammer, and pedal and key, For dead, dead, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... extremities, had developed previous to her admission into this hospital, but it was impossible to find out when and how they began. She had never had, to the knowledge of her friends, an attack of 'apoplexy,' nor of paralysis. The head was symmetric, and without scars thereon. The pedal extremities involuntarily assumed various distorted positions and were constantly in motion. The toes were usually in a state of tonic spasm,—contracted, and drawn downward or extended, pointing upward, and slightly ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... anticipation all who may venture to speak after her. She will play various kinds of music upon the piano with a uniform vigour that would serve well for the beating of carpets, and will express much scorn for the feeble beings who use the soft pedal, or indulge in the luxury of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... first, with the soft pedal down. The instrument had never known a strong masculine hand before, having been fumbled and friveled over by softly incompetent, feminine fingers. But presently it began to thrill under the passionate hand of its lover, and carried away by his one innocent weakness, Jack was launched ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... suddenly stammered out something about the necessity of changing his boots, and limped off accordingly for that purpose. He was not gone more than five minutes, but in that time had contrived not only to supply his pedal deficiency, but also to take a drink by way of calming himself; and after the drink he took a turn with Miss Friskin, and whirled her about the room, till he knocked over two or three innocent bystanders, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... flash of Methuselah at the age of 64 taking Tango lessons from Baldy Sloane up at Weisenfeffer's pedal parlors? And then having to survive for 850 years with the dance bug ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... believe that almost everybody would have done in my place. Raffles, indeed, said he would have done it himself, but that was his generosity, and he was the one man who would not. What I did was to turn in the opposite direction to the other gate, where we might so easily have been cut off, and to pedal for my life—up-hill! ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... of sunn, viz., the fibres of Crotolaria juncea, was steeped repeatedly in limewater, and then exposed to the air by spreading it on the grass; it was also repeatedly pounded by the dhenki or pedal, and when sufficiently reduced by this process to make a pulp, it was mixed in a gumla with water, so as to make it of the consistence of thick soup. The frames with which the sheets were taken up were made of mat of the size of a sheet of paper. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... reason for comparing the pedal joint with the pastern on the basis that it may also be completely and securely bandaged. Open navicular joint does not occur, as a rule, except by way of the solar surface of the foot, and the introduction of active and virulent contagium is certain to ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... excite the audience to enthusiasm. Beethoven's powers of playing were never shown to greater advantage than in his andante movements. His execution of the quicker parts was apt to be confused by his frequent use of the pedal, but nothing occurred to mar or obscure the clearness and depth of expression with which he rendered the slower movements, and it was in these that his playing was ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... flying noiselessly along and gathering pace every yard. I had nearly reached the bottom and was just getting ready to pedal, when all of a sudden, I caught sight of something that almost paralyzed me. Right ahead, in the centre of the village square, stood a prison warder. His back was towards me and I could see the moonlight gleaming on the ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... meaning in a phrase amusing through its homely contrast. But humor based on ponderous diction is too often wearisome. Better say simply "He died," or colloquially "He kicked the bucket," than "He propelled his pedal extremities with violence against the wooden pail which is customarily employed in the transportation of the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that Struthers' attentive ear was just below the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... I won't," and Cora placed her foot more firmly on the brake pedal, while she was ready to grasp the emergency lever ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... himself in his words, he began to talk hurriedly of an important order. Sidonie had disappeared after exchanging a few unmeaning words with the impassive Frantz. Madame Dobson continued her tremolos on the soft pedal, like those which accompany ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gurgle, groan, agonize, quiver, quaver, just as much as you please, Madam,—I have my foot on the fortissimo pedal, and thunder myself deaf! O Satan, Satan! which of thy goblins damned has got into this throat, pinching, and kicking, and cuffing the tones about so! Four strings have snapped already, and one hammer is lamed for life. My ears ring again,—my head hums,—my nerves tremble! Have ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... won't; we'll settle it now. You began it, and I want it finished now," I added, cracking the whip once more in the neighborhood of his pedal extremities. ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... he said, putting on the husky conversational pedal, "I was naturally trusted. And I knew ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. A second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... 'em. Scoot ahead full speed." Then, over his shoulder to the girl, "Crouch down there, Molly." Goodwin was still a man of action and he knew Sandy Bourke of old. Out came the pedal, the gears engaged and the car shot ahead, beneath a swinging arc light. Sandy's hat-rim did not sufficiently shade his face or Molly's action had not been swift enough. There came a yell and a string of curses from the crippled car which backed and turned ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... of an automobile has nothing to do but watch his steering-wheel, and be ready to touch a pedal when he wishes to slow up or go faster or stop. If he makes a curve he does not have to bank his machine owing to his comparatively slow speed; but the aviator, traveling much faster through the air, must do this, bringing his airplane to a steep angle if he makes a very short turn. If he ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... She pressed down the pedal and bent over the wheel as if urging the machine to its utmost. Then there was jolt—a roar! a bang! ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... Goyte. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. He looked at his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and dark, before the peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a moment along her lap. In spite of his grey moustache and ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... silent, All your janglings now; Notes false-chorded, slithering slaps, Pedal-aided row! Where is Minx, we wonder? Ah! those scrambling skips! Back she's come to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench, with vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right. Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch. Recognising this as a dental drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... mumps, with measles complicating, pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal. An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as the machine moves swiftly, gives the same soft rasp—a ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... candy-pullings, and 'companies' where you sat around and were bored until somebody proposed playing 'The Prince of Paris Lost his Hat' or some game like that. When the old folks went to bed, our hostess would find a pack of cards—authors, most likely—or play a waltz on the soft pedal for two couples to dance. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... a silence he asked again: "What was there before the world was born?" That was an easy one; so I said in a tone of finality: "There wasn't anything." Then I went on with my meditations, thinking I had used the soft pedal effectively. Silence reigned supreme for some minutes, and then was rudely shattered. His thumb flew from his mouth, and he laughed so lustily that he could be heard throughout the house. When his laughter had spent itself somewhat, I asked meekly: "What are you laughing at?" His answer came on the ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... a stupid-looking young fellow with a sly, twisted smirk which gives him the appearance of perpetually winking his eye, detaches himself from a group on the right. All join in with urging exclamations: "Go on, Peters! Go to it! Pedal up, Pete! Give us a rag! That's ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... a matter of doubt to the devout women. As if for the fun of it, these two used to beat each other up beautifully, giving free shows to the neighborhood with vocal and instrumental accompaniments, four-handed, soft, loud, with pedal and all. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a long hall, Gerrit Smith in quiet conversation. In a moment we heard his voice, and my friend was greatly impressed by it, declaring he had never imagined such an utterance possible. It was indeed amazing; it was like the deep, clear, rich tone from the pedal bass of a cathedral organ. During his career in Congress, it was noted that he was the only speaker within remembrance who without effort made himself heard in every part of the old chamber of the House of Representatives, which was acoustically one of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Suppose you were making a bicycle,—in which of the following places would you want to increase the friction, and in which would you want to decrease it? Handle grips, axles, pedals, tires, pedal cranks, the sockets in which the handle bar turns, the nuts that hold the ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... it would be impossible to pass before the whole long line had gone by, I crossed over and now saw that the Scots Grays would soon find friends. I called Leon and pulling out a card, told him to pedal back and dig out a bottle of champagne I had hidden in our hay cart, and to present it to our soldier friends as a bracer and a souvenir. And ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... were working the pedal and I was sailing around very fast," said Raggedy Andy, "and all of ...
— Raggedy Andy Stories • Johnny Gruelle
... pressing his foot on the self-starting pedal. Thirty minutes later you roll away from the curb and the picnic has begun. The intervening time has, of course, been profitably spent by you in walking to the nearest ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... the cloud of steam risen from the bath, when Mackay once more gripped the hoe, and moving to his grindstone placed his foot on the pedal and set the edge of the hoe against the whirling stone. The sparks flew high. A murmur came from the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... which had been studying the exhibits in the distillery got the idea in his head that my foot was the loud pedal on a piano and he started to play the overture from William Tell until ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... and the various superscriptions naturally cause the sonata to be ranked as programme-music, but of a very simple kind. It is easy to suggest pastoral scenes: a few pedal notes, a certain simplicity of melody, and a few realistic touches expressive of the waving of branches of trees, or the meandering of a brook, and the thing ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... cartilages are attached to the posterior angles of the pedal bone. They are flattened from side to side, and the portion that projects above the coronary cushion may be felt by pressing on the skin that covers it. The plantar cushion is a wedge-shaped piece of tissue formed by interlacing connective-tissue ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... know why I think you're in the same jam, Judge," I said. "You'll look great running for office, with your opposition telling the public how a Psi foozled your vision. They'll stomp on the loud pedal about how you let her get away with it and wangle a 'Not Guilty' verdict when she ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... be absolutely erect, but leaning slightly forward, so as to allow the weight to be distributed between the handle-bars, the pedal, and the saddle. This slightly inclined attitude also maintains the proper and harmonious relation of the internal organs, so that the bowels do not crowd down on the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... "Soft pedal, Phonzie! You know I'd break a date with any one of 'em any day in the week for a sixty-cent table ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... had bulldozed out for it years before, the first year they had arrived on Baron IV. Slowly Pete turned Mario's words over in his mind, allowing himself to worry a little. There had been rumors of trouble back on Earth, persistent rumors he had taken care to soft-pedal, as mayor of the colony. There were other things, too, like the old newspapers and magazines that had been brought in by the lad from Baron II, and the rare radio message they could pick up through their atmospheric disturbance. ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... switch and placed an ear-piece over his head, giving me another connected with it. We listened eagerly. There were no foreign noises in the machine, no grating or thumping sounds, as he controlled the running off of the steel wire by means of a foot-pedal. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... discovered a most unique and lazy style of angling. Happening to look up at the bank, he saw two pair of bare feet of heroic size, from which two fishing lines hung, the corks bobbing on the surface a few yards from the shore. The broad bottoms of their pedal extremities turned to the river, the line passing between the great and second toes to the water, and there they lay enjoying delicious sleep, waiting for a fish to swallow the bait, when the pull on the line would be felt between their toes and awaken them to ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... the words of "Home, Sweet Home," and decided on that. Nothing could have been worse. I attacked the squeaky melodion, pushed down a pedal, pulled out the "vox humana" stop—the most harmless one of the melodion, but which gave out a supernaturally hoarse sound—I struck the chord, and standing up I began. These poor, homeless creatures must have thought my one purpose was to harass ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... for practice, and their alarming performances were gradually depleting the number of equestrians. One of these novices came down the hill, having an arm round the neck of his instructor, and one leg on the pedal, the other in mid air. He was unable to steer the machine, and as I cantered up, the performer's hat, which had been over one eye, fell off, disclosing the features of Professor Bryce. The next moment the machine, its rider and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... swung around into line with that distant planet and Seaton stepped down hard, upon a pedal. Instantly they seemed infinite myriads of miles out in space, the green system barely visible as a ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... bet. And every five minutes he'd ask her how did she ever—really now—open the trunk. But whenever he'd ask she would put the loud pedal on the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off—and got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He said the answer ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... contrebasson; Ger. Kontrafagott), a wood-wind instrument of the double reed family, which it completes as grand bass, the other members being the oboe, cor anglais, and bassoon. The contrafagotto corresponds to the double bass in strings, to the contrabass tuba in the brass wind, and to the pedal clarinet in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... presented to us for adoration, but as we did not seem to "ad," he withdrew his pedal attachment and talked about ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... against the open window; the slender figure, one arm curving between you and the strings, the other gleaming behind them; the delicate little sandal stealing from the white froth of silk and lace to caress the pedal; the nimble hands fluttering across the long strands, "Like white blossoms borne on slanting lines of rain;" and the great gold harp rising to catch a javelin of sunshine that pierced the vines at the window ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... been to give vent as he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary psalm for ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... get as far as the pigs at Lockyer's farm; the rectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been white a year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at this particular point of the road. Subsequently, there being apparently no further call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard, where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchard found the coop almost intact, but very ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... year old codfish! old spider that spins no more! old death with open eyes! old devil's cradle! vile lantern of an old town-crier too! Old wretch whose look kills! old moustache of an old theriacler! old wretch to make dead men weep! old organ-pedal! old sheath with a hundred knives! old church porch, worn out by the knees! old poor-box in which everyone has dropped. I'll give all my future to be quit of thee!" As he finished these gentle thoughts the pretty bride, who was thinking of her young husband's great ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... nearer to the side of the deep gully, across the road that was slippery with snow, slid Mr. Brown's automobile. Bunny and Sue's father's hands held tightly to the steering wheel, and he pressed his foot down hard on the brake pedal. ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... destroying the horn-secreting membrane; second, when depression of the coffin bone causes pressure upon and arrests the formation of horn; and, third, when the elevation of the sole compresses the soft tissues against the pedal bone and induces the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... sacrilegious coterie at Rome that was running the Church and the world pretty much as they pleased, or against the brutal "Hans Wurst" (Duke Henry of Brunswick). Erasmus and his school of gentle reformers always counseled a slackening of the pace and the use of the soft pedal. Where is Erasmus to-day in the world's valuation? Even Rome, in whose bosom he nestled, and who fondled him for a season, has cast him aside as worthless. Luther lives yet, to the delight not only of Coleridge, but of millions of the world's best men, who, with ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... recognized the characteristic utterance of her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a breakdown, and arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over, but she was philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and loudly attested her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... passage, he so far relented as to go up to him and pant in his face. Music, too, made him restless, inclined to sigh, and to ask questions. Sometimes, at its first sound, he would cross to the window and remain there looking for Her. At others, he would simply go and lie on the loud pedal, and we never could tell whether it was from sentiment, or because he thought that in this way he heard less. At one special Nocturne of Chopin's he always whimpered. He was, indeed, of rather Polish temperament—very gay when he was gay, dark and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... paw; hoof; base, bottom, extremity. Associated Words: chiropody, chiropodist, pedicure, orthopedy, orthopedic, orthopedist, pedal, plantigrade, bastinado, taligrade, palmigrade, cloven, ball, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... surprise at her own feet, and I observed the slight roughening of the side of the sole caused by the friction of the edge of the pedal. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... couple of sweaters at Jane's head. "Put those under your ears dear," she ordered, "my pillows aren't unpacked yet and you may find Neddie's last year tacks in that burlap. There now, you look almost human. But the wistful whimper lingers. Jane, what has happened? You are simply smothered in the soft pedal. Tell your Judy ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... mouth, in talking, was produced by a long tape, running down to a pedal, which was controlled by the foot of the performer. And the smile consisted of long strips of red tape, which were drawn out through slits at the corners of the mouth by means of threads which passed through holes in the sides of the head. The performer—who was always ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... miracle as holiness is the supernal. Now and then it is raised to such a pitch that we entirely fail to suspect its existence; it is like the note of the great pedal pipes of the organ, which is so deep that we cannot hear it. In other cases it may lead to the lunatic asylum, or to still stranger issues. But you must never confuse it with mere social misdoing. Remember how the Apostle, speaking of the "other side," distinguishes between "charitable" actions ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... soft! The wind is rough today!" The nerves of the feet contribute their share of helpful knowledge, calling attention to differences in the ground often unnoticed by the eye, telling whether the path is smooth or rough, grass-grown or rock-strewn. The auditory and pedal nerves are mutually helpful, the ear recording and classifying the sounds made by the feet, often guiding them aright by recalling certain peculiarities of sound—whether the ground is hollow, whether ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... wasteful and indirect and empirical is the process. We want a small range of rapid vibrations, and we know no better than to make the whole series leading up to them. It is as though, in order to sound some little shrill octave of pipes in an organ, we are obliged to depress every key and every pedal, and to blow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... to tremble somewhat. The young inventor was so surprised that he did not open the gasolene throttle, nor switch on his spark. As a consequence his motor-cycle lost momentum, and he had to take one foot from the pedal and touch the ground, to prevent himself from ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets. Old Mrs. Shimerda ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... positive for the future. She kept him on the brittle edge of nervous expectation. The opposition of the dancer had been successfully met by threats of dismissal; Hugh continued to lose flesh and gain in vocal and pedal agility. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... him as he started to speak, and Jack's finger shot out to the forbidden wheel on the instant. Elizabeth saw it at a point when she could not control the pedal with her foot. Mother love brought a scream to her lips, and to save the child she gave him a shove with her hand. Jack fell on the floor in a heap, striking his head on the bedpost as he ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... dismounted, and Mark climbed into the saddle. He began to pedal, and then threw in the gasolene and ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... patter through the echoing aisles. There is a hush of expectation. A few quiet worshippers assemble; the western light grows low, and lights spring to life, one after another, in the misty choir. Then murmurs a voice, an Amen rises in full concord, and as it dies away the slumberous thunder of a pedal note rolls on the air; the casements whirr, the organ speaks. That fills, as it were, to the brim, as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content into the flowing, the aspiring tide, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they lie in convenient mass ready to resume for the figure abandoned for another. If the right hand thrusts the flute, it is the duty of the left to see that the alternate and the limiting threads of the warp are properly lifted. First comes a pressure of the foot on a long, lath-like pedal which is attached to the bar holding in turn the loops ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... songs is outgrown, especially with boys. During many years there has remained in memory the expression in the face of a boy, head and shoulders taller than any other child in the primary department, as he stood pointing to pedal extremities, not less than number fours, and singing, "Little feet, be very careful where you take me to." The sentiment could not possibly have been wrung from him had not ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... Berlioz's 'Dance of the Sylphs,'" said Dr. Dubbe. "The spirits hover over Faust, who has fallen asleep. The 'cellos are sawing away drowsily on their pedal point D (probably in sympathy with Faust), and what sounds like Herr Thomas tuning the orchestra is the lone A of the fifth. The absent third represents the sleep of Faust. This is a trick common to the new school. Wagner uses it in ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... despatched a second supper with undiminished appetite. Then Esther mounted the platform where the band had been seated, and played a last waltz, and a very last waltz, and "really the last waltz of all." The squire's son played a polka with two fingers, and a great deal of loud pedal, and the fun grew faster and more uproarious with every moment. Even Rosalind threw aside young ladylike affectations and pranced about without thinking of appearances, and when at last the others left the room to prepare for the drive home she ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... "This was a very compact organ, in which four key-boards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet. See Fetis's 'Biographie Universelle des Musiciens'.—G. Grove." 'Note to Miss Marx's Art. on ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... recent rains, and the mud was something terrible. If one has never encountered Virginia mud, he can have no adequate idea of the meaning of the word. It gets a grip on your feet and just won't let go. Every rise of your pedal extremities requires a mighty tug, as if you were lifting the earth, as indeed you are—a much larger share of ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... began at once by striking those chords, somewhat more softly than usual; then she essayed various modulations and, as she made the last triad resound for a long time by means of the pedal—her hands were now lying in her lap—she felt a gentle joy in the melodies which were hovering, as it were, about her. Then Klingemann's ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... a couple of conversations on their own hook—kind of side issue, soft pedal dialogues—and they wa'n't takin' the slightest notice of my brilliant efforts. At the other end of the table Sadie is havin' more or less the same experience; for every time she tries to cut in with some cheerful observation she finds she's addressin' ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... thanked him effusively. And after that he used to go and sit with them occasionally in the evening. He had never heard Madame Arnaud playing again: she was too shy to play in company: and even when she was alone, now that she knew she could be heard on the stairs, she kept the soft pedal down. But Christophe used to play to them, and they would talk about it for hours together. The Arnauds used to speak of music with such eagerness and freshness of feeling that he was enchanted with them. He had not thought it possible for French people ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... lived in a big White House, with Evergreen Trees and whitewashed Dornicks in front of it, and a Wind-Pump at the rear. Father was a good deal the same kind of a Man as David Harum, except that he didn't let go of any Christmas Presents, or work the Soft Pedal when he had a chance to apply a Crimp to some Widow who had seen Better Days. In fact, Daughter was the only one on Earth who could induce him to ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... able to follow his course after he left the field he would soon have known that Frank was rather heading for town than intending to pedal in the direction of his own house, which was situated on the outskirts ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... was made by Mr Lebreton, of Rouen, was received on the 11th july 1830. It is composed of four keys, forty two registers, and one pedal. Although modern, the church of Saint-Romain, merits as we see, to be examined ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... refusing to be ruled, must needs set up as a ruler, and manifested a determination to keep, not only his sisters, but his governess in order, by violent manual and pedal applications; and, as he was a tall, strong boy of his years, this occasioned no trifling inconvenience. A few sound boxes on the ear, on such occasions, might have settled the matter easily enough: but as, in that case, he might make ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... came. The campus dripped with sadness. The Faculty oozed regret at every pore. We loyal friends of Hogboom were looked on as the chief mourners and it was up to us to fill the part. We did our best. We talked with the soft pedal on. We went without cigarettes. We wiped our eyes whenever we got an audience. Time after time we told the sad story and exhibited the telegram. By noon more particulars began to come in. Prexy got an answer ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... the material before commencing to hammer it. The hammer weighs 15 lb., and has a stroke variable from 21/2 in. to 91/2 in., and makes 250 blows per minute. The driving shaft, A, is fitted with fast and loose belt pulleys, the belt fork being connected to the pedal, P, which when pressed down by the foot of the workman, slides the driving belt on to the fast pulley and starts the hammer; when the foot is taken off the pedal, the weight on the latter moves the belt quickly on to the loose pulley, and the hammer is stopped. The flywheel on the shaft, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should marry ladies who belong ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... sentence really which she made out. She shook her head negatively, and in desperation put on the loud pedal, but she could not make the sound of the piano cover ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... possible protest, and by imperceptible degrees I lifted it to the top of the groove, and the least bit above it, say half an inch in all; but it made an appreciable difference to the sounds within, as when you remove your foot from a piano's soft pedal. I could do no more, for there was no further fulcrum for the spike, and I dared not gamble away what I had won by using ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... surging and rolling together; can only particularize them by race, tribe, and language. Nationalities from the uttermost parts of Asia here meet those from the Atlantic edge of Europe for the first and last time. By noon the sound becomes a loud droning, uninterrupted and breve-like, as from the pedal of an ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... these shoes were only for show. The ladies walked painfully about in the unaccustomed leather. They seemed to have innumerable corns, to wrestle with bunions huge and dire, to suffer from unknown pedal infirmities. Outside the town the ladies put on their shoes. Outside the town, after the fair, they took them off again, sitting on the roadside, stripping their shapely feet, bundling the obnoxious, crippling abominations into ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one, probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... swift glance around, and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress. The sweet voice was still rising and the interested listener hoped that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put on the loud pedal. The pianist, however, was gazing at his music, and played on until, with startling suddenness, the ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... choke button all the way. Advance spark lever about half way and throttle lever about one-quarter way and depress starter pedal. ...
— Marvel Carbureter and Heat Control - As Used on Series 691 Nash Sixes Booklet S • Anonymous
... is like a pedal-point in music; it must support the whole fabric, whether you are planning a house, a ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... between the extremes. With all these notes available there is no excuse for offending the ears and taste of your audience by continually using the one note. True, the reiteration of the same tone in music—as in pedal point on an organ composition—may be made the foundation of beauty, for the harmony weaving about that one basic tone produces a consistent, insistent quality not felt in pure variety of chord sequences. In like manner the intoning voice in a ritual may—though ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... its pedals and its peculiar registers; the Teutonic muse alone can execute these solemn airs which must be played with the soft pedal. For more than an hour Gilbert exhausted himself in vain attempts, and at last, disheartened, he contented himself with reciting aloud the poem which he despaired of translating. He uttered the first part with the fire of enthusiasm; ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... watch the conducting-stick has no conductor. Often, after a pedal-point for instance, the conductor is obliged to refrain from marking the decisive gesture which is to determine the coming in of the orchestra until he sees the eyes of all the performers fixed upon him. It is ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... all, like a throbbing pedal note, ran his need of this girl. He would do anything, suffer anything, make any sacrifice, momentary or lifelong, if he could but see her again, hold her hand for one instant, look into her eyes mysterious with ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... weave cloth after freedom. Used to give a brooch (hank) or two to weave at night. I'se sometimes thread de needle for my Ma, or pick out de seed out de cotton, an' make it into rolls to spin. Sometimes I'd work de foot pedal for my Ma. Den dey'd warp de thread. If she want to dye it, she'd dye it. She'd get indigo—you know dat bush—an' boil it. It was kinder blue. It would make good cloth. Sometimes, de cloth wuz kinder strip, one strip of white, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... down of the titles of books that conducted the pilgrim on the Way. Perhaps as they softly assembled for departure, a little music would be suggested to round off the evening, and she saw herself putting down the soft pedal as people rustled into their places, for the first movement of the "Moonlight Sonata." Then at the end there would be silence, and she would get up with a sigh, and someone would say "Lucia mia"! and somebody ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... an evening call he interned him in the vitals of a tuneless Baby Grand, and for three hours played on him CHOPIN'S polonaise in A flat major, with the loud pedal down. On his release Feodor had lost his reason and rushed to the nearest police-station to ask to be sent to the Front immediately. His object, he explained, was to end the War. The Bulgar authorities thought the plan worth trying and sent him off as a comitadjus; and to these circumstances ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... now Fischer, Abel, and Giardini were all forgotten—there was nothing like chords and arpeggios! He really stuck to the Harp long enough to play several airs with variations, and would nearly have exhausted all the pieces usually performed on an instrument incapable of modulation (this was not a pedal Harp), when another visit from Abel brought him back to the Viol da Gamba. He now saw the imperfection of sudden sounds that instantly die away—if you wanted staccato, it was to be had by a proper management of the bow, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... to vary the vocal timbre; that is, to sing with Colour. This desideratum of varied tone-colour is sought even by instrumentalists. Nay, the instrument itself is sometimes constructed with this object in view. Witness the invention of the "soft" pedal, which is intended not solely to reduce the intensity of tone in the pianoforte—that may be accomplished by a modification of force in striking the note—but to give the tones a darker, more sombre quality, or colour. To vary the tone-colour, a violinist or 'cellist draws ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... abuse the sacred right of hospitality about half to three-quarters of an hour too soon. Out of the tail of my eye I sees him reaching in his pocket for the educated pasteboards and I gives him the high sign to soft pedal, but he don't mind me. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... uneasily over the piano from the opposite side, was heard to murmur that he didn't care what Miss Hilda heard, nor the whole world, for the matter of that. "But," he added, with a faint smile, "folks allow that you know how to PLAY UP sometimes, and put on the loud pedal, when you don't want Mammy's ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... engine in front of him woke into life deafeningly and, waving away the mechanics holding the wings, he pressed the clutch pedal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... preliminaries of an evening which would inevitably run into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The numerous screened windows were open and the soft warm air ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... 2. Tendered him a banquet. 3. At the witching hour of midnight. 4. The devouring element was checked. 5. Piscatorial sport. 6. Pedal extremities. 7. Fraught with tremendous possibilities. 8. Amid the plaudits of the multitude. 9. Caudal extremity. 10. Passed to his long home. 11. Dissected the Thanksgiving bird. 12. Presided at the ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... of Mr. Polly's character came out in his reply. "Not much," he said. "Pedal got a bit loose in Stamton, O' Man. Couldn't ride it. So I looked up the cousins while ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... stalk is very contractile and elastic, constantly changing in shape. When detached from the host the animal moves with a very irregular and indefinite motion. When attached it moves freely over the surface on its pedal disk. The latter is bordered by four membranes composed of cilia. A distinct axial fiber extends from the pedal disc to the peristome and gives off a number of branches. This fiber is analogous to the myonemes in Vorticella. An indistinct longitudinal furrow can be ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... look up the hill also. I saw the corporal at the gate repeat the gesture; then a big bicycle corps, four abreast, guns on their backs, slid round the corner and came gliding down the hill. There was not a sound, not the rattle of a chain or a pedal. ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... observed that that amiable, long-legged individual eyed the stockman rather narrowly, as though he expected a few words of reproach, or something worse; but in this he was mistaken; for Hardum contented himself with expressing surprise at the length of his pedal extremities, and wanted to know if he was not sired by a kangaroo—an expression which our new acquaintance laughed at, as he wished to conciliate the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... was the same!" she cried, so loud that I had half to drown it in the pedal. "He's taken to following the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all the ready cash he can lay his hands on. But don't mention this to any one, Minnie. If it got out it might precipitate matters, and then the whole business would tumble down like a house of cards. As it is, I may be able to pull him out. But I've put the soft pedal on the partnership talk." ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... modulation Hastens adown to subdominant key, Where melody mellow-like Singing so 'cello-like Rises and falls in a wild ecstasy. Scarce is this finished When chords all diminished Break loose in a patter that comes down like rain, A pedal-point wonder Rivaling thunder. Now all is mad agitation again. Like laughter jolly Begins the finale; Again does the 'cello its tones seem to lend Diminuendo ad molto crescendo. Ah! Rubinstein only ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... that was interesting and even deeply moving: the relics of Enrico Toti, an artist who, having only one leg, joined the Bersaglieri Ciclisti as a volunteer at the beginning of the war, and rode up mountain tracks on a bicycle with a single pedal, and died, after acts of the greatest heroism and after sustaining for many hours grave wounds, crying with his last breath "Avanti Savoia!", upon whose dead body and brave departed spirit was conferred the most rare Gold ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... a motor with a man once. I said to him: 'What would happen if you trod on that pedal thing instead of that other pedal thing?' He said, 'I couldn't. One's the foot-brake, and the other's the accelerator.' 'But suppose you did?' I said. 'I wouldn't,' he said. 'Now we'll let her rip.' So he stamped on the accelerator. Only it ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... formed the theme of his conversation by day. His sister, who was the oldest of the children, had been the happy possessor of three pairs of shoes, and she often discussed knowingly the good qualities of pedal coverings and of their advantages in travelling through brambles or over stones. Often as he contemplated his scratched, chapped and bruised feet, the child had asked himself if it were possible that he should ever be able to afford such a luxury as a ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... wearisome repetition in popular church music, seems to be especially disliked by Mr. Paine, as it occurs but once or twice in the course of the work. In the great choruses the cadence is usually reached either by a pedal on the tonic, as in the chorus, "Awake, thou that sleepest," or by a pedal on the dominant culminating in a chord of the major ninth, as in the final chorus; or there is a plagal cadence, as in the first chorus of the second part; or, if the 6/4 chord is introduced, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or after him knew how to make that instrument speak so eloquently. By ingeniously scattering the notes of a chord over the keyboard while holding down the pedal, he practically gave the player three or four hands, and greatly enlarged the harmonic and coloristic possibilities of the pianoforte. Liszt, Rubinstein, Paderewski, and others have gone farther still in the same direction, but he showed the way, and most of his pieces are as delightful ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... waistcoat, trousers, and boots, not forgetting his stockings; and then deliberately planting his chair in the open entry of the door, and gathering up one foot on the seat thereof, was amusing himself by cutting and picking the horny excrescences of his pedal digits, for the benefit of the passengers in the gentlemen's saloon; and, unfortunately, you could not be sure that his hands would be washed before he sat next to you at breakfast in the morning,—for I can testify ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best—the music that ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Joe Harris raved at this announcement, might be too strong a word. But it is not too much to say that her springy foot (Joe had not the proverbially "little" one of the novelists, but a very well-shaped pedal of the Arab pattern, under the sole of which water could have run with as much freedom as under the Starucca Viaduct or the High Bridge), patted the hall floor with vexation, impatience and "botheration." There was not much use in blurting out her vexation before a servant, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... footsteps, we have been routed night after night from our warm quarters, in the dead of winter, to kindle fires and fill frosty kettles from water-pails thickly crusted with ice, that we might get the writhing pedal extremities of our little heir into a tub of water as quickly as possible. But lately we have learned that all this work and exposure is needless. We simply wring a towel from salted water—a bowl of it standing in our sleeping ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... playing the piano downstairs, I wonder? With the soft pedal down, some one is trying over that gavotte of Rameau's, so full of bewitching melancholy, that I was playing just now. Who can it be? Francesca came up with me—it ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... flowers in the room and the perfume of heliotrope and roses filled the air. The piano was open and on it one of the popular songs of the day; a loud, garish thing. Ethel liked what she called "bright music;" on the keys lay a tumbled lace handkerchief, and on the floor, close to the pedal of the instrument, was a man's ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... feet. It was his way of praying. I timed him with a stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I afterward carried out that scheme, and got five ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... should not be absolutely erect, but leaning slightly forward, so as to allow the weight to be distributed between the handle-bars, the pedal, and the saddle. This slightly inclined attitude also maintains the proper and harmonious relation of the internal organs, so that the bowels do not crowd down ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... of the mouth, in talking, was produced by a long tape, running down to a pedal, which was controlled by the foot of the performer. And the smile consisted of long strips of red tape, which were drawn out through slits at the corners of the mouth by means of threads which passed through holes in the sides ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... to the devout women. As if for the fun of it, these two used to beat each other up beautifully, giving free shows to the neighborhood with vocal and instrumental accompaniments, four-handed, soft, loud, with pedal and all. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... was that Oncle Jazon overreached himself. He was so delighted at Kenton's luck that he broke forth giggling and thereby drew against his own ribs a considerable improvement of Long-Hair's pedal applications. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... cloth after freedom. Used to give a brooch (hank) or two to weave at night. I'se sometimes thread de needle for my Ma, or pick out de seed out de cotton, an' make it into rolls to spin. Sometimes I'd work de foot pedal for my Ma. Den dey'd warp de thread. If she want to dye it, she'd dye it. She'd get indigo—you know dat bush—an' boil it. It was kinder blue. It would make good cloth. Sometimes, de cloth wuz ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... hands; but they won't do if you're depending on your head or your feet. If one end of you gets tangled, so does the other. That's why beer and cigarettes don't hurt piano players and picture painters. But you've got to cut 'em out if you want to do mental or pedal work. Now, have a cracker, and then ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... arranged a flexible fan whose handle is fixed near a pulley. A small piece of lead forms the counterpoise of the fan, which is thus completely balanced. Over the pulley runs a cord, each end of which is attached to a pedal. It will be seen that the alternate motion of these pedals must cause a rotation of the pulley in one direction or the other, and that consequently the fan will rise or fall more or less rapidly, and give a quantity of air that varies according to the rapidity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... couple of conversations on their own hook—kind of side issue, soft pedal dialogues—and they wa'n't takin' the slightest notice of my brilliant efforts. At the other end of the table Sadie is havin' more or less the same experience; for every time she tries to cut in with some cheerful observation she finds she's addressin' either ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... in his limbs, and Doctor Shaw's in her head, let the preacher run the sewing machine and Doctor Shaw preach the gospel of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come. If God fitted Anna Shaw's brain and tongue for the platform, it would be unwomanly in her to make herself the pedal power of a sewing machine. We want successful, useful men and women; and in fields for which God has fitted woman, don't be afraid to give her the freest, broadest liberty, or be uneasy about her unsexing herself. She has entered two hundred fields in the last one hundred years. ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... in a motor with a man once. I said to him: 'What would happen if you trod on that pedal thing instead of that other pedal thing?' He said, 'I couldn't. One's the foot-brake, and the other's the accelerator.' 'But suppose you did?' I said. 'I wouldn't,' he said. 'Now we'll let her rip.' So he stamped on the accelerator. Only it turned out to be the foot-brake after all, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... weather and labored out a ponderous joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking wife—for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's way. So I decided to retire ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... unlucky burgher had found his way into a group of students and was being made the butt of a good-humoured jest. And beneath the high, laughing tones, the perpetual hum of a thousand talking voices neither rose nor fell, but droned unceasingly like the long pedal in a fugue, whose full deep note stands still amidst the strife of moving sounds, as the sun stood while the battle was fought out in Ajalon. The very life of the multitude seemed to produce a sound of its own, in the breathing of a thousand ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the many acidities of evaporating perfume; the sugary sweetness of the blondes, the salt flavours of the brunettes, and this allegro movement of odours was interrupted suddenly by the garlicky andante, deep as the pedal notes of an organ, that the perspiring armpits of a ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... had finished with the couple and they moved down the aisle to what the paper called the "Bridle March, by Lohengrin," Mr. Maugans always craned his neck to see and usually put his foot on the wrong pedal, with the startling effect of firing a ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... holes in the roof—er, I mean, maybe you'll be disappointed with the lay-out! What's the blithering sense of being in such a consuming fever about moving the fiendish furniture? I'm certain you'll hate the very sight of this corn-crib out among the ant hills. Can't you back-pedal on the furniture gag and give yourself a chance to hear the answer to ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... this intelligence knew no bounds. He dreamed of those shoes at night, and they formed the theme of his conversation by day. His sister, who was the oldest of the children, had been the happy possessor of three pairs of shoes, and she often discussed knowingly the good qualities of pedal coverings and of their advantages in travelling through brambles or over stones. Often as he contemplated his scratched, chapped and bruised feet, the child had asked himself if it were possible that he should ever be able to afford ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... suppose the nest was made of? Bits of felt and soft leather from the hammers and pedal; and the mouse had gnawed in two most of the strips of leather that pull back the hammers! So, when the piano had been fixed, there was a pretty heavy bill ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... the piano, and began softly playing, with the hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not touched, the string of the key that the Commandant ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... window, as the smoke of their pipes and cigars floated up lazily to the ceiling above. The gentle hum of the traffic made a pleasant accompaniment to their conversation, as the holding down of a soft pedal fills in and supports dreamy organ music. But for the six young men in the bow window the room was untenanted, save for a waiter who had just brought some fresh drinks, and who was now clearing away empty ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... see enough to convince me that the ramifications of your society are like a net-work of wires, all over the earth, penetrating everywhere, and at every point touching the most deadly explosives of human passions and hates; and that it needs but the pressure of your finger upon the pedal to blow up the world. The folly of centuries has culminated in the most terrible organization that ever grew out of the wretchedness of mankind. But oh, my friend—you have a broad mind and a benevolent soul—tell me, is there no remedy? Cannot the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... was meant, the boys threw themselves down upon the ground and gave way to merriment that was none the less overpowering because it had to be indulged in "with the soft pedal on," ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... the same bars for the second time. He was still able to sustain, if it were necessary, a quavering, imperfect phrase. But John delivered the second repetition without a mistake, singing easily from the chest. The master put his foot upon the soft pedal. Nobody was watching him. Had any one done so, he would have seen the perspiration break upon the musician's forehead. The piano purred its accompaniment. Then, in the middle of the phrase, the master lifted his hands and held them ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... chaste modulation Hastens adown to subdominant key, Where melody mellow-like Singing so 'cello-like Rises and falls in a wild ecstasy. Scarce is this finished When chords all diminished Break loose in a patter that comes down like rain, A pedal-point wonder Rivaling thunder. Now all is mad agitation again. Like laughter jolly Begins the finale; Again does the 'cello its tones seem to lend Diminuendo ad molto crescendo. Ah! Rubinstein only could make such ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... somewhat. The young inventor was so surprised that he did not open the gasolene throttle, nor switch on his spark. As a consequence his motor-cycle lost momentum, and he had to take one foot from the pedal and touch the ground, to prevent himself from ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... to say," groaned Jennie. "There ain't any such an animal! You know that in this day and generation shoe makers have ceased to make sensible shoes. I look at 'em in the shop windows," pursued the aching girl, "and I wonder what sort of foot the human pedal extremity will become in a generation or two. ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... must be provided for releasing all the dampers from the strings at the will of the performer. The loud pedal, as it is called, but more properly, the damper pedal, accomplishes this end by raising the dampers ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... settle it now. You began it, and I want it finished now," I added, cracking the whip once more in the neighborhood of his pedal extremities. ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... wish to bear too hard on this pedal. It is easier to look at things from the commonplace standpoint. One thing or another prevented any of my companions in the jail from doing what it was desirable to do, and circumstances quite unforeseen ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and 'companies' where you sat around and were bored until somebody proposed playing 'The Prince of Paris Lost his Hat' or some game like that. When the old folks went to bed, our hostess would find a pack of cards—authors, most likely—or play a waltz on the soft pedal for two couples to dance. Wholesome but ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... but, as if recollecting himself, he suddenly stammered out something about the necessity of changing his boots, and limped off accordingly for that purpose. He was not gone more than five minutes, but in that time had contrived not only to supply his pedal deficiency, but also to take a drink by way of calming himself; and after the drink he took a turn with Miss Friskin, and whirled her about the room, till he knocked over two or three innocent bystanders, all of which tended very much to compose his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... proceeded to the creations of the poet. Some maintained the justness of Shakspear's delineations of aerial beings, while others denied it. By no violent transition, Ariel and his songs were introduced, and a lady, celebrated for her musical skill, was solicited to accompany her pedal harp with the song of "Five fathom deep thy father lies"... She was known to have set, for her favourite instrument, all ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... and "breath," and "smiles," and "Eden zephyrs," "sighs of seraph lovers," and "lyres of slumbering cherubs," dancing away to "the Pedal Harp!" How strange it is that Thomson, in his stanzas on the AEolian lyre (see the 'Castle of Indolence'), never dreamed of such things, but left all these prettinesses to the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... not watch the conducting-stick has no conductor. Often, after a pedal-point for instance, the conductor is obliged to refrain from marking the decisive gesture which is to determine the coming in of the orchestra until he sees the eyes of all the performers fixed upon him. It is the duty of the conductor, during rehearsal, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... saw the corporal at the gate repeat the gesture; then a big bicycle corps, four abreast, guns on their backs, slid round the corner and came gliding down the hill. There was not a sound, not the rattle of a chain or a pedal. ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... story, so sure were they of its impossibility. Galvani, however, had noticed that the maximum effect was produced when a metallic arc, of tin and copper, was brought into contact with the lumbar nerves and pedal extremities of a frog. Then the animal would be violently convulsed. The observer believed this came from a nervous fluid, and so he lost the advantage of his observations. It was reserved for Volta ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... produced the curious effect of a man stumping about on his heels! To overcome this difficulty the heels of the feet were made to project almost as much behind as the toes did in front somewhat after the pattern of Ebony's pedal arrangements, as Rosco remarked when they were being fitted on for another trial. At last, by dint of perseverance, the wooden legs were perfected, and Rosco re-acquired the art of walking to such perfection, that he was to be seen, almost at all times and in all weathers, stumping ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... the explosion chamber, the magnet flashes its sparks to ignite it, the cooling water bathes the hot walls of the cylinders—a thing of nerves, and ganglions, and tireless muscles is panting eagerly at your service. You move this lever, you press your foot lightly on this pedal; the engine transfers its power to the wheels; you move. The carriage with you and your friends is borne at railway speed across continents. You can hurl yourself at sixty miles an hour along the great highroads, you can crawl like a worm through ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... opposite side of the frame, and upon the fixed uprights. It is really a velocipede, one of the pedals of which is movable upon the winch, and is capable of running from the axle to the extremity, as in the upper apparatus. This pedal has the form of a shoe, and is provided with two straps to keep the foot in place and cause it to follow the pedal in its rotary motion. A movable seat, capable of rising and descending and moving backward ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... The boilers stand 1 ft. 9 in. apart, thus affording space between them for the motive machinery, including the pump. The crank axle is behind the boilers. The levers, the injector, the access to the fire-box, a pedal for working the engine brake as well as a screw brake for the carriage, are all in front. The brakes act on all six wheels, are worked by the driver, and the whole weight of the engine, car, and passengers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge of the freeway. Then, and only then, she heard the squeal of agonized tires and saw ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... who was noted for laziness and shirking his duty, and had just been adding to his reputation for such, a battalion adjutant, a tall and handsome fellow with a slight partiality for legs, came dashing up on a native pony. His knees were bent and elevated toward his chin in order that his pedal extremities might not collide with the frail limbs of his ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... the characteristic utterance of her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a breakdown, and arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over, but she was philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and loudly attested her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats of her ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... She smiled a little and immediately burst into energetic melody. There was a great deal more clapping when she finished, and when this was over, as an encore, she gave a piece which imitated the sea; there were little trills to represent the lapping waves and thundering chords, with the loud pedal down, to suggest a storm. After this a gentleman sang a song called Bid me Good-bye, and as an encore obliged with Sing me to Sleep. The audience measured their enthusiasm with a nice discrimination. Everyone was applauded till he gave an encore, and so that there might be ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... forward in the middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should marry ladies who belong to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... sound vibration caused him a sorry loss of sleep," said the tutor. "But certainly his later results were worth the amount of rest he sacrificed. One of the first agencies he employed to work upon was a piano. Have you ever tried singing a note into this instrument when the sustaining pedal is depressed? Do it some time and notice what happens. You will find that the string tuned to the pitch of your voice will start vibrating while all the others remain quiet. You can even go farther and try the experiment of uttering several different pitches, if you want to, and the corresponding ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... "That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it has told ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... banisters; he was racing out of the hotel. He ran to the coach-house, wheeled his bicycle into the courtyard, mounted, and rode down the street. He went at a moderate pace through the town, but once on the Corniche road, he drove the machine as hard as he could pedal. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and the most beautiful melody of bells I ever heard is toning through the air. They are the bells of S. Michael's church, and I am told that the musician plays them by a set of pedal keys, and works himself into a mighty heat and flurry in the operation. But we cannot think of the wild manner and mad motions of the player in connection with those beautiful sounds, so clear and melodious; that half plaintive music so sweetly measured. They ring ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... little scraps o' red flannel an' leather, an' pegs an' bits o' iron that didn't look as if it had ever been any part o' the machine. It was the dernedest mess! I picked up somethin' Jess said was a pedal,—a little piece o' shiny iron about as long as that,—'n' that was the only thing that seemed to have any shape left to it. The litter didn't make any pile at all—jest a lot o' siftin' sawdust-stuff scattered aroun' on ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... machine flying noiselessly along and gathering pace every yard. I had nearly reached the bottom and was just getting ready to pedal, when all of a sudden, I caught sight of something that almost paralyzed me. Right ahead, in the centre of the village square, stood a prison warder. His back was towards me and I could see the moonlight gleaming on the barrel ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... under your ears dear," she ordered, "my pillows aren't unpacked yet and you may find Neddie's last year tacks in that burlap. There now, you look almost human. But the wistful whimper lingers. Jane, what has happened? You are simply smothered in the soft pedal. Tell your Judy all about ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... been studying the exhibits in the distillery got the idea in his head that my foot was the loud pedal on a piano and he started to play the overture from William Tell until ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... Pedal tubercle: on the thoracic and abdominal rings of caterpillars: on the anterior side of leg-base and, correspondingly, on apodal segments: is VII of the abdomen where it consists of three setae: VI of the thorax where the setae ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... groan, agonize, quiver, quaver, just as much as you please, Madam,—I have my foot on the fortissimo pedal, and thunder myself deaf! O Satan, Satan! which of thy goblins damned has got into this throat, pinching, and kicking, and cuffing the tones about so! Four strings have snapped already, and one hammer is lamed for life. My ears ring again,—my head hums,—my nerves tremble! ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... did as they were bidden, and, as each heavy brogan was fitted to the pedal extremity of some one of the darkies, the newly-shod individual sprang to his feet, and commenced dancing about as if he were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with serviceable shoes, such as would astonish the Parisian makers of bottines. But these shoes were only for show. The ladies walked painfully about in the unaccustomed leather. They seemed to have innumerable corns, to wrestle with bunions huge and dire, to suffer from unknown pedal infirmities. Outside the town the ladies put on their shoes. Outside the town, after the fair, they took them off again, sitting on the roadside, stripping their shapely feet, bundling the obnoxious, crippling abominations into Isabella-colour ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... at pleasure; hence the name piano-forte. But the pianoforte itself required many years before all its possibilities of tone-production were discovered. The instruments used by Mozart still had a thin short tone, and there was no pedal for prolonging it, except a clumsy one worked with the knee—a circumstance which greatly influenced Mozart's style, and is largely responsible for the fact that his pianoforte works are hardly ever played to-day in the concert hall. For, as the tone could not be sustained, ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... clump of bushes, he drew out a bicycle and prepared to mount. He was in the act of driving the gear around with his foot for the purpose of getting the opposite pedal in position, when he heard the thud of a heavy body that landed lightly and evidently on its feet. He did not wait for more, but ran, with hands on the handles of his bicycle, until he was able to vault ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... like leeches," responded Kate. "I believe they develop into mosquitoes later on, bad 'cess to them. What Mr. Nash would call my pedal extremities are simply being devoured by the brutes. Ugh! I believe the bottom of this creek is all soft mud. We may have to drive—no, as I'm a living, wiggler-haunted human being, here's firm bottom. Hurrah, Phil, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... they had arrived on Baron IV. Slowly Pete turned Mario's words over in his mind, allowing himself to worry a little. There had been rumors of trouble back on Earth, persistent rumors he had taken care to soft-pedal, as mayor of the colony. There were other things, too, like the old newspapers and magazines that had been brought in by the lad from Baron II, and the rare radio message they could pick up through their atmospheric disturbance. Maybe something ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... previous to her admission into this hospital, but it was impossible to find out when and how they began. She had never had, to the knowledge of her friends, an attack of 'apoplexy,' nor of paralysis. The head was symmetric, and without scars thereon. The pedal extremities involuntarily assumed various distorted positions and were constantly in motion. The toes were usually in a state of tonic spasm,—contracted, and drawn downward or extended, pointing ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... steel stake, having a cavity, into which one half of the intended head will fit; immediately above is a steel die, having a corresponding cavity for the other half of the head: this latter die can be raised by a pedal moved by the foot. The weight of the hammer is from seven to ten pounds, and it falls through a very small space, perhaps from one to two inches. The cavities in the centre of these dies are connected with the edge of a small groove, to admit of the body of the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... silence he asked again: "What was there before the world was born?" That was an easy one; so I said in a tone of finality: "There wasn't anything." Then I went on with my meditations, thinking I had used the soft pedal effectively. Silence reigned supreme for some minutes, and then was rudely shattered. His thumb flew from his mouth, and he laughed so lustily that he could be heard throughout the house. When his laughter had spent itself somewhat, I asked meekly: ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... and lazy style of angling. Happening to look up at the bank, he saw two pair of bare feet of heroic size, from which two fishing lines hung, the corks bobbing on the surface a few yards from the shore. The broad bottoms of their pedal extremities turned to the river, the line passing between the great and second toes to the water, and there they lay enjoying delicious sleep, waiting for a fish to swallow the bait, when the pull on the line would be felt between their toes and awaken them to attend to business. Paul took in ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... isn't it?—and my tone seemed rich and virile. I played the first theme, and all went well until the next interlude for the orchestra; I looked about me confidently, feeling quite like a virtuoso, and soon spied my parents, when suddenly my knees began to tremble, trembled so that the damper pedal vibrated. Then my eyes blurred and I missed my cue and felt Richter's great spectacles burning into the side of my head like two fierce suns. I scrambled, got my place, lost it, rambled and was roused to my position by the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of the Uhlans." If you came to see me, you had to hear it. As arranged for the pianola, it was marked to be played throughout at a lightning pace and with the loudest pedal on. So one would play it if one wished to annoy the man in the flat below; but a true musician has, I take it, a higher aim. I disregarded the "FF.'s" and the other sign-posts on the way, and gave it my own interpretation. As played ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... the western light grows low, and lights spring to life, one after another, in the misty choir. Then murmurs a voice, an Amen rises in full concord, and as it dies away the slumberous thunder of a pedal note rolls on the air; the casements whirr, the organ speaks. That fills, as it were, to the brim, as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... soft-pedal stuff about the kid and the Christmas tree on the girl at the Glendale station. Maybe she hasn't cut ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... seemed as if it filled half the room. Then Frank spread a beauteous wine coloured cover all embroidered in pink roses with green leaves over it, and the stylish man opened a lid, sat down and spread out his hands. Frank said: "Soft pedal! Mighty soft!" So he smothered it down, and tried only enough to find that it had not been hurt coming, and then he went away on the wagon. Father and the boys gathered up every scrap, swept the walk, and put all the things they had used back where they got them, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... are attached to the posterior angles of the pedal bone. They are flattened from side to side, and the portion that projects above the coronary cushion may be felt by pressing on the skin that covers it. The plantar cushion is a wedge-shaped piece of tissue formed by interlacing connective-tissue fibres ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... on the soft pedal and played the old love song, and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen, through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he might never hear, even in his dreams. When he ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Doctor he had disinterred an ancient pair of skates from the attic, and presently he began to perform pedal convolutions of such startling design and eccentricity that the boys gathered about him and cheered until, seating himself unexpectedly in the center of a particularly wide and airy flourish, he flatly told the boys ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... with Wunsch, but the doctor shook his head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would stay. The doctor laughed at him. "Ten fellows like you couldn't hold him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands full. Guess I'd better put the soft pedal on him." He pulled ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... rapid vibrations, and we know no better than to make the whole series leading up to them. It is as though, in order to sound some little shrill octave of pipes in an organ, we are obliged to depress every key and every pedal, and to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... into Cheshire we wheel, and my escort, after wishing me all manner of good fortune in hearty Lancashire style, wheel about and hie themselves back toward the rumble and roar of the world's greatest sea-port, leaving me to pedal pleasantly southward along the green lanes and amid the quiet rural scenery of Staffordshire to Stone, where I remain Sunday night. The country is favored with another drenching down-pour of rain during the night, and moisture relentlessly descends at short, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... are half a dozen—" muttered Marzio, relapsing into sullen discontent and slowly turning the body of the chalice beneath the cord stretched by the pedal on which he pressed his foot. Having brought under his hand a round boss which was to become the head of a cherub under his chisel, he rubbed his fingers over the smooth silver, mechanically, while he contemplated the red wax model before him. Then there ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... that Mrs. Cooke, when she chose, could exert the subduing effect on her husband of a soft pedal on a piano; and during luncheon she kept, the soft pedal on. And the Celebrity, being in some degree a kindred spirit, was also held in check. But his wife had no sooner left the room when Mr. Cooke began on the subject uppermost in his mind. I had suspected that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the old Edison phonographs which worked with a pedal, and looked very much like a sewing-machine, and we took them to the laboratory, allowed one of them to talk into it, and then set the machine to repeating what had been told it. The officials were delighted and it was not ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... timbre; that is, to sing with Colour. This desideratum of varied tone-colour is sought even by instrumentalists. Nay, the instrument itself is sometimes constructed with this object in view. Witness the invention of the "soft" pedal, which is intended not solely to reduce the intensity of tone in the pianoforte—that may be accomplished by a modification of force in striking the note—but to give the tones a darker, more sombre quality, or colour. To vary the tone-colour, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... figure in the corn-straw dress that the glare of light fell shimmering on. The sweet voice was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on. He, however, was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... cyclist. At that time a few cycling beginners used the circle for practice, and their alarming performances were gradually depleting the number of equestrians. One of these novices came down the hill, having an arm round the neck of his instructor, and one leg on the pedal, the other in mid air. He was unable to steer the machine, and as I cantered up, the performer's hat, which had been over one eye, fell off, disclosing the features of Professor Bryce. The next moment the machine, its rider and his instructor, were "all of a heap" ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... von Beseler. I happened to perform the clog dancing at a critical moment during a trip on a Scheldt River barge, thus diverting the attention of the river sentries from my lack of proper papers. While the pedal acrobatics were in progress my temporary friend, Mons. le Conducteur, reinforced the already genial pickets with many glasses of ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... Sardou. “He raised his voice in that act! Why, it’s a scene to be played with the soft pedal down! This is the way it should be done!” Dropping into a chair in the middle of the room my host began miming the gestures and expression of Robespierre as the phantoms (which, after all, are but the figments of an over-wrought ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... complicating, pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal. An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as the machine moves swiftly, gives the same soft ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... and quality of the material before commencing to hammer it. The hammer weighs 15 lb., and has a stroke variable from 21/2 in. to 91/2 in., and makes 250 blows per minute. The driving shaft, A, is fitted with fast and loose belt pulleys, the belt fork being connected to the pedal, P, which when pressed down by the foot of the workman, slides the driving belt on to the fast pulley and starts the hammer; when the foot is taken off the pedal, the weight on the latter moves the belt ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... Garden Wall," with variations by Signor Thumpanini, and the young lady who played it was a pupil of that celebrated Italian musician. When the male portion of the guests entered, the air was being played in the bass with a great deal of power (that is, the loud pedal was down), and with a perpetual rattle of treble notes, trying with all their shrill might to drown ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... caudle, caudal. choler, collar. compliment, complement. lumber, lumbar. lesson, lessen. literal, littoral. marshal, martial. minor, miner. manor, manner. medal, meddle. metal, mettle. missal, missel (thrush). orphan, often. putty, puttee. pedal, peddle. police, pelisse. principal, principle. profit, prophet. rigour, rigger. rancour, ranker. succour, sucker. sailor, sailer. cellar, seller. censor, censer. surplus, surplice. symbol, cymbal. skip, skep. tuber, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... boarders than usual in the parlor. The young woman from the notion counter had company; and one of her guests was playing "He sut'nly was Good to Me" on the pianola with loud and steady tread of pedal. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... surrounds it; at times even this maintains an archaic simplicity. Thus in the coda of the vivace of the Seventh Symphony, a simple melody is reiterated eleven times in succession, with no other orchestration than the pedal-point on E by the rest ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... lower lip. He had no starter on his bug; he had in his embarrassment to get out and crank. He did it quietly, not looking at her. She could see that his hand trembled on the crank. When he did glance at her, as he drove off, it was apologetically, miserably. His foot was shaking on the clutch pedal. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... voice like that," he said, putting on the husky conversational pedal, "I was naturally trusted. And I knew what ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... vent as he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary psalm for the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... intense attention. At times, when the historian was at fault in his facts—and, to say the truth, that was more frequently the case than comports with veracious history—she would cease the impelling motion of her foot upon the pedal of her little wheel, drop her thread, and, gently arresting the fly of her spool, she would lift her iron-framed spectacles, and with great gravity say: "Read that again. Ah! it is not as it happened, your grandfather was in that ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... own than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the happiness of having fought against obstacles, of having beaten them, and of knowing that he now was on the down trail. The grade lessened for a few hundred feet, and the machine slowed. Houston pressed on the clutch pedal, allowing the car to coast slowly until the hill became steeper again. Then he sought once more to shift ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... are rendered possible by being taken on a drone or pedal of cant, common form and conventionality. This drone is, as it were, the flour and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... make his first essay with the Brogue. They did not get as far as the pigs at Lockyer's farm; the rectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been white a year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at this particular point of the road. Subsequently, there being apparently no further call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard, where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchard found the coop almost ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... with no sway of the body and scarcely any movement of the arms, depending entirely upon his narrow feminine hands and slender fingers. The wide arpeggios in the left hand, maintained in a continuous stream of tone by the strict legato and fine and constant use of the damper-pedal, formed an harmonious substructure for a wonderfully poetic cantabile. His delicate pianissimo, the ever-changing modifications of tone and time (tempo rubato) were of indescribable effect. Even in energetic passages ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... organ-builder seemed too agitated to answer the questions that the town official asked him, but led the way quickly to the organ-loft. "Put your foot on that pedal!" he said excitedly, pointing to a particular one ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... in my place. Raffles, indeed, said he would have done it himself, but that was his generosity, and he was the one man who would not. What I did was to turn in the opposite direction to the other gate, where we might so easily have been cut off, and to pedal for ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... learned to pedal and to guide a tricycle in about three lessons. He caught the two ideas almost instantly, and soon brought his muscles under control sufficiently to ride successfully, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... feet contribute their share of helpful knowledge, calling attention to differences in the ground often unnoticed by the eye, telling whether the path is smooth or rough, grass-grown or rock-strewn. The auditory and pedal nerves are mutually helpful, the ear recording and classifying the sounds made by the feet, often guiding them aright by recalling certain peculiarities of sound—whether the ground is hollow, whether the sidewalk is of board or cement, and whether there is a depression here or a raised ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... service started a clamor for investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which of course brought terror to the bosoms of the plunderers. On Dec. 20,1913, we find the "Outlook" "putting the soft pedal" on the public indignation. "It must not be forgotten that such a road as the New Haven is, in fact if not in terms, a National possession, and as it goes down or up, public interests go down or up with it." But in spite of all pious admonitions, the Interstate Commerce Commission yielded to ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... is the infernal miracle as holiness is the supernal. Now and then it is raised to such a pitch that we entirely fail to suspect its existence; it is like the note of the great pedal pipes of the organ, which is so deep that we cannot hear it. In other cases it may lead to the lunatic asylum, or to still stranger issues. But you must never confuse it with mere social misdoing. Remember how the Apostle, speaking of the "other side," distinguishes ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... plague in modern editions is the abuse of the pedal. Mozart never indicated the pedal. As purity of taste is one of his great qualities, it is probable that he made no abuse of the pedal. Beethoven indicated it in a complicated and cumbersome manner. When he wanted the pedal he wrote "senza sordini," which means without ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... this," and Mr. Ganz illustrated at the piano; "it is to be played forte, and is followed by a few notes to be touched very softly, like an echo. It was really beautiful to see how the little fellow reached out for the pedal to make the loud part more emphatic, and then played the echo very softly and neatly. He had grasped the first principle of tone color—namely tone contrast, and also a ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Never fear," added Pa, in a good-humored voice, "that sort of thing won't happen to any of you Woolley-legs; a good Irish stew is better than a kick of the pedal, eh?" ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... the side of the deep gully, across the road that was slippery with snow, slid Mr. Brown's automobile. Bunny and Sue's father's hands held tightly to the steering wheel, and he pressed his foot down hard on the brake pedal. ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... Pear piro. Pear-tree pirarbo. Pearl perlo. Pearl, mother of perlamoto. Peasant vilagxano, kamparano. Peat torfo. Pebble marsxtono, sxtoneto. Peccadillo peketo. Peculiar stranga. Pecuniary mona. Pedagogue pedagogo. Pedagogy pedagogio. Pedal pedalo. Pedant pedanto. Peddler kolportisto. Peddle kolporti. Pedestal piedestalo. Pedestrian piediranto. Pedigree deveno, genealogio. Pediment fruntajxo. Peel (fruit, etc.) sxelo. Peel sensxeligi. Peep rigardeti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... smoke-blue silken frock was the most subtle art, as Chester, who had a keen eye for such matters and a fastidious taste, could readily recognize. From the crown of her dark head to the toe of the blue slipper with which she pressed the pedal of the great piano which she had brought from her old home in the South, she was a picture to ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... back a Japanese screen and disclosin' a full trap outfit—base drum with cymbals, worked by a foot pedal, xylophone blocks, triangle, and sand boards—all rigged up next to a cabinet ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... promptly saw,—as the reader sees, no doubt, before we can tell it,—that what we wanted was two crescendos meeting somewhere near the middle; a crescendo passing into a diminuendo from whichever end you moved to the other—a swell. We saw that our loud-pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall." So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clematis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek columns. On one ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... is, in articulation, the pedal of power, and decision in the conscious action of the chin (not the jaw) will induce by reflex action that stroke which expresses well-aimed will-power. It may be noticed in connection with this suggestion that when a person means ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... mention this to any one, Minnie. If it got out it might precipitate matters, and then the whole business would tumble down like a house of cards. As it is, I may be able to pull him out. But I've put the soft pedal on ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... this? The Americans have pretty feet and small hands, both men and women. Is it vanity, and do they squeeze their feet into boots too small for them, or are their pedal coverings badly made, or does the secret lie in the rough pavements of their thoroughfares? I am glad to say that I never required the services of a foot doctor, but I know that my feet have ached many and many a time after promenading the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... academic freedom, as the students style it, exists to a high degree, a general scraping of the feet admonishes the lecturer to repeat his words or be more distinct and clear in his enunciation. This pedal language, though often disregarded, still does not fail in the end in producing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... impairing or destroying the horn-secreting membrane; second, when depression of the coffin bone causes pressure upon and arrests the formation of horn; and, third, when the elevation of the sole compresses the soft tissues against the pedal bone and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... pause, if it does not convince me. No! I can't answer it. I—I don't want to answer it. I simply surrender. He shall have his way with you—and with me. Only," he added in a gloomy lowered tone which struck Mr Powell as if a pedal had been put down, "only it shall take a little time. I have never lied to you. Never. I renounce not only my chance but my life. In a few days, directly we get into port, the very moment we do, I, who have said I could never let you go, I ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of an evening which would inevitably run into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The numerous screened windows were ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... from gaver, to cram, an inelegant term) very easily to raise himself to any story of the epinette. The latter was a cylinder turning upon its axis, and thus passing every bird in review. "An india-rubber tube introduced into the throat, accompanied by the pressure of the foot upon a pedal, makes the bird absorb its copious and succulent repast in the wink of an eye." Four hundred an hour have been thus fed by one operator. Fowls thus fattened are said to possess a delicacy of flavor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
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