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More "Thread" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the glass front of a prosperous-looking cigar store on the south side of the avenue and pointed to a shattered hole in the window. Behind it a bullet swung on a thread from the ceiling, and this agent of disaster the proprietor had ingeniously turned to account in advertising, by the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... swabs the deck and keelhauls the anchor," answered Tom. "In between times you thread ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... ointments, which attract swarms of bees. The said body is intact. The hair is long and thick; the eyelashes, eyes, nose, and ears are spotless, as well as the nails. It appears to be the body of a woman, of good size; and her head is covered with a light cap of woven gold thread, very beautiful. The teeth are white and perfect; the flesh and the tongue retain their natural color; but if the glutinous substance is washed off, the flesh blackens in less than an hour. Much ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... repeating a poem about King Robert the Bruce; how, as he noticed a spider six times fail to climb up its slender thread, but succeed at the seventh attempt, he took courage to make one more effort for his ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... towards night when we trotted up to the stable, where we left our horses, and obtaining a black to shoulder our portmanteaus, we began to thread the mazes of the capital on foot. New York was certainly, even in 1757, a wonderful place for commerce! Vessels began to be seen some distance east of Fly Market, and there could not have been fewer than twenty ships, brigs, and schooners, lying ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... your letter came I had just returned from Dover, where I stayed four days to see Crane off for the Black Forest. There was a thin thread of hope that he might recover, but to me he looked like a man already dead. When he spoke, or, rather, whispered, there was all the accustomed humor in his sayings. I said to him that I would go over to the Schwarzwald in a few weeks, when he was getting better, and that we would take some convalescent ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... brothers: it is the young Commodus who carries the torch of white-thornwood, the little basket of work-things, the toys for the children:"—and then, after a watchful pause, "she is winding the woollen thread round the doorposts. Ah! I see the marriage-cake: the bridegroom presents the fire and water." Then, in a longer pause, was heard the chorus, Thalassie! Thalassie! and for just a few moments, in the strange light of many wax tapers at ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... eyes followed the young man—this brave bearer of the awful burden of the divine mission—watching him press on to the river. She thought of the many rivers that he must swim, the forests that he must thread, the savages that he must contend against, the wild beasts that he must conquer, the plague that he must defy, the shelterless nights that he must sleep under the trees—freezing, starving, struggling through winter's cold and summer's heat, and all for the love ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... mother sat at the end of the table, and sewed industriously on the clothes that she had washed and ironed during the day; but when a queer little old clock in the corner struck nine, she bit off her thread and fastened her needle on the yellow cushion, and ...
— Three People • Pansy
... stood up, shaking the sleep from their eyes and then, through habit, looking to their arms and ammunition. The thread of ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... baffled and disappointed, but by the oddest of chances he was to pick up yet another thread of the Minute mystery, a thread which, however, was to lead him into an ever-deeper maze than that which he had already and ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... I do?" blustered Milo—though under the bluster ran a thread of placating timidity. "He saved my life, didn't ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... means of the staccato and legato. Delsarte had a marked prejudice in favor of the martellato, which partakes of both. He compared it, in his picturesque way of expressing his ideas, to pearls united by an invisible thread. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... (which must be good if given at all), patent safety inkstands—these things are useful on board ship, and can be carried to the islands and brought back again safely. Work-baskets or boxes for the girls, with good serviceable needles, pins, thread, scissors, thimbles, tapes, &c. &c., not a plaything. Here we can buy for them, or keep in the store for them to buy, many things that are much too bulky to send from a distance, the freight would be ruinous. The "Southern Cross" brings ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Various courses open to JESSE. Might have assumed air of interested inquiry. Cow? What Cow? Why drag in the Cow? Might have slain TANNER with a stony stare, and left him to drag his untimely quadruped off the ground. But JESSE took the Cow seriously. Allowed it to get its horns entangled amid thread of his argument. Glared angrily upon the pachydermatous TANNER, and having thus played into his hands, loftily declared, "I do not propose to take any notice of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him one question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right 'cross th' meshes." We always used that name for marshes, in ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... already laid before our readers the system of central toothed rails used on the Righi and other mountain roads in Europe. In the Wetli system, instead of this rail and the pinion on the vehicle engaging it, there is a drum having a helicoidal thread which engages with triangular rails. This drum is attached to the locomotive. The construction will be readily understood from the illustrations given herewith, which we take from La Nature. The thread on ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... Charlotta, creeping into the room, a figure of fun, with her many braids wound about her head, the ends, tied up with white thread, sticking out in all directions. "It'll hold off till the last minute and then pour cats and dogs. And all the folks will get sopping . . . and track mud all over the house . . . and they won't be able to be married under the honeysuckle . . . and it's awful unlucky ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... writing backwards there are obvious evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese calligraphy sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or pencil instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye of the needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable, out of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by the Japanese art of fencing. The [8] swordsman, delivering ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... any one round the table thus invites the attention of the whole dinner-group, dinner-companions should drop instantly their private chats and join in whatever general talk may ensue on the topic generally introduced. The thread of their tete-a-tete conversation can be taken up later as the ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... Hair this is of yours, my Dear!" says she; "soe fine, long, and soft! scarcelie a Silver Thread in it. I warrant there's manie a young Gallant at Court would ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... catch, and presently she dropped on her knees by the open window and rested her arms on the sill. Again her eyes swept sky and field, now glancing at the lawn of velvet green, now at the upturned earth on the left, the or hard on the right, the thread of water in the distance winding lazily in and out at the foot of low hills, and now at the sun, well up from the soft dawning of another day, and suddenly ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... neck and skin of neck of geschundene goose (fat goose) to one side. Scrape the meat carefully from the bones, neck, back, etc., of the goose, remove all tendons and tissues and chop very fine. Fill this in the skin of the neck and sew up with coarse thread on both ends. Rub the filled neck, the legs and the breast with plenty of garlic (sprinkle with three-eighths pound of salt and one tablespoon of sugar and one teaspoon of saltpetre), and enough water to form a brine. Place the neck, legs and breast in a stone ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... his later treasures. All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... wanderings, conserved energy by little exertion, and thus waxed fat. In the thickest of the rough jumble I found two of his deserted winter dens to which he never returned, and once in midwinter I found him out, asleep beneath some brush over which the snow had drifted. It was the thread of rising steam from a tiny hole above the den that first attracted my attention to it, but my nose ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... swift piratical praus. And these muttered statements of her grandfather's might were mixed up with bits of later recollections, where the great fight with the "White Devil's" brig and the convent life in Samarang occupied the principal place. At that point she usually dropped the thread of her narrative, and pulling out the little brass cross, always suspended round her neck, she contemplated it with superstitious awe. That superstitious feeling connected with some vague talismanic ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... of silk thread are fine and delicate, but also very strong. Other substances are refined and delicate, but possess little ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... sinnet, various cordage, bed stuffing, thread for tying combs, scrubbing-brushes, girdle (ornamental), whisk for flies, medicines, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... stockade interest reached its highest pitch. Braves, squaws, and children were strung along the upper end of the enclosure, breathlessly watching the vapour-thread. Each swarthy face had dropped the mask of listlessness; each figure was rooted. Not an eye forsook a straight line to ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... reason additional to its economy why this practice should not die out. The tearing up into strips of old garments, and the tacking of their ends together with needle and thread is work eminently suited for children, and one in which they take great pride, as it gives them a share in the creation of a useful and beautiful ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... the storm was as violent, and the thunder and lightning as terrific as on the day before. All outdoor labour was again suspended. Mrs Seagrave, Juno, and Caroline took their work, for there was plenty to do with the needle and thread, and Ready soon found employment for the rest. William and Mr Seagrave unlaid some thick rope, that Ready might make smaller and more useful rope with the yarns. Ready took up his sailing needles, and worked eyelet-holes in the canvas screens (which they had put up in a hurry), ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... so fine, that 30,000 pieces, placed side by side in contact, would not cover more than an inch. It would take 150 pieces of this wire bound together to form a thread as thick as a filament of raw silk. Although platinum is the heaviest of the known bodies, a mile of this wire would not weigh more than a grain. Seven ounces of this wire would extend from London to New York. Fine as is the filament produced by the silkworm, that produced ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... precipice and the deep sea, he who ventured on the passage must have hurried anxiously along the thread of sand, hoping to reach the last bend in time. As he rounds the ill-omened corner he sees he is too late; already the surf is breaking against the cliff. He turns back only to find retreat barred behind by rollers that have crept in since he passed. His very ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... for the dress that she will wear," he went on nervously, since neither of his auditors seemed delighted with this news, "it is to be splendid, quite splendid, all of the purest white silk with little discs of silver sewn about it, and a representation of the Gate Nicanor worked in gold thread upon ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... mills' tall smokestacks loomed in sight. The logs thickened until it was with difficulty that Captain Marsh could thread his way among them at all. Shortly Orde, standing by the wheel in the pilot-house, could see down the stretches of the river a crowd of men ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... filled up the intestines with tow soaked in wormwood, and sewed the body up again with a needle and thread. And during and after these proceedings not only did the dead nun give out no smell of putrefaction, but, as in her lifetime, she diffused an ineffable and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... worms. I can imagine a pea rolling off such a board; but a worm is not often found in a rolling condition. Most of us know, that when a worm drops from the combs, it is like the spider, with a thread attached above. The only way that I can imagine one to be thrown out by these boards, is to have it dead when it strikes it, or so cold that it cannot spin a thread, and wind to shake the board, till it rolls off. The objections to these boards are coupled with ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... volition. Not only will they do this, but after the act is performed they usually sink into a quiet sleep,[1] from which they awake after passing into the normal sleep, and, as a rule, have forgotten that they did anything unusual, or that they have been hypnotized, and take up the thread of thought again at the point where they first entered the hypnotic condition. They do not remember what they have done or seen. Their mind is a blank as to all that occurred during ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... Victoria brings thee meat and corn and wine, With richly veined woods, and glittering gold from mine, Fairy web of silken thread, soft thick snowy fleece; Wide room for smiling homes of industry and peace." —Mrs. ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... going to run across the street for a minute to ask Mrs. Wibblewobble to lend me a spool of thread. It is so chilly out that I don't want to take you along. So will you be afraid to stay here alone, just ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... and I promised the cabman something handsome if he would drive fast. But he was terribly slow; it seemed as if we should never reach your blessed door. I am all of a tremble still; it took me five minutes, just now, to thread my needle." ...
— The American • Henry James
... the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. {96} It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were addressed to a woman. This division ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... was done, Was cook, nurse, parlourmaid rolled into one; And every wife she vowed that her man Should be trained on the same super-excellent plan. * * * * * Behold these lusty miners all Fettered fast in domestic thrall, Scrubbing, rubbing, baking bread, Busy with scissors and needle and thread, Spreading the brats their bread and jam, Trundling them out in the morning pram, Washing their pinafores clean and white And tucking them up in their cots at night. * * * * * Ask me not—for I cannot tell, ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... at that perfect moment when only one thin thread still held me to the civilized world when an official ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... feathering them from the dead flamingo. As soon as my work was completed, the boys crowded round me, all begging to try the bow and arrows. I begged them to be patient, and asked my wife to supply me with a ball of thick strong thread. The enchanted bag did not fail us; the very ball I wanted appeared at her summons. This, my little ones declared, must be magic; but I explained to them, that prudence, foresight, and presence of mind in danger, such as their good mother ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... nation of Indians on the Missouri. The seams of the leggings down the sides, are also fringed and ornamented, and occasionally decorated with tufts of hair taken from enemies whom they have slain. In making all these dresses, their only thread is the sinew taken from the backs and loins of deer, elk, buffaloe, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... level of the plain the grassy slopes of the Qu'Appelle Valley bowled to the blue lakes. Hugging the water's edge, the buildings of the romantic old fort scattered in the twilight. The winding trail stood out like a white thread that reached down the valley towards the ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... right-angled turn just a few yards in, and what light there was seemed to filter in from around the corner. And on each side of the passage, before it made the turn, there was a door, and from the one on the right, through a cracked panel, a tiny thread of light ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... turmoil of battle. Amathus is mine, high Paphos and Cythera, and my house of Idalia; here, far from arms, let him spend an inglorious life. Bid Carthage in high lordship rule Ausonia; there will be nothing there to check the Tyrian cities. What help was it for the Trojans to escape war's doom and thread their flight through Argive fires, to have exhausted all those perils of sea and desolate lands, while they seek Latium and the towers of a Troy rebuilt? Were it not better to have [59-91]clung to the last ashes of their ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... paralyzed. Gauzita took up a midget of an eyeglass which she had dangling from a thread of a gold chain, and she stuck it in her eye and tilted her impertinent little chin and looked him over. Not that she was near-sighted—not a bit of it; it was just one ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the houses, standing chatting to each other, many old women, their white hair flying in every direction, who, as they talked, knitted stockings; or, with distaff in hand, twirled the spindle, making flax into thread for spinning, or wool into woof and web for weaving. Hearing a shuttle, he looked in at an open door, and found a young girl busily weaving a heavy blue cloth at a queer old loom; not far from her, an elderly woman was weaving flax thread into coarse, heavy linen ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... exhaustive episode on Puritan politics in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is strung the fortune of Massachusetts. It is here that Englishmen will find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our annals. Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill and exactness the course ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... locks, what do you know of the world, And what do your brown eyes see? Has your baby mind been able to find One thread of the mystery? Do you know of the sorrow and pain that lie In the realms that you've never seen? Have you even guessed of the great unrest In the world where you've ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... of locusts, I hailed the Adriatic, and plunged into its bosom. The sea, delightfully cool, refreshed me to such a degree, that, upon my return to Venice, I found myself able to thread its labyrinths of streets, canals, and alleys, in search of amber and Oriental curiosities. The variety of exotic merchandize, the perfume of coffee, the shade of awnings, and the sight of Greeks and Asiatics ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... these! Hear, east and west, oh, hear. It is the eternal God. This silence murmuring in my ears is the blood of all Nature seething; it is God weaving through the world and me. I see a glistening gossamer thread in the light of my fire; I hear a boat rowing across the harbour; the northern lights flare over the heavens to the north. By my immortal soul, I am full of thanks that it is I who ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... room, her soul unstirred, Dead... or sleeping, Through the blind tumult hears afar The note of a horn, like a silver thread. She has given her soul ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... finger finely twined The subtle thread that knitteth mind to mind; There that strange bridge of signs was built where roll The sunless waves that sever soul from soul, And by the arch, no bigger than a hand, Truth travell'd over to ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by the people themselves, and the finer fabrics are beautiful in texture and fineness, some of the strands being so fine that several are used to make one thread. By weaving one whole day from dawn to dark, only a quarter of a yard of material is produced. The looms, the cost of which is about fifty cents, are all made by hand from bamboo; the reels and bobbins, which complete the outfit, raise the value of the whole to about a dollar. There ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... of civilization. His progress has not been great, and he doubtless realizes that he has undertaken a task which he can never finish. He will probably labor upon it while he lives, and then some other daring man will take up the thread where he will drop it, and go on until he in turn will be obliged to relinquish his unfinished task to a successor. When the work shall be finished, after its original design, it will doubtless be found to be antiquated. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... of the Gods portrays at the opening the three norns or fates weaving and measuring the thread of destiny. It is the beginning of the end. The perfect pair, Siegfried and Brunhild, appear in all the glory of their life, splendid ideals of manhood and womanhood. But Siegfried goes out into the world to achieve deeds of prowess. He gives her ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... through a hole—three different sorts of light, of fire, candle, and moon, mixed in with monstrous shadows and commonplace figures—some meaningless countenance surmounting a satin whose every shining thread is distinguishable, and the pattern of whose lace trimming could be copied for a fashion plate; he is, in short, a fussy, loud individual, with money to buy and some out-of-the-way ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... black or brown paper with a red ribbon band; the cats of black paper showing a back view may have a red or yellow ribbon necktie; the pumpkins of yellow paper with the sections traced in ink or notched a trifle and black thread drawn between ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... afraid, than the Bengal tigress which Dinky-Dunk once intimated I was, the Bengal tigress who will battle so unreasoningly for her offspring. It may be natural in mothers, whether they wear fur or feathers or lisle-thread stockings—but it worries me. I was an engine running wild. And when you run wild you are apt to run ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... for what? Is this the bait which enticed me? Was there no way by which I might have enjoyed in freedom comforts even greater than those which I now earn by servitude? Like a lion which has been made so tame that men may lead him about by a thread, I am dragged up and down, with broken and humbled spirit, at the beels of those to whom, in my own domain, I should have been an object of awe and wonder. And, worst of all, I feel that here I gain no credit, that here I give no pleasure. The talents and accomplishments, which ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... all the dear old days of the past I have thought and chiefly how the wonderful story of your life has been woven into mine—threads of wisdom and adventure and humor and romance. I like to unravel it and look at the colors. Lincoln is the strongest, longest thread in the fabric. Often I think of your description of the great, tender hands that lifted you to his shoulder when you were a boy, of the droll and kindly things that he said to you. I have laughed and cried recalling those hours of yours with Jack Kelso and Dr. John Allen and the rude young giant ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the imagination of the reader to supply an interval of several years. Before the thread of the narrative shall be resumed, it will be necessary to take another hasty view of the condition of the country in which the scene of our ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... many of the women were powerful and of unusual height. The greater portion of the work fell to the lot of the women, who looked after the housework, tilled the land, laid up a store of wood for the winter, beat the hemp and spun it, and made fishing nets from the thread. They also gathered in the harvest and prepared it for food. The occupation of the men was hunting for deer, fishing, and building their cabins, varied at times by war. When they were free from these occupations, they visited other tribes with whom they were acquainted for ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... here—by the thread of Fraulein Hirsch—that Count Von Hillern was drawn into her mind. Once there, it was as if he stood near her—quite close—looking down under his heavy, drooping lids with stealthy, plunging eyes. It had always been when Fraulein Hirsch had walked with her that ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the old dispensation of Indian supremacy it supplied the natives their principal means of support. Its sap was variously prepared and served as milk, honey, vinegar, beer and brandy. From its tough fiber were made thread, rope, cloth, shoes and paper. The strong flower stalk was used in building houses and the broad leaves ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... the scribes; the common people heard him gladly. His speech was too divinely grave, and too palpably true, to be turned aside by the clumsy wit of the men whom it condemned. Intermitting for a moment the thread of his parabolic preaching, he turned aside and addressed a few withering words directly ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... valley, where the inclosures are fenced with walls built of mud and refuse bones. This dismal region seems the natural home of poverty and despair. The man who was intent on following the poor creature who had had the courage to thread these dark and silent streets seemed struck with the spectacle they offered. He stopped as if reflecting, and stood in a hesitating attitude, dimly visible by a street lantern whose flickering light scarcely pierced the fog. Fear gave eyes to the old ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... black with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh, without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements, I would have no extraordinary repertory. What the rest of you call progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to say, from time to time, the exceptional ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was a Thing, and as she stood staring, with wild heaving breast, this she saw. 'Twas but a thing—a thing lying inert, its fair locks outspread, its eyes rolled upward till the blue was almost lost; a purple indentation on the right temple from which there oozed a tiny thread of blood. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is dearer to me than life, do Thou bless and hallow our bond of love and friendship; watch over us in all our outgoings and incomings for good: and may the tie that unites our hearts be strong and indissoluble as the thread of man's immortal life!... ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... recesses in the drawing-room, are fashioned out of the remains of a large throne or dais brought from Florence, and which had belonged to the Medici family. The materials are of the richest possible kind, being flowers of floss silk upon a ground-work of gold thread, interspersed with silver. The effect produced by this combination is gorgeous in the extreme. "And those figures?" That nearest the eye is a statue of the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburgh, admirably carved in oak, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... 3 P.M.—-There came the Waits I suppose, and Jane had to stop and leave me to take up the thread. Poor dear Jenny, the festival days are no days of rest to her, but I am not sure that she would enjoy repose, or that it would not be the worse possible penance to her. She is gone down now to the workhouse with Valetta to take cards and tea and tobacco to the old people, not sending them, because ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . . He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... dull-blue hue. At our manifest discomfort Rador's laughter roared out. He took the garments from the pair, motioned them to leave us, and, still laughing, threw one around me. Its texture was soft, but decidedly metallic—like some blue metal spun to the fineness of a spider's thread. The garment buckled tightly at the throat, was girdled at the waist, and, below this cincture, fell to the floor, its folds being held together by a half-dozen looped cords; from the shoulders a hood resembling ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... to join them, after which we went out to see the hacienda, and especially the handsome and well-kept stables, where the proprietor has a famous breed of horses, some of which were trotted out for our inspection—beautiful, spirited creatures—one called "Hilo de Oro" (golden thread)—another, "Pico Blanco" (white mouth), etc. In the inner courtyard are many beautiful and rare flowers, and everything is ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... spear, a fisherman's knife in its sheath with belt, a paternoster, invaluable for the fathoms of fishing line attached, a small American axe with the head vaselined, a canvas housewife with sail-needles, a few darning needles and some pack thread, and a number of odds and ends including some extra ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... quadrature—a half moon—and between those points and inferior conjunction it is visible as a beautiful crescent. It becomes narrower and sharper as it approaches inferior conjunction, until it resembles a curved luminous thread prior to its disappearance at the conjunction. After having passed this point it reappears on the other side of the Sun as ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... It entered a harbor called Phorkys, where there was a grotto sacred to the nymphs, and it was shaded at the entrance by an olive-tree. Stone vases stood around in the grotto, and there bees had stored up honey. The nymphs spun their fine thread from stone spindles there, and wove their sea-purple robes. Springs of cool water flowed through the grotto, and there was an entrance for mortals and one which was kept holy for ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... death! Lifted hand and plighted word Eyes have seen and ears have heard; Eyes have seen—nor ours alone; Fell the sound on ears unknown. Age-long labour, strand by strand, Forged the immemorial band; Never thread hath known decay, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the rear, no tugging at his elbow could stop him. But just as he was about to sit down, the trembling attorney put a slip of paper into his hands. "You have pleaded for the wrong party!" whereupon, with an air of infinite composure, he resumed the thread of his oration, saying, "Such, my lord, is the statement you will probably hear from my brother, on the opposite side of this cause. I shall now beg leave, in a very few words, to show your lordship how utterly untenable are the principles, and ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... the most important and vital question of unconstitutional power which has grown to such dimensions in the hands of United States officials; and it must bring to people's cognizance the very slight thread by which hangs the security of any citizen's right to ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... blessed shore?" asked the little old man, becoming still more frightened, and screwing up his eyes as tailors do when they wish to thread a needle. "I have been looking in every direction and I see nothing but the sky ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... being a raw simpleton, was called Goosehead. This man's wife rose early every night, when Buffalmacco, who had worked up to that time, was going to rest, and setting herself at her spinning wheel, which she unfortunately placed over against Buffalmacco's bed, she spent all the night in spinning thread. Buonamico was unable to sleep a moment, and began to devise a means whereby to rid himself of this nuisance. It was not long before he perceived that, behind the brick wall which separated him from Goosehead, was the fire of his objectionable neighbour, and by means ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... the Re d'Italia was really going to sail at last. The first and second whistles, sounding raucously, sent the company officials and the family of the young officer of reserves ashore. The plank was lowered; between the ship and the looming pier a thread of black water appeared and grew; a flash and an explosion indicated that the possibly doomed liner had been filmed according to schedule. "Evviva l'Italia!" yelled the returning braves in the steerage—a very decent set of fellows, it struck me, to leave so cheerfully their vocations ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... had cut off the downy part of several feathers, and had laid them together in a little heap. Then she took a fine thread, and tied this little tuft of down to the end of it. Then she took up the thread by the other end, and ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... Clarissa took up the thread of her old life just where she had dropped it. Her father was by no means so gracious or agreeable to-day as he had been during his brief visit to Hale Castle. He took out his tradesmen's letters and bills when Mr. Granger was gone, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... about 2 feet high, with a base which she clutched with her great, coarse, bare toes, and as she teased out the wool from the bunch at the top she twirled a short spindle with her right hand making a remarkably even thread. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... me wot's spinnin' this 'ere yarn or is it you, sir?" interrupted the narrator. "'Cos if it's me, I loses the thread o' wot I'm sayin' if ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... pea-green caftan, came from Poltava, bringing with him a little book, and, opening it in the middle, showed it to us. Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind thread about them and stick them together with wax, so he passed it over to me. As I understand nothing about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it. I had not turned two leaves when all at once he caught me by ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for tea, and coaxed and duly bemoaned her cat (who had pretty nearly forgotten his beating, but very much enjoyed the petting), having done all these and many other things, Mrs. Jenkins sate down to get up the real lace cap. Every thread was pulled out separately, and carefully stretched: when, what was that? Outside, in the street, a chorus of piping children's voices sang the old carol she had heard a hundred times in the days of ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda floor, and Mrs. Keene's special attendant, who was really more a seamstress than a ladies' maid, dreamed that for some mysterious reason she could not thread a needle to fashion in a vast hurry the second mourning of her employer, who she imagined would call ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun; for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the story of our Southern land—of its institutions, of its misfortunes and of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... long have I, methought, with tearful eye Pored o'er this tangled work of mine, and mused Above each stitch awry and thread confused; Now will I think on what in years gone by I heard of them that weave rare tapestry At royal looms, and hew they constant use To work on the rough side, and still peruse The pictured pattern set above them high; So will ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... hold you still, And perch you where you list On what wrist, - You are mine through the times! I have caught you fast for ever in a tangle of sweet rhymes. And in your young maiden morn, You may scorn, But you must be Bound and sociate to me; With this thread from out the tomb my dead hand shall ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... exploits. The deeds of criminals naturally awaken the emotions of horror, fear, curiosity and awe in proportion to their heinousness and the mystery by which they are enveloped. Consequently the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on the criminal—is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... species of hawks, belonging to several genera, are trained in India. They are often fed by being allowed to suck the blood from the breasts of live pigeons, and their eyes are darkened by means of a silken thread passed through holes in the eyelids. 'Hawking is a very dull and very cruel sport. A person must become insensible to the sufferings of the most beautiful and most inoffensive of the brute creation before he can feel any enjoyment in it. The cruelty lies chiefly in the mode of feeding ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... many a factory in which busy workers are already making beautiful things. Here the weaver's shuttle flies, yonder gold is spun around slender threads of sheep guts, elsewhere costly materials are embroidered by women's nimble fingers with the prepared gold thread. There glass is blown, or weapons and iron utensils are forged. Finely polished knives split the pith of the papyrus, and long rows of workmen and workwomen gum the strips together. No hand, no head is permitted to rest. In the Museum the brains of the great thinkers and investigators ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to cooperate as members of an organic whole. There ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... laughed, she because of the clever way in which he had turned the conversation to his advantage; he through sheer delight. But she did purpose to allow him to dwell on the point he had raised, so she adroitly took up the thread where he had broken off ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... sake, Stephen, follow closely. There is more than the life of a girl in all this. Jean Saxe cannot be suppressed even if we dared attempt it; Francois Villon, the King's jackal, who holds his life by a thread, knows everything. Of all men he dares not keep silence, of all men he would not keep silence if he dared, scum that he is. Within two days the King will know all Saxe's accusations, and if we do not act ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... one bestead with gossamer-thread I pluckt at my eyes To catch again the glory shed, The hope, the load, the prize; But no more hands invisible Held like a shade o'er me, And there seem'd little enough to tell My ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects and discuss theses. Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of thought. This was the situation ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... easy to determine how Plato's cosmos may be presented to the reader in a clearer and shorter form; or how we may supply a thread of connexion to his ideas without giving greater consistency to them than they possessed in his mind, or adding on consequences which would never have occurred to him. For he has glimpses of the truth, but no comprehensive or perfect ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... to labor assiduously, and every article which could be converted to use was employed; the lining of the boat was tore up for the sake of the planks and nails; a seaman luckily had two needles, and the linen afforded whatever thread was necessary; the piece of scarlet cloth was substituted for a sail; an oar was erected for a mast, and a plank served for a rudder. The equipment of the boat was soon completed, notwithstanding the darkness of the night, at least as ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... of the church had filled a box for the missionary's family, I made one more effort to spare something. All was poor and thread-bare. What should I do? At last I thought of my towels. I had six, of coarse brown linen, but little worn. They seemed a scanty supply for a family of seven; and yet I took one from the number, and, putting it into my pocket, hastened to the house where the box was ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... rises over the measureless plain, while the early breeze is yet cool and invigorating, a privilege enjoyed almost invariably in Arabia, but wanting too often in Egypt in the west, and India in the east. At this hour we would often thread the streets by which we had first entered the town, and go betimes to the Persian camp, where all was already alive and stirring. Here are arranged on the sand, baskets full of eggs and dates, flanked by piles of bread and little round cakes of white butter; ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... electrical wire to the neighboring planks. The spider who had ventured on the charged wire paid the penalty of such daring with his life long ago, but he had left his web behind him, and that beautifully minute thread has been carrying off to the earth a portion of the electric fluid, before it had been received, and tested, and registered by the mechanism below. Such facts show the exceeding ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... magpies had probably found it already dead, as it was cold; they had begun tearing the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he thought he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up, and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village who made a livelihood by collecting bones, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... from the amphibian that begat the reptile. The reptile remains, but some impulse went out from the reptile that begat the mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had a specific line of descent. One golden thread must connect him with the lowest forms of life. And the wonder is that this golden thread was never snapped or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the geologic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder that the line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or the dog, or ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Rue Fortuny! A magnificent situation—a house in the style of Louis XII.—a house built by her son! Why, what did people want? The same people, doubtless, who did not go to Vedrine. Biting off the thread with which she had ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... backward and sideward so that she showed to perfection the deep curved lines that swept from her shoulders to her breasts, and from her breasts downward to her hips. A large diamond star hung as by an invisible thread upon her neck: it pointed downward to the hollow of her breasts. There was no beauty that she had that was not somehow pointed to, insisted on, held forever under poor Furnival's ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... and other historians, in the autumn of that memorable year, when the fate of British Canada hung as if by a thread, Adam Lymburner, more prudent than loyal, retired from the sorely beset fortress to Charlesbourg, possibly to Chateau Bigot, a shooting box then known as the "Hermitage," to meditate on the mutability of human affairs. Later on, however, in the exciting times of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about her shoulders—lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to care for her like a man, made him ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the middle of this building to Memorial Hall, or thread the great nave to the western portal and enter the twin tabernacle sacred to Vulcan? The answer readily suggests itself: substantials before dessert—Mulciber before the Muses. Let us get the film of coal-smoke, the dissonance of clanking iron ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... it was shaped till within these three or four hundred years. Underneath that, and behind the hanging Pallium, appears the Dalmatic, edged with gold lace; and under that, extending the whole breadth of the figure, and finishing with rich and deep thread lace, is the Alb, made of fine linen. The Tunic is quite hidden by the dalmatic. The Sandals appear to be of gold tissue, and to rest ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings' worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot, or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... occurred, and consequently, it was easy to preserve and perpetuate any particular set, or pattern, even among the lower orders. The plaid was made of fine wool, with much ingenuity in sorting the colors. In order to give exact patterns the women had before them a piece of wood with every thread of the stripe upon it. Until quite recently it was believed that the plaid, philibeg and bonnet formed the ancient garb. The philibeg or kilt, as distinct from the plaid, in all probability, is comparatively modern. The truis, consisting of breeches and stockings, is one piece and ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... deshabille. The young Consul was in his night-shirt, and a pair of flannel drawers tied at the knees with broad tape. His thin legs were thrust into long grey stockings, which Miss Cordsen alone knew how to knit. Richard had a pair of Turkish slippers, thread stockings, which fitted closely to his well-formed leg, and a shirt of fine material stiffly starched, in which he always slept. There were none of his brother's failings which the ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... day, not the next, but on the first day of calm, red, sunset sky, went Quonab to his hill of worship; and when the little fire that he lit sent up its thread of smoke, like a plumb-line from the red cloud over him, he burnt a pinch of tobacco, and, with face and arms upraised in the red light, he sang ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cannot see him—not a ray Of all his glory there appears, And oft we thread our darkened way, Trembling with anxious ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... life of a martyr, of privations, and of unheard-of work. He is a fanatic, and fanaticism draws him on, even to the point of becoming an accomplished Jesuit. At moments he becomes simply stupid. Most of his lies are sewn with white thread.... In spite of this relative naivete, he is very dangerous, because he daily commits acts, abuses of confidence, and treachery, against which it is all the more difficult to safeguard oneself because one hardly suspects the possibility. With all that, Nechayeff ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... from the roof of the cave, by a long thread, swung before the king's eyes, and he left his gloomy thoughts to see what the little creature ...
— True Stories of Wonderful Deeds - Pictures and Stories for Little Folk • Anonymous
... tongue— He spoke not of the love that filled his breast; The thread of hope, on which his whole life hung, Was far too weak to bear so strong a test. He trusted to the future—time, or chance— His constant homage and assiduous care; Preferred to dream, and lengthen out his trance, Rather than ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... were not altogether as she had pictured them. Silver locks and lace caps, arm-chairs and some sort of fluffy knitting work, had been a part of her idea of a grandmother, and lo! her own grandmother was erect and slender, with not a thread of gray in her dark hair, nor a ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... paper-mulberry (broussonetia papyrifera), wistaria tendrils and hemp, but when the silkworm was introduced the finer fabric naturally took the place of the humbler in the offerings to the gods." The paper-mulberry which is now used for making paper, was in early times twisted into a thread and woven into a very serviceable cloth. Cotton(74) which now furnishes so large a part of the clothing of the people is nowhere mentioned. The skins of animals were doubtless used as clothing before the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... as the picture is taken. I want a microscopic lens used in the camera in such a way that we take a motion picture of the twinings and twistings of one little thread on the wax cylinder, as it records the sound waves around ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... woman working together could provide for their family all that was necessary for their sustenance; meats, vegetables, grains, milk, eggs, butter, cheese, all were home products. They provided their own lighting and controlled their own water supply. The women spun the thread, wove the cloth, dyed it and made the garments. In every way, if it was necessary, the family could maintain its existence independent of the cooperation of society except in the one matter of defense from violence. None of this is true today." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... a pair of dazzling white trousers with invisible straps that kept them in shape. He wore pumps and thread stockings; the black ribbon of his eyeglass meandered over a white waistcoat, and the fashion and elegance of Paris was strikingly apparent in his black coat. He was indeed just the faded beau who ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... potations increased, his English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the dialect of the Paris ateliers, which was more familiar to him than his mother tongue. Ah! how he hated these people and their thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art—a ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... traffic. But even so—without a rail on either side, with the blue sea foaming and chafing among the rocks three hundred feet below, and horribly visible on both sides at once—the twisted path when you were on it felt no more than a swinging thread. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... delightfully commemorated in the old custom of Queen's College, by which, at the Gaudy dinner on Jan. 1st, each guest receives a needle with a silk thread of the colour of his faculty—Theologians black, Lawyers blue, Arts students red—and is bidden 'Take this and be thrifty'. The mending of the hood was a duty which must have often devolved on the poor mediaeval student. The custom dates from the time of the Founder (1340). It ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... whether in or out of the marriage relation. When one or another people sinned against a Jewish woman the men of the family were the avengers, as when the sons of Jacob slew a whole city to avenge an outrage committed against their sister. Polygamy and concubinage wove a thread of disaster and complications throughout the whole lives of families and its dire effects are directly traceable in the feuds and degeneration of their descendants. The chief lesson taught by history is danger of violating, physically, mentally, or ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a time, was the thread running through his sentences. Prometheus Enriched was calling to witness forgotten sacrifices, forgotten rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of Christ. For a while his discourse took the farm of reminding God of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... high-tide, numbers of vessels might be seen spreading their snowy canvas in the wind as they set out on their distant and perilous voyages. In the middle ground of the picture was the peninsula of Wirral, while the river Dee might be seen shimmering like a silver thread under the blue hills of Wales, which occupied the back ground of the landscape. Westward was the ocean—next, the Formby shore attracted the eye. The sand-hills about Birkdale and Meols were visible. At ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere delicacy of build—the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. "I've never been ill in my life," said ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... just a minute, will you?" Fairy was unruffled. She sought her sister. "Look here, Prue,—what do you make of this? I'm coming to pieces! I'm hanging by a single thread, ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... came down that night—I could have told him. It was not a sort of thing to talk to you about, but I thought I could tell him; he died, and he gave me mother. He left mother with me. You know perfectly well, Effie, that our mother's life hangs on a thread. You know she must not have a shock, and yet—Effie, Effie, if I don't get that L250, she will have such a shock, such a terrible shock, that it will send her ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... with undisputed sway. Whether marked by lettered stone or grassy mound, it mattered little—he knew where each rude forefather of the hamlet lay. Rich in the family lore of the neighbourhood, he could trace back ancestry and thread his way through the maze of relationship to the third and fourth generations. He could recount the sins which had hurried men to untimely graves, and point to the spot where their bones were rotting; and he ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... war. Henry of Valois had already commenced operations in Gascony against Henry of Navarre, whom he hated, almost as cordially as Margaret herself could do, and the Duke of Alencon was besieging Issoire. Meantime, the beautiful Queen came to mingle he golden thread of her feminine intrigues with the dark ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Countess's hands. Then she found it at last. There was another of the silken threads hanging on the lock of the door leading to the room where Sir Charles lay. On the official seal placed there by the police officers was a tiny thread of silk. It was not attached to the seal in any way. It came away in Beatrice's hands when she pulled it, as if it had been fixed there by gum. Beatrice knew better than that. On the silk was wax, as she discovered when her hand ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... that the Glittering Lady wore sandals which were fastened with red studs that looked like rubies or carbuncles. On the rock lay one of these studs. I picked it up and we examined it. It had been sewn to the sandal-strap with golden thread or silk. Some of this substance hung from the hole drilled in the stone which served for an eye. It was as rotten as tinder, apparently with extreme age. Moreover, the hard gem itself was pitted as though the passage of time had taken effect upon it, though this may have been caused by other ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the "Dromedary," a double-barrelled fowling-piece, belonging to one of the officers, he "tabooed" it by tying a thread, pulled out of his cloak, round the guard of the trigger, and said that it must be his when he got to New Zealand, and that the owner should have thirty of his finest mats for it. But this, according to Cruise, any native may do with regard to an article ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... through which their route now wound began to absorb them. Here they crossed a bridge, spanning a purple chasm whose snake-like thread of water could be heard hissing among the sharp flints a hundred feet below; now they rattled through the street of a sleepy village that seemed to have no reason for being except its picturesqueness; now they were creeping up a tortuous steep ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... going by four on my way to London; but the day proves very cold, so that having put on no stockings but thread ones under my boots, I was fain at Bigglesworth to buy a pair of coarse woollen ones, and put them on. So by degrees till I come to Hatfield before twelve o'clock, where I had a very good dinner with my hostess, at my Lord of Salisbury's Inn, and after dinner though ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... decore placentis, vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere: [Footnote: Sen. Epist. liii.] "Who are allured by the grace of some pleasing word, to write what they intended not to write." I doe more willingly winde up a wittie notable sentence, that so I may sew it upon me, than unwinde my thread to go fetch it. Contrariwise, it is for words to serve and wait upon the matter, and not for matter to attend upon words, and if the French tongue cannot reach unto it, let the Gaskonie, or any other. I would have the matters ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... ceramics was developed to an art, as was the making of different types of glass. Looms were built to spin thread and cloth from woods goat wool, and vegetable dyes were discovered. Exploration parties crossed the continent to the eastern and western seas: salty and lifeless seas that were bordered by immense deserts. No trees of any kind grew along their ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... to see me Thursday. I was glad to hug and kiss him. He takes care of sixty little blind girls and seventy little blind boys. I do love them. Little blind girls sent me a pretty work-basket. I found scissors and thread, and needle-book with many needles in it, and crochet hook and emery, and thimble, and box, and yard measure and buttons, and pin-cushion. I will write little blind girls a letter to thank them. I will make pretty clothes ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... I believe I've got hold of the end of the thread at last! The senator is with us, working in the dark, as he always does. And that Hathaway business: that was one of his smooth little side-moves—his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want Evan to get in too deep in the righteousness puddle, and he took ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... That is, those who have been invested with the sacred thread, which is a sign of having been initiated into the paternal caste. This ceremony takes place at the age of seven or nine years, but is only observed by the three higher castes. It is to be compared with the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... crossed-leg, crouching huckster, thou pack-thread pedlar! if thou dost not let me go immediately, I will cut off thy hands, thy feet, thine ears, and thy nose, and then ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... Before resuming the thread of my narrative, I must not omit to mention, that in the head of the sperm whale there is a large cavity or hole called the "case," which contains pure oil that does not require to be melted, but can be bailed at once into casks and stowed away. This is the valuable spermaceti from ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... there so quiet in her corner, her body worn to a silver thread, and hardly anything left of her but her indomitable eyes, it is hard, at least for a young thing of nineteen, all aflush and aflurry with her new party gown, to realize that that old mother is infinitely more romantic than ...
— Different Girls • Various
... taking up the thread of Roswell Martin Field's strange and unique story, let me give a letter written by his father to his sister, Miss Mary Field, then at the school of Miss Emma Willard in Troy, N.Y., as exhibit number one, that Eugene Field came by his peculiarities, literary ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... attacks Heorot, and kills Hrothgar's favorite thane. The next day, Beowulf pursues her to her den under the waters of the fen, and after a terrific combat slays her. The hero returns home to Sweden laden with gifts. This ends the main thread of the first incident. In the second incident, after an interval of fifty years, we find Beowulf an old man. He has been for many years king of the Geats. A fire-breathing dragon, the guardian of a great treasure, is devastating the land. The heroic old king, accompanied ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the love passages with a sudden and sympathetic insight. No longer did he feel tempted to skim those pages hastily that he might resume the thread of the main and more engrossing plot. Didn't Louise live almost across the street from him? Wasn't his interest in her explained by that paragraph, "A wondrous and subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... replied verbally that he thought like M. Venizelos. But, as it happened, the question did not arise; Servia's promise was coupled with so many stipulations and reservations, that, in the opinion of the Entente Powers, {52} it amounted almost to a refusal;[4] and the thread of the negotiations was very soon broken by events. Destiny ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... lost the thread... Lise... I love and respect that angel as before; just as before; but it seems to me they both asked me simply to find out something from me, that is more simply to get something out of me, and then to get rid of ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... towards the base of the leaf, the [page 369] pedicels are multicellular, are longer than elsewhere, and bear smaller glands. All the glands secrete a colourless fluid, which is so viscid that I have seen a fine thread drawn out to a length of 18 inches; but the fluid in this case was secreted by a gland which had been excited. The edge of the leaf is translucent, and does not bear any glands; and here the spiral vessels, ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... now the best hands, plying the needle unceasingly during the long, long day, can earn only three or four shillings a week. Before the invention of machinery for flax-spinning, the manufacture of fine thread by hand-labour was a most profitable employment. Wonders were wrought in this way by female fingers. The author of 'Our Staple Manufactures' states that in 1799, out of a pound and a half of flax, costing 10 s., a woman produced yarn of the value ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... who was holding something in a pair of pliers in his left hand, and winding a thread of silk brought up from the mill round it with his right, "he hasn't been near us yet. Josh and I keep running against him in the woods, or up one of the river paths; but, as soon as he sees us, he turns his back and goes in among ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... Lydia's face showed him that he had said enough. "I had not thought of this," she said, after a silence that seemed long to him. "Our observations are so meaningless until we are given the thread to string them on! You must think better of this, Lucian. The relation that at present exists between us is the very best that our different characters will admit of. Why do you desire ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... downstairs. When he entered I saw at a glance that it was one of his gala nights, for he wore the ceremonial white waistcoat and cravat, and had thrown the accommodating coat wide open. His hair, too, was brushed back from his broad forehead with more than usual care, each silver thread keeping its proper place in the general scheme of iron-gray; while his goatee was twisted to so fine a point that it curled upward like a fishhook. He had also changed his shoes, his white stockings now being incased in low prunellas tied with ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... affairs in that first day of our history. Subtle politicians speak the phrases and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy from council chambers placed within log huts within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests. The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin notes of a metaphysical theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths of grave sermons that run hours long upon ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... day of our journey, we had a very heavy rain, and in a few hours after it commenced, we had not a dry thread upon our bodies. This made our journey still more unpleasant. On the tenth day, we found ourselves entirely destitute of provisions, and how to obtain any we could not tell. We finally resolved to stop at some farmhouse, and try ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown
... came with her needle and thread in the little leather case she always carried, and Dot, in the importance of being fitted for a new frock, quite forgot to envy Meg and Bobby, who hurried ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... was drawn from the blue silk, and a needleful of scarlet went in instead, while the end of the blue thread was carefully secured in Beatrice's left hand for ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... and the shorter, sturdier ones of slaves. Any one of those dozens of grotesque pedestrians might glance up, see him, and pick him off with the deadly tubes. Under his fingers the mortar crumbled and left him hanging, more than once, by one hand. For fully five minutes his life hung by a thread apt to be severed at any time. But—he made it. Helped by the decreased gravity of the red spot, and released from inhibiting fear by the fact that he was already, figuratively, a dead man, he performed ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... defective toe, and then made a not very successful shift at tightening the center webbing of askimoneiab, or heavy, membranous moose filling. The mending of his clothes was a comparatively simple matter by means of needle and thread. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... a paroxysm during which I had seemed to stand a great way off and listen to my own shrieks, there came to me a moment of calm. I knew that my one tenuous thread of hope lay in launching myself into that wild flood that was tearing through into the cove. I was not a strong swimmer, but a buoyant one. I might find refuge on some half-submerged rock on the shores of the cove—at least I should perish in the open, in the sunlight, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... expecting Granville with the Bishop of Winchester,[*] when the groom arrived with the message that the Bishop had had a bad fall. An hour and a half later Granville entered, pale and sad: 'It's all over.' In an instant the thread of that precious life was snapped, We were all ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... all adrift, Miles!" Marble shouted, leaning forward to be heard. "Both bowers have snapped like thread, and here we go, ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... centre were completely covered with separate pieces of linen, and thus produced being quite flat. This being an exceedingly neat and convenient button, it became largely patronised, as it still is by housewives, for all underclothing, having superseded the old thread button formed of a ring of wire, with threads drawn over it and gathered in the centre. A slight improvement was made by Mr. Elliott. During the time that the patent lasted these two gentlemen worked in concert, and established a very ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... us. This was evidently his intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow's face behind its broad benevolence and its confusing ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... other scale, if they made a free choice, after deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, and the few who shrank half-hearted from the gallows and the flames were exceptions, were men navigating ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... liberation. The illumined mind sees and hears and feels the vibrations that emanate from all who are travailing in the meshes of the sense-conscious life; but through all the sympathetic sorrow, there runs the thread of a divine assurance and certainty of profound joy—a bliss that passes ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper, was conscious of a certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as the man sat down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of men standing, and amongst them a slight sharp-featured thread-paper of a man, with a taller companion, whom he identified as the pair he had noticed on the night of the story-telling. The little gasfitter was clearly all nervous fidget and expectation; the other, large and gaunt in figure, with a square impassive face, and close-shut lips that had ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... popular prejudice, enlarged upon no enormities to please the lover of tragedy, regarded neither beauty nor the art of novel making, nor created suffering heroines to excite an outpouring of sorrow and tears. The incidents of our story, which at best is but a mere thread, are founded in facts; and these facts we have so modified as to make them acceptable to the reader, while shielding ourself from the charge of exaggeration. And, too, we are conscious that our humble influence, heretofore exerted, has contributed to the benefit of a certain ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Murfreesboro, over miserable dirt roads. About December 19th or 20th, we were on the march at an early hour, but the rain was there before us, and stuck by us closer than a brother. We were drenched through and through, and few had a dry thread. We waded streams of water nearly waist deep; we pulled through mud that seemed to have no bottom, and where many a soldier left his shoes seeking for it. The open woods pasture where we went into camp that night, was surrounded with a high fence made of cedar rails. That fence ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... wide to right and left, the gay, prosperous-looking city; white villas rising one above the other, hanging gardens and terraced lawns, making greenery and verdure in mid-air. On the occasion of my first visit in August, 1881, the Loire was so low as to appear a mere thread of palest blue amid white sands; at the time I now write of, broad and beautiful it flowed beneath the noble bridge, a deep twilight sky ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a reason additional to its economy why this practice should not die out. The tearing up into strips of old garments, and the tacking of their ends together with needle and thread is work eminently suited for children, and one in which they take great pride, as it gives them a share in the creation of a useful and ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... dealer, could endure Peter's mode of transacting business no longer. She knew that if he once got into the true spirit of applying the oil of flattery to the landlord, he would have rubbed him into a perfect froth ere he quitted him. She, therefore, took up the thread of the discourse, and finished the compliment with much more delicacy than honest Peter ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... prefer the modern napery, so exquisitely embroidered in gold thread, which affords an opportunity to show the family coat of arms, or the heraldic animals—the lion and the two-headed eagle and the griffin—intertwined in graceful shapes around the whole edge of the table ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... quiet in his own. And as they had so often stood together in their short day and their two nights of the moon, so now again they stood with a serenading silence between them. A plaintive waltz-refrain from the house ran through the blue woof of starlit air as a sad-colored thread through the tapestry of night; they heard the mellow croon of the 'cello and the silver plaints of violins, the chiming harp, and the triangle bells, all woven into a minor strain of dance-music that beat gently upon their ears with such suggestion of the past, that, as by ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... yourself but one among the many threads which make up the texture of the doublet. You should aim at being like men in general—just as your thread has no ambition either to be anything distinguished compared with the other threads. But I desire to be the purple—that small and shining part which makes the rest seem fair and beautiful. Why then do you bid me become even as the ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... read where Mr. Denis Oglethorpe stood, by the queer, sudden inner light in her eyes, and the unconscious fluctuation of rich color in her bright glowing face. He was struck with a secret pang in a second. There would be so frail a thread of hope for the man who was only second with a ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dazzle, never frazzle, not a thread but wool! All together! All together! That's the way we ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... requires great care and patience to do it nicely. When all the flesh is thus loosened, take the turkey by the neck, give it a pull, and the skeleton will come out entire from the flesh, as easily as you draw your hand out of a glove. The flesh will then be a shapeless mass. With a needle and thread mend or sew up any holes that may ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... Hast thou in time past saved me when in flight From foes. I never fled, but steadfastly Withstood the charge of all the Trojan host. Furious the enemy came on like a flood But I by might of hands cut short the thread Of many lives. Herein thou sayest not true Me in the fray thou didst not shield nor save, But for thine own life roughtest, lest a spear Should pierce thy back if thou shouldst turn to flee From war. My ships? I drew them up mid-line, Not dreading the battle-fury ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... time: but first come Continental tours, and the moody longing for Eastern travel; your native downs and moors can hold you no longer; with larger stride you burst away from these slips and patches of free-land,—you thread your way through the crowds of Europe, and at last, on the banks of the Jordan, you joyfully know that you are upon the very frontier of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... wearied Spaniards endeavored to thread the mazes of this tangled thicket, where the creepers and flowering vines, that shoot up luxuriant in a hot and humid atmosphere, had twined themselves round the huge trunks of the forest-trees, and made a network that could be ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... rolled out from behind a cloud, and shone full on his face. He drew out his watch-chain, touched it with his thumb-nail, and placed the trinket in my hand. It was such as a child might wear, an enameled thread encircling it. Through the glass I could see the tiny nest of ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cream; granulated sugar, twenty pounds; water, three quarts. Boiled to a thread, set off, add three pounds of glucose dissolved; pour, let get cold. Cream, melt, add pinch of glucose to one pint simple syrup; four tablespoonfuls of glycerine. ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... talk much and has to be pumped. He doesn't lose the thread of the discourse. His failure to talk on details of his early life seem to the interviewer due to unwillingness rather than lack of memory. While his age is advanced, his mind is sharp for one who has had ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... cloth than is used anywhere else, so that which they make use of is much less costly. They use linen cloth more; but that is prepared with less labour, and they value cloth only by the whiteness of the linen, or the cleanness of the wool, without much regard to the fineness of the thread: while in other places, four or five upper garments of woollen cloth, of different colours, and as many vests of silk, will scarce serve one man; and while those that are nicer think ten too few, every man there is content with one, which very often serves him two years. Nor is there ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... not finished till the Saturday afternoon. I gave the tailor six sequins and dismissed him, but I kept Zenobia to attend on the ladies. I took care to place powder, pomade, combs, pins, and everything that a lady needs, on the table, not forgetting ribbons and pack-thread. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... doubt. His mind wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was, as all such mistakes are, inexplicable. Did her hand shake? Had she miscounted the number of tablets? Had she, in her nervous state, deliberately risked a larger dose whose danger she did not realise? These questions would never be answered. She had been alone in her room, nor was there a thread of evidence upon which to hang a theory. Esther, the nurse, Jane, Dr. Callandar (poor man!) had noticed nothing out of the ordinary when they had parted from her that last time. Aunt Amy's evidence was not taken. No one thought ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... thunderstorms, but let them go and listen to that one that thundered in Cuba when Bill was buying his crystal and they'd find that they didn't know what thunder was. But then I interrupted him, unfortunately perhaps, for it broke the thread of his tale and set him rambling a while, and cursing other people and talking of other lands, China, Port Said and Spain: but I brought him back to Cuba again in the end. I asked him how they could play chess with a crystal; and he said that you looked at the board and looked at the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... must be tucked up in her little bed and see nurse take away the candle. She would lie and stare with her bright round eyes into the thick blackness, and feel grateful if she could fix them on any little faint thread of light coming through chink or crevice. She could not have told you what it was she feared, and perhaps this was the reason why she never spoke of it to anyone—not even to mother. Besides, in the bright morning light she forgot her fears, and being naturally a cheerful and courageous child ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... satisfaction of all parties. The Indian deputies were gratified with a valuable present, consisting of looking-glasses, knives, tobacco-boxes, sleeve-buttons, thimbles, sheers, gun-locks, ivory combs, shirts, shoes, stockings, hats, caps, handkerchiefs, thread, clothes, blankets, gartering, serges, watch-coats, and a few suits of laced clothes for their chieftains. To crown their happiness, the stores of rum were opened; they drank themselves into a state of brutal intoxication, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... beasts trot away, scamper away so fast with their nimble legs, that one cannot see them. What delicate forms they have! they must have worn corsets when they were young. Ah! there is a sort of knot in this thread which fastens the corselet to the belly. Wait, little fellow, wait while I look at you a little nearer!" The small, thin finger of Piccolissima caught one of the little creatures, but she found some ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... a thread of green from a bundle of silk in her lap deliberately. "No; you never told me that," ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... explaining to the audience that the strands of a spider's web were purposely rough so that the spider could climb them easily, but that a quartz fibre was smooth and glassy, and a spider would never attempt to ascend one. He showed on the sheet a single thread of a spider's web and a single quartz fibre, and amid the breathless excitement of the audience a real live spider was put into the lantern. The applause with which it was greeted must have made the poor thing nervous, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... in order to economize time, to increase the velocity. Twisting the fibres of wool by the fingers would be a most tedious operation: in the common spinning-wheel the velocity of the foot is moderate, but by a very simple contrivance that of the thread is most rapid. A piece of catgut passing round a large wheel, and then round a small spindle, effects this change. This contrivance is common to a multitude of machines, some of them very simple. In large shops for the retail of ribands, it is necessary at short intervals ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... lark I never had one," Howard said to Jack, when they were safely housed and had changed their clothes, not a thread of which was dry. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... know, and will not betray! Sanctuary! Thou seekest sanctuary, and thou shalt have it if I can aid thee; but no time is to be lost. Rush on as if thy life hung on a single thread. Turn to the right, pass the Stadium, wind quickly around the hill Pion, and thou shalt see the Temple bathed in glorious light, and close to it the sacred grove; but I fear the hour has passed to ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... "The thread of this great discourse was his present and past relations to Virginia and Virginians. After gratefully acknowledging his infinite obligations to the great Virginians of the first age of the federal republic, he modestly and unpretendingly recounted the unsought exalted honors heaped upon him by ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... have been in a mighty big hurry," quavered the old step-mother. "June ain't goin' to be with us long, I'm afeerd:" and, without looking up, June knew the wireless significance of the speech was going around from eye to eye, but calmly she pulled her thread through a green pod and said calmly, with a little enigmatical shake of ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... in to light the lamp, which she placed on a square table in front of the fire; then she fetched her distaff, her ball of thread, and a small stool, on which she seated herself in the recess of a window and began as usual to spin. Gasselin was still busy about the offices; he looked to the horses of the baron and Calyste, saw that the stable was in order ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... men. Whether some feeble fibre in the race had already developed in this early representative of the name, or whether it was the persistent ill-fortune which has always pursued them, making life a continual struggle and death a violent ending, the fatal thread which has run through their history for so many generations comes here into the most tragic prominence, the beginning of a long series of tragedies. It adds a softening touch to the record of David's unhappy fate that the death of his mother is recorded as one of the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... thousand pesos. This would lead to greater care in producing and cultivating the cotton, because they would not have the Sangleys acting as middlemen. The rest that they bring is silks, very poor and sleazy, except some silk which is brought in raw or spun into thread. This last, I fear, exceeds in quantity that brought from the Spanish kingdoms; and would interfere with your Majesty's royal revenues from the silks of Granada, Murcia, and Valencia, which would be most undesirable. Besides this, there is another ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... plain enough. A slight thread of blood was trickling slowly from a spot on the smooth glistening bald head of the prostrate man, while as, with a moan of anguish, the girl thrust her arm softly beneath his neck, and raised the head, the mark of another blow was ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... long and earnestly over her breakfast. She thought deeply as she proceeded to her office. Even the business of again taking up the thread of her ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... as it was cold; they had begun tearing the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he thought he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up, and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village who made a livelihood by collecting bones, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... confuse Minna. I begged him to be silent, and did my best to help her to find the lost thread of her story. ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... one magnificently upright, the other shrinking, were re-passing over the muting rugs, through the corridor of noble marble, by the lackeys between whose common palms and the hands of patrician guests was the antiseptic intermediary of white thread gloves. ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... through the medium of enriching himself by a 'salva regina', made his friends prepare for him that just retribution, which ended in a 'de profundis'. At a period when all his vices were called to aid one virtuous action, his thread of vicious life was shortened, and he; no doubt, became the victim of his insatiable avarice. That he was poisoned is not to be disproved; though it was thought necessary to keep it from the knowledge of ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... her own called Fensalir, or the Hall of Mists, where she spent much of her time at her wheel, spinning golden thread, or weaving web after web of many-coloured clouds. All night long she sat at this golden wheel, and if you look at the sky on a starry night you may chance to see it set up where the men of the South show a constellation called the Girdle ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... head, heels, and tail for over a year, with nothing else but the corn meal that Rufus trades meat with Silas for. I thought, honeybunch, when I saw you coming so stylish and beautiful with those none-such chickens that you must have been bringing a silk purse sewed with gold thread with you. I said to Silas as he put out the lamp last night, 'The good Lord may let His deliverance horses lag along the track, but He always drives them in on the home stretch for His own, of which Moseby Craddock is one.' 'Why, she's ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... entered the tent again. In her hand she carried a rather decrepit hussif and a hank of strong linen thread. She held them ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... A mere thread of a footpath, almost blotted out by tall grasses, led gently up the slope for sixty yards to where, above a natural hedge of celery blooms, a little cabin of weather-beaten drift-logs cuddled at the foot of a steep, green hill. A porch jutted out ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... golden grain, tempts the majority), it is quite pitiful to note how they cling to that notion of 'the corn-sieve,' and cannot be persuaded that story-telling requires an apprenticeship like any other calling. They flatter themselves that they can weave plots as the spider spins his thread from (what let us delicately term) his inner consciousness, and fondly hope that intuition will supply the place of experience. Some of them, with a simplicity that recalls the days of Dick Whittington, think that ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... these together, and, taking off his coat—a stout cotton summer one—began to sew the loop inside, under the left arm. His hands shook violently, but he accomplished his task satisfactorily, and when he again put on his coat nothing was visible. Needle and thread had been procured long ago, and lay on the table in a piece of paper. The loop was provided for a hatchet. It would never have done to have appeared in the streets carrying a hatchet, and if he placed ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Warrants, bailiffs, bills unpaid, Lords of laundresses afraid; Rogues, that nightly rob and shoot men, Hangmen, aldermen, and footmen; Lawyers, poets, priests, physicians, Noble, simple, all conditions; Worth beneath a thread-bare cover, Villainy bedaubed all over; Women, black, red, fair, and grey, Prudes, and such as never pray; Handsome, ugly, noisy still, Some that will not, some that will; Many a beau without a shilling, Many a widow not unwilling; ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... also procured a patent, which they shared with Sir Edward Villiers, brother to Buckingham, for the sole making of gold and silver thread and lace, and had obtained very extraordinary powers for preventing any rivalship in these manufactures: they were armed with authority to search for all goods which might interfere with their patent; and even ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... in an early hotbed. Many will ripen during summer, and may be gathered. In the fall, when frost comes, the vines will be covered with blossoms and with peppers of all sizes. Fall-grown green ones, strung on a thread, and hung in a warm, dry room, will ripen finely. They are very hardy, and may be transplanted without injury. Hen-manure is best ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... discussing the outlook and expecting to learn that some agreement had been reached. In an adjoining room the members of the delegation were sitting in conference on the burning subject, painfully aware that time pressed, that the Damocles's sword of Mr. Wilson's declaration hung by a thread over their heads, and that a spirit of large compromise was indispensable. At three o'clock Mr. Lloyd George's secretary brought the reply of the Council of Three to Italy's maximum of concessions. Only one point remained ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... was a muscle—cold, flabby, and red; And N was a Nerve, like a bit of white thread. O was some Opium, a fool chose to take; And P were the Pins used to keep him awake. Fol ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and thought with Max and Brenda asleep by his side and the parrot preening its bright feathers on the parapet of the tower, while Lucy and the Lord High Islander played cat's cradle with a long thread ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... his hand to the hilt, thinking to essay pulling it out by strength; but lo! he drew it out with as much ease as though it had hung by a thread of untwisted silk. And immediately every door in the enchanted garden flew open, and the magician Ormadine appeared, his hair standing on end; and he, after kissing the hand of the champion, led him to a cave where a young man wrapped in a sheet of gold lay sleeping, lulled by ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... the Muscovites, when his terrified guards had dispersed, had mounted his followers, and hearing shots, was leading his cavalry into the firing line, himself at their head, with his steel raised aloft. At once Rykov cried, "Platoon fire!" A fiery thread flew along over the locks, and from the black levelled barrels three hundred bullets whistled. Three riders fell wounded, and one lay dead. The Count's steed fell, and the Count with it; with a cry the Warden ran to the rescue, for he saw that the yagers had ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... barn, rigging a new block and tackle for the hayloft. Barney was helping thread the new, manila line from a coil ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... that's so. I've seen boys try to do it, ever and ever so many times, and they usually threw the needle and thread away two or three times ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... legends which the early races framed to express their notions of divine things,—the Fates, who spin and snip the thread of life; ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... cloud, in which only one out of many millions of floating particles can ever hit the mark. The mosquito is able to procreate without ever satisfying its ravenous appetite for blood. To swell its grey thread-like abdomen to a coral bead is a delight to the insect, but not necessary to its existence, like food and water to ours; it is the great prize in the lottery of life, which few can ever succeed in ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... been erased! How many fancies have been shed! How many failures might be traced To this—this average-reader dread! I've seen an average single bed; I've seen an average garden-weeder; I've seen an average cotton thread— I've ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... not a man to whom the expression of admiration came easily: his long sallow face and distrustful eyes seemed always barricaded against the expansive emotions. But, where her own influence was concerned, Lily's intuitions sent out thread-like feelers, and as she made room for him on the narrow sofa she was sure he found a dumb pleasure in being near her. Few women took the trouble to make themselves agreeable to Dorset, and Lily had been kind to him at ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our thoughts; we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred notions, all ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to herself the sermon printed in a certain religious weekly which reached her every Saturday, and concluded with a chapter or two of the Bible. But to-day something had gone wrong with her mind. She could not follow the thread of the Reverend Doctor MacMichael's discourse. She could not fix her attention on the wanderings and misdeeds of Israel as recorded in the Book of Exodus. She must always be getting up to look at the pot on the fire, or to open the back door and study the ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... if not a slightly rakish look; but I believe a man, even in that light, would have seen in him something manly and far from unattractive. He had a rather gruff but not unmusical voice, with what some might have thought a thread of pathos in it. He always reminded certain of his friends of the portrait of Jean Paul in the Paris edition of his works. He was hardly above the middle height, and, I am sorry to say, wore his hat on the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... thought yourself back to England. No matter what train of thought you went upon, it always worked its way by one thread or another to England. Mine ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... the offending wire. His flashlight still operated, and he could see the heavy insulation which had been scraped away. No charring; then it must have been the extension rods that had scissored through the insulation. The wire hung together by a thread, the strands of metal severed completely. He groped for his tool kit, trying to ignore ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... nerve has two roots, one from the anterior, the other from the posterior portion of the cord. These unite and run side by side, forming as they pass between the vertebrae one silvery thread, or nerve trunk. Although bound up in one bundle, the nerve fibers of the two roots remain quite distinct, and perform two entirely ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... seed-cotton in the same space of time. Previous to being spun, the cotton is prepared pretty much in the same way as in Japan or China, the cotton being tossed into the air with a view to separating the staple; but the spinning-wheel commonly used in Corea only makes one thread at ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... wander from the thread of my story, as old folks will do. After all, it is only a small story, of a small life; not every man is born to be great, my dear. Yet, while I sat on my shoemaker's bench, stitching away, I thought of greatness, as I suppose most boys do. I thought of a scholar's life, like that of Father ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... hands, I toss you all away; The winds shall blow you through the world To seek my wedding day. Or East you go, or West you go And fall on land or sea, Find the one that I love best And bring him here to me. And if he finds me spinning 'Tis short I'll break my thread; And if he finds me dancing I'll dance with him instead; If he finds me at the Mass— (Ah, let this not be, Lest I forget my sweetest saint The ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... opportunity, cautiously and briefly; too cautiously to betray his presence by the slightest noise. Indeed, I shouldn't have discovered that he had been there, except for the disarrangement of the drapery about the corpse's face, and for observing on the floor a curl of light hair, fastened with a silver thread; which, on examination, I ascertained to have been taken from a locket hung round Catherine's neck. Heathcliff had opened the trinket and cast out its contents, replacing them by a black lock of his own. I twisted the two, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... a silk thread to her wrist and gave one end to Morton. "We will keep this taut," he said; ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... corresponding in size with the rest of the furniture; and the captain, pulling open the drawers of the first named, showed them well stocked with material of various kinds, suitable for making into new garments for the dolls, and with all the necessary implements,—needles, thread, thimbles, ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... that you shall take a vacation until you have deserved it. What right have you to rest before you have labored—before you have earned a thread that clothes you or a mouthful that nourishes you. There are men whose whole lives are a vacation. These words are not for them. From my viewpoint, such men might as well be dead. The men upon whom I am urging the wisdom of taking periods for recuperation are those who have been ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the poetic allusions that occupied the boys' hours at school. The simple plot of the shepherd and the gnat was selected from the type of fable lore thought suitable for school-room reading. It served by its very incongruity as a suitable thread for a catalogue of facts and fiction. Vergil himself furnishes the clue for this interpretation of the Culex, but it has been overlooked because of the wretched condition of the text that we have. The first lines[5] of the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... time ago to see a machine, which offers something new. A man had applied to a light boat, a very large screw, the thread of which was a thin plate, two feet broad, applied by its edge spirally round a small axis. It somewhat resembled a bottle-brush, if you will suppose the hairs of the bottle-brush joining together, and forming a spiral plane. This, turned ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the one we had just passed and climb again a steeper ascent before we could reach it. The valley of the Jiddah, a tributary of the Nile, was between us and our halting-place—a stiff march, as the silver thread we viewed from the narrow passage between the basaltic columns of the Eastern Begemder ridge was 3,000 feet below us. Tired and worn out, at last; we accomplished ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... these, with like records of a dim past, present to thinking travellers the crown and first glory of the Moor. Integral portions of the ambient desolation are they—rude toys that infant humanity has left in Mother Nature's lap; and the spectacle of them twines a golden thread of human interest into the fabric of each lonely heath, each storm-scarred mountain-top and heron-haunted stream. Nothing is changed since skin-clad soldiers and shepherds strode these wastes, felt their hearts quicken at sight of women, or their hands clench over celt-headed spears before ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the cape and sweater over him. Macartney went to the edge of the plateau to prospect. A billowy sea of white stretched out to a blue infinity. The clouds had lifted or been vaporised. He could see nothing of Odde; but he believed that he could make out a thread of silver, which must be the fiord. It would take him too long to get out there and back—and yet to stay here! That meant that the pair of them would die. It is but just to him to say that no alternative presented itself to him. The pair of them would die? Well, yes. What else was there? ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... at the bar in almost obscurity, had, on a sudden, his brilliancy noticed and his great talents acknowledged, and no sooner had he reached that eminence in his profession, when all was made easy before him, than unpitying Clolho stept up, and cut his thread of life; I must ask your indulgence, for the reasons you will see, as you proceed in this my life of him, as also, from the very scanty materials I have been able to collect for it. How the first idea of ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... the skins of the animals they domesticated and of those they hunted provided them with some form of covering, at any rate in countries where it was needed. Possibly they spun wool or flax into a thread, for at Halsaflieni two objects were found which look like spindle-whorls, and others occur on sites which are almost certainly to be attributed to the megalithic people. There is, however, nothing to show that they ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... pound, fortie pound, yea a hundred pound of one pair of Breeches. (God be merciful unto us!)" To these gay hose they add nether-socks, curiously knit with open seams down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ankles, and sometimes interlaced with gold and silver thread as is wonderful to behold. Time has been when a man could clothe his whole body for the price of these nether-socks." Satan was further let loose in the land by reason of cork shoes and fine slippers, of all colors, carved, cut, and stitched with silk, and laced on with gold and silver, which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... when she saw the King's son gazing in at her, she blushed red all over, cast down her eyes and span on. Whether the thread was quite as even as usual I really cannot say, but she went on spinning till the King's son had ridden off. Then she stepped to the window and opened the lattice, saying, 'The room is so hot,' but she looked ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... her momentary displeasure as the insistent appeal of the landscape crowded everything else from her mind. The white road lay like a carelessly flung thread on the billowing plateau land. The air was crisp with the magic of the upper altitudes. Gray clumps of sagebrush stood forth like little islands in the sea of grass. A winding line of willows told where a small stream ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... other ages, and other lands. In the process of our investigation we must retrace our steps and turn back to the early traditions of our Aryan forefathers, and see whether we cannot, even in that remote antiquity, lay our hand upon a clue, which, like the fabled thread of Ariadne, shall serve as guide through the mazes of a varying, yet curiously ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... our picture. Her eyes are not large and expressive; her nose is not straight, delicate, Hellenic; her mouth has not that charm I thought it had, which I imagined could beguile me of sullenness in my worst moods. What is she? A thread-paper, a doll, a toy, a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... in the midst of purple tinged clouds, leaving along the horizon at first a fringe of gold, then a simple thread, and finally nothing but the reflection of his rays, sent to the earth by the layers of atmosphere,[B] like the adieu we receive at the turning of a road from a ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... a bearing in heraldry made in the form of a spindle, with its yarn or thread wound about it. Fusils are longer than lozenges, and taper or ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... we had spoken little since we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of enigmatic happening after happening the mind had deserted speech and crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing to gather some clue to causes, some thread of understanding. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... o'clock when we emerged upon an open plateau, and a glimmer of stars overhead revealed to me afar off the silver thread of the great river. Even in that dim light I could trace its winding course along the valley, and the view by daylight from this point must have been a delight to the eye. Pete stopped the straining mule, a feat ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... superior to human weakness, and that the old adage, which declares that one volunteer is better than three pressed men, is not yet out of date. Nor is it an unfair inference that the armies of the Confederacy, allied by the "crimson thread of kinship" to those of Wellington, of Raglan, and of Clyde, owed much of their enduring fortitude to "the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... LYKKE. I understand; you have given most care to the trade of arms. (Sits down by the table on the right, and runs through the papers.) Aha! Here is light enough and to spare on what is brewing. This small letter tied with a silken thread—— (Examines the address.) This too for Olaf Skaktavl. (Opens the letter, and glances through its contents.) From Peter Kanzler. I thought as much. (Reads under his breath.) "I am hard bested, for——; ay, sure enough; here it stands,—"Young Count ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... as a "Calling" or a "Profession" my real interest has been to unravel the nature of man, grasp the problem of human life, and to apprehend the nature, laws, and destiny of the human soul. My library covers a rather continuous thread from 1543, and the time of Paracelsus, to Profs. James, Ladd, Lombroso, Sir Oliver Lodge, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... six inches in length, which formed the soul of my invention. I took it in my hand and gazed upon it. Through its thin, flexible, and almost transparent outer envelope I could see, as I held it to the light, its framework, fine as the thread-like bones of a fish, its elastic chords, its quivering diaphragms, and all the delicate organs of its inner life. It seemed as if I could feel the palpitations of its heart as I breathed upon it. For how many days and months had I been working on this subtle ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... the obvious intention of obeying her, but no words came. He seemed to have lost the thread of his argument. He felt a perfect fool, stuck up there with his elbow on a cushion, just as if he were addressing a public meeting. He looked at his elbow as if he expected to find a glass of water ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... must feed sometimes As other folks accustomed are to do; I'm not of those who fatten on their rhymes, My reader kind, between myself and you; So this abruptly-ended interview With circumstances such you will forgive, The thread of my narration I'll renew To-morrow or the next day if I live, That is of course if ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... explanation of something that was stated in Deuteronomy. She did not learn all this, either, at this one time; but she got a vivid hint of it, strong enough to keep her hunting and pulling at the lovely golden thread of the Bible for ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Sinclair say that Esther Coombe was losing all her good looks. 'Thin as a rail, and peeked as a pin' were the words she used. To me she has never been so lovely. She is thinner; there are hollows in her cheeks; her lips are no longer a thread of scarlet. The transparent lids of her deep, wonderful eyes droop often and her hair seems to have lost its life and hangs soft and very close to her face. I love her. I love her as a man loves a woman, as a knight loves his lady, as a Catholic loves the Madonna! This terrible strain ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... several is granted considerable space, especially to the years 871, 878, and 885. The whole has gained a certain roundness and fulness, because the events—nearly all of them episodes in the ever-recurring conflict with the Danes—are taken in their connection, and the thread dropped in one year is resumed in the next. Not only is the style in itself concise; it has a sort of nervous severity and pithy rigor. The construction is often antiquated, and suggests at times the freedom of poetry; though this purely historical prose is far removed ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... excited that I could only say, "Don't mind us! We are safe. But fight, George! Fight for us!" The repetition was ludicrous. I meant so much, too! I only wanted him to understand he could best defend us there. Ah! Mr. Yankee! if you had but your brothers in this world, and their lives hanging by a thread, you too might write wild letters! And if you want to know what an excited girl can do, just call and let me show you the use of a small seven-shooter and a large carving-knife which vibrate between my belt and my pocket, always ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... the three Stalos came down and carried her and the reindeer off to their own cottage. The country was very lonely, and perhaps no one would have known in which direction she had gone had not the girl managed to tie a ball of thread to the handle of a door at the back of the cottage and let it trail behind her. Of course the ball was not long enough to go all the way, but it lay on the edge of a snowy track which led straight to ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... no arms or legs, but fins from the shoulders. He could draw, write, thread needles, and play the hautboy. Fac-similes of his writing are preserved among the Harleian MSS. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the earthquake was a long crack made in the north bank of the Caledonian Canal near Dochgarroch Lochs. It occurred in the middle of the towing-path, and could be traced at intervals for a distance of 200 yards to the east of the Lochs, and 400 yards to the west, being often a mere thread, and in no place more than half-an-inch wide. Soon after its formation, however, the fissure was obliterated by heavy ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... the edges of the wound together, and gave the ends of the bands to two men to hold, while first in one place he cleverly thrust a pin through the skin of one side of the wound and out at the other, then holding the lips of the gash together he quickly twisted a fine thread of silk over the pin-head on one side, over the point on the other, and so on, to and fro, till ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... visibly annoyed, and for the moment a trifle flustered; but, concluding his remarks had been too deep for the rough creature, he gathered up the thread of ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... communications cable using a thread of optical glass fibers as a transmission medium in which the signal (voice, video, etc.) is in the form of a coded pulse ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... who art thou," the teacher said, "My science brave to learn so fain? Which many kings who wear the thread Have asked to learn of me in vain." "My name is Buttoo," said the youth, "A hunter's son, I know not Fear;" The teacher answered, smiling smooth, "Then know him from ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... not only believe in a life after death; they are even of opinion that they would never die at all if it were not for the maleficent arts of sorcerers who cut the vital thread prematurely short. In other words, they disbelieve in what we call a natural death; they think that all men are naturally immortal in this life, and that every death which takes place is in fact a violent death inflicted by the hand of a ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... delighted. The hair, which had excited the admiration of the travellers, was made up in the shape of a hussar's helmet, and very ingeniously traced on the top. Irregular figures were likewise braided on each side of the head, and a band of worked thread, dyed in indigo, encircled it below the natural hair, which seemed, by its tightness and closeness, to have been glued fast to the skin. This young Jenna woman was by far the most interesting, both in face and form, of any they had seen since their landing; ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... philosophy is back towards the position of the old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened and clarified by sound scientific ideas. If I publish my criticism on Comte, I should have to re-write it as a summary of philosophical ideas from the earliest times. The thread of philosophical development is not on the lines usually laid down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest to the Epicureans, and then the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular theological ideas, just as was done by the Christian Fathers. In the Middle Ages it was entirely lost ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison, declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'—a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in King Lear, descriptive of the prospect ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... the place where Lewti lies, 65 When silent night has closed her eyes: It is a breezy jasmine-bower, The nightingale sings o'er her head: Voice of the Night! had I the power That leafy labyrinth to thread, 70 And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, I then might view her bosom white Heaving lovely to my sight, As these two swans together heave On ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... whole thing!" sighed Greg, rising. He had drawn off one of his white lisle-thread gloves, but now he was engaged in ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... uneasiness of a heart that has lost its owner, and seeks and seeks again, turning for comfort like a poor lost dog to every face which may prove friendly. Just now things seem to be in such a dreadful tangle that I can not even find a thread of it ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... thread, and on the whole, the couple were angry enough with Gerald, his refined appearance and air of careless prosperity, to be willing that he should have a fall, and Lance thus extracted that the "he" who had been cruel was a Neapolitan impresario in a small ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were tried by putting microscopical atoms on the gland itself of single hairs; and it is perfectly evident that an atom of human hair, 1/76000 of a grain (as ascertained by weighing a length of hair) in weight, causes conspicuous movement. I do not believe (for atoms of cotton thread acted) it is the chemical nature; and some reasons make me doubt whether it is actual weight; it is not the shadow; and I am at present, after many experiments, confounded to know what the cause is. That these atoms did really act and alter the state of the contents of all the cells in the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... entered the room and picked up a big handful of nuts, and returned to the loft, where the Black Rogue was still sleeping. At first the Shifty Lad shut his eyes too, but very soon he sat up, and, taking a big needle and thread from his pocket, he sewed the hem of the Black Gallows Bird's coat to a heavy piece of bullock's hide that was hanging at ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... not wonder if the rotten one gives way. If you will not lean on the strong Stay, complain not when the weak one crumbles to dust beneath your weight. And if you choose to swing over the profound depth at the end of a piece of pack-thread, instead of holding on by an adamantine chain wrapped round God's throne, you must be prepared for its breaking and your being ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... they do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet and every hope ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... into them. These holes receive one end of a warp stick, the other end, being supported in a corresponding hole of the heavy, movable stone seat. The other warp stick is supported in a similar manner, while the thread is passed around both in a horizontal direction preparatory to placing and stretching it in a vertical position for the final working of the blanket. A number of these cup-shaped pits are formed along the side of the stone bench, to provide for various lengths of warp that may be required. ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... justified his conduct. When he was about to depart for the first Continental Congress, a number of friends contributed funds to furnish him forthwith presentable apparel: a suit of clothes, new wig, new hat, "six pair of the best silk hose, six pair of fine thread ditto,....six pair of shoes"; and, it being "modestly inquired of him whether his finances were not rather low than otherwise, he replied it was true that was the case, but HE WAS VERY INDIFFERENT ABOUT THESE MATTERS, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... rights" has from the very commencement of this Government been the rock on which the ship of the nation has many times nearly foundered, and from which it is to-day in great danger. The one question of the hour is, Is the United States a Nation with full and complete National powers, or is it a mere thread upon which States are strung as are the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... from the top to the bottom with wild-flowers and plants of every description. The traveller's joy had even gained a footing on the bridge itself. To add to the beauty, a tiny rivulet, which seemed to take its rise from some invisible source, flowed through the flowery ravine like a silver thread. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... but I have not received that from Mr. Harte to which you refer, and which you say contained your reasons for leaving Verona, and returning to Venice; so that I am entirely ignorant of them. Indeed the irregularity and negligence of the post provoke me, as they break the thread of the accounts I want to receive from you, and of the instructions and orders which I send you, almost every post. Of these ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... always read and dream; in a short time came the reality of school-days and boyish struggles. But though he was called away from the chivalric companionship of the knights of old, the impression made upon his mind by their courage and fortitude and devotion to duty ever after ran, like a thread of gold, through the warp and ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... and beauty of the great deep, every branch and species of sea creature from the coral and the sponge to the highest form of marine life. The most wonderful thing of all, we thought, and certainly the most novel to us, was a kind of animated purple thread, which spun itself out to such an extent that there was only a long cobweb left perceptible; this, floating about, after a time showed extraordinary muscular strength and energy, gathering itself together ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... far as I was able I had arranged during the last few days the affairs which had been confidingly placed in my care, and desired to leave books and papers in such a condition that a successor could at once take up the thread ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... urged me, from my husband, to come on immediately. In eight hours from the time I received that letter, I was in New York. Alas! it was too late; the disease had returned with double violence, and snapped the feeble thread of life. I never saw my husband's ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... the kettles, the sky was blue and dreamy; the river was winding like a thread of silver through the quiet valley. The long table of rough boards, with the row of tin cups and great stacks of bread, was an inviting spectacle. The farmers stood around in groups, discussing political questions and cropping prospects until "Turkle" ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... the heart of the enthusiastic Grantham, as, unconsciously touching the hilt of his sword, he replied: "If your hope of avoidance rest on this, sir, it will be found to hang upon a very thread indeed." ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... But look you," pointing to a white foamy thread that descended the opposite steeps, "yonder beck dashes through the castle court, and it never dries; and see you the ledge the castle stands on? It winds on out of your sight, and forms a path which leads to the village of Adlerstein, out on ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... neck firmly shut. Take the stopper out and rinse the flask several times with running water. Any zinc that is left should be rinsed thoroughly, dried, and set aside so that it may be used again. Now tie one end of a long thread firmly around the mouth of the balloon and let the balloon go. Does it rise? If it does not, the reason is that you did not get it full enough. In that case make more hydrogen and fill it ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... There was the mosquito-netting, sold for a song, that the cleverest Fitu-Ivan net-weaver could not duplicate in a thousand years. He enlarged on the incomparable virtues of rifles, axes, and steel fishhooks, down through needles, thread and cotton fish-lines to white flour ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... got her finger mashed open, she turned pretty pale with the pain, but she never said a word. I took her in my lap, and the surgeon sponged off the blood and took a needle and thread and began to sew it up; it had to have a lot of stitches, and each one made her scrunch a little, but she never let go a sound. At last the surgeon was so full of admiration that he said, 'Well, you ARE a brave little thing!' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so many tons of brass rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is more expensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the making of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains. The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, from Norway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America; and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least seven countries must cooperate to ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the thread of their conversation—and it was the unexpected which intervened. Drexley relaxed still further; there was a quiet humour in everything he said; he took upon his shoulders the whole entertainment of the little party. The ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... know," the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on which he had cast himself loose. "But I believe a great deal more could be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from the 'Mikado,' and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't know ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... have been to Beaumanoir, and is bringing the young seigneur back to town," remarked Jean, puffing out a long thread of smoke ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... wife is represented in her boat, "making her toilet at dawn using the water as a mirror." While we are assured also that the woman sitting upon her veranda "finds it very difficult to thread her needle by the pale light of the moon," which fact, few, I ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... then taking the fish by the tail you can easily remove the backbone drawing it towards the head. The smaller bones will melt in the vinegar; remove the heads and roll each fish up, tail end inside, and wind a thread round each roll, lay them in the vessel they are to remain in till used, a stone earthernware crock is best. Make scalding hot with spices as much vinegar as will cover them, pour it over the fish and keep them hot about the stove for about ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... abstraction of soul and sense, that he would often leave you abruptly in the middle of a sentence; and if you chanced to meet him some weeks after, he would resume the conversation with the very word at which he had cut short the thread of your discourse. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... portages, or shoal and dry places, over which it was necessary to carry their boats by main force. In this kind of country the Indians had the manifest advantage, being acquainted with sinuous pathways, which, it is said, enabled them to thread all the intricacies of the hamac almost without wetting the moccason. The party of Col. Harney, however, were picked men, inured to all the hardships of Indian warfare, and after several days of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... not lose the significance of a word. At first the mystery remained as impenetrable as ever, but after a while a thread of suspicion wove itself into his brain. He tried to brush it away, however, by rubbing his hand violently over his brow and eyes. It was too painful. It was too ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... no objection," returned the philosopher; "only remember to exhibit few guards, for these Franks are like a fiery horse; when in temper he may be ridden with a silk thread, but when he has taken umbrage or suspicion, as they would likely do if they saw many armed men, a steel bridle ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... feel that the existence of this species hangs on a very slender thread. This is due to its alarmingly small range, the insignificant number of individuals now living, the openness of the species to attack, and the danger of its extinction by poison. Originally this remarkable bird,—the largest North American ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... foot on your neck. But if you think I make any terms with 'en, you're mistaken. He've a-driven my Tom from home an' employ; he've a-cast a good son out o' my sight and knowledge, and fo'ced 'en, for all I know, into wicked courses—for Tom's like his father before 'en; you can lead 'en by a thread, but against ill-usage he'll turn mad. Will I forgive Rosewarne for this? He may put out the fire in my grate and fling my bed into the street, and I'll laugh and call it a little thing; but for what he've a-done to the son ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on its side, seized it by the bottom, and jerked forth the contents. A large package was disclosed, carefully wrapped up in impervious tarpaulin, also well tied. He was on the point of pulling open the folds at one end, when a light coloured thread of something, hanging on the outside, arrested his eye. He put his hand upon it; it felt stringy, and adhered to his fingers. 'Hold ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... on one side, and on the other hanging over the beautiful valley of Campan. Beneath me lay the town of Bagneres, and, far as the eye could reach, extended the plain of Bigorre, with the clear waters of the Adour marking their track like a silver thread. On the slope of a neighbouring mountain the wild-pigeon hunters were spreading their nets; for the Chasse aux Palombes is nowhere so successfully followed as in this part of the Pyrenees. It is a simple sport; but highly productive to those ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... in the habit of sewing nasty bits of red thread, impossible to extricate, into conspicuous parts of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... river beds. The root of the golden tree seems always to reach down towards the centre of the earth, growing always larger; for the deeper one digs in the bowels of the mountain the larger are the grains of gold unearthed. The branches of the golden tree are in some places as slender as a thread, while others are as thick as a finger, according to the dimensions of the crevices. It sometimes happens that pockets full of gold are found; these being the crevices through which the branches of the golden tree pass. When these pockets are filled with the output from the trunk, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... tortuous, and in some places it is very narrow; and the road runs along through it like a white thread, suspended, as it were, half way between the lofty summits of the mountains and the roaring torrent of the Rhone in the deep ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... the modern napery, so exquisitely embroidered in gold thread, which affords an opportunity to show the family coat of arms, or the heraldic animals—the lion and the two-headed eagle and the griffin—intertwined in graceful shapes around the whole edge of the table and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... which Industrial Education may form an important item. (Hear, hear.) But we must not do injustice to the wilder tribes. Their case is totally different from that of your Indians. The buffalo was everything to the nomad. It gave him house, fuel, clothes, and thread. The disappearance of this animal left him starving. Here, on the contrary, the advent of the white men has never diminished the food supply of the native. He has game in abundance, for the deer are as numerous now as they ever have been. He has ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread, which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... this scanty costume, the color flushing her cheeks in her indignation at her father's sometimes coarse remarks. She did not dare answer him, however, but bit off her thread in silent rage. After breakfast she went down to the courtyard. The house was wrapped in Sunday quiet; the workshops on the lower floor were closed. Through some of the open windows the tables were seen laid for dinners, the families being on the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... towering maze tottered, seeming to wave towards every quarter of the heavens; and then, yielding to the movements of the hull, the whole fell, with a heavy crash, into the sea. Cord, lanyard, and stay snapped like thread, as each received in succession the strain of the ship, leaving the naked and despoiled hull of the Caroline to drive before the tempest, as if nothing had occurred to impede ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... only the sixteenth of a hint to rush armed with full fervour into the mysteries of his system. Mrs. Gunilla took up a packet of old gold thread, which she set herself to unravel, whilst the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... bay, by father's quay, there was a deep, shelving bank, where, at the end of the summer, came shoals of young cod-fish and other small fry; and there we boys carried on our fishing, each with his linen thread and bent pin. We cut the fish open, and hung them over the drying poles standing in the field over by our own warehouse for the preparation of dried fish, and we let the liver stand in small tubs to rot until it became train-oil. Both ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... 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 my needle, impotent as it flew up and down, and when by chance I made a straight seam I brought it to so sudden a stop that the thread raveled back before my weary eyes. When my back and fingers ached so that I could no longer bend over the work, I watched my comrades with amazement. The machine was not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... in the snow, like knots upon a little thread, beginning at the convent door and winding away down the descent in broken lengths which were not yet pieced together, showed where the Brethren were at work in several places clearing the track. Already the snow had begun to be foot-thawed again ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... great addition, Godfrey. Well, we will set about making the sheaths at once. I have got a store of needles and stout thread." ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was freshly ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... is said, or rather fabled, to have been a retreat built at Woodstock by Henry II. for the safe residence of his mistress, Rosamond Clifford; the approaches of which were so intricate, that it could not be entered without the guidance of a thread, which the King always kept in his own possession. His Queen, Eleanor, having, however, gained possession of the thread, obtained access to, and speedily destroyed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... still a beautiful woman, though well past fifty. Her splendid, dark hair had hardly a thread of gray in it, and grew luxuriantly, but she insisted upon wearing it simply parted in the middle and coiled in a mass of plaits behind, while one braid stood up coronet fashion well at the back of her head. She was addicted to rich satins and velvets, and had a general air of Victorian repose and ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... one, or almost new, and for the present would seem to float in the void, like Mahomet's coffin. Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief Justice Crewe's phrase) would 'take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it'; being also prone (with Bacon) to believe that 'the counsels to which Time hath not been called, Time will not ratify'; I do assure you that, had any legacy of guidance been discovered among the papers left by my predecessor, it would have been eagerly welcomed ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... trace the thread of what we at present consider abnormal, through the whole skein of a single life, hoping thereby to encourage others ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... just after this meal that she brought me a roll of grass sinnate (of the kind which sailors sew into the frame of their tarpaulins), and then, handing me needle and thread, bade me begin at once, and make myself the hat which I so much needed. An accomplished hand at the business, I finished it that day—merely stitching the braid together; and Arfretee, by way of rewarding my industry, with her own olive hands ornamented the crown with ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... come to warn thee that great, very great and imminent danger is hanging, impended but by a thread, over thy head." ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... poor scene of triumph!—a poor-clad, pale-faced man, mounted upon the back of a shuffling, unwilling little grey donkey, passing slowly through the byways of a city, busy upon other things. Beside him, a little band of worn, anxious men, clad in thread-bare garments—fishermen, petty clerks, and the like; and, following, a noisy rabble, shouting, as crowds in all lands and in all times shout, and as dogs bark, they know not why—because others are shouting, or barking. ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... said the heedless Bluebell. "That will be so much pleasanter, and we need not thread those horrid ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... establishes himself in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the following day Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two teacups, milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... an excellent auxiliary, and would devote many an hour to the cheering of the poor shattered mind. His entrance seldom failed to break the thread of melancholy murmurs, and he had exactly the gentle, bright attentive manner best fitted to rouse and enliven. Nothing could be more irreproachable, than his conduct, and his consideration and gentleness ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to look at a spider's web that the silver light had just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation. Wherefore the young lady hastened to inquire what had become ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... himself under the protection of the navy of Great Britain. The vacant throne was given by Napoleon to his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Ferdinand, with the help of the English fleet, maintained himself in Sicily. A thread of sea two miles broad was sufficient barrier against the Power which had subdued half the Continent; and no attempt was made either by Napoleon or his brother to gain a footing beyond the Straits of Messina. In Southern Italy the same ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... running up the farther side, the grey mud parapet heaped out, like the earth of one long, continuous grave, on both sides of the trench. Behind that trench, along its whole length, as far as we could see, ran a sinuous thread of light-coloured soil. It was the beaten track by which the Germans had moved up and down their trench. They could not move in the trench, so when they wanted to move they had to hop up and move outside ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... nectared bowl, Let us raise the song of soul To him, the god who loves so well The nectared bowl, the choral swell; The god who taught the sons of earth To thread the tangled dance of mirth; Him, who was nurst with infant Love, And cradled in the Paphian grove; Him, that the Snowy Queen of Charms So oft has fondled in her arms. Oh 'tis from him the transport flows, Which sweet intoxication knows; With him, the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... different light. He could not understand how he had got mixed up in it. He went back over every incident of the day from the moment when he had left the house with Olivier: he saw the two of them walking through Paris until the moment when he had been caught up by the whirlwind. There he lost the thread: the chain of his thoughts was snapped: how could he have shouted and struck out and moved with those men with whose beliefs he disagreed? It was not he, it was not he!... It was a total eclipse ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... palace roofs opposite, flooded the room with light. It made Aurora's red dress brilliant, and played and sparkled on the gold she wore. Twenty little golden chains of Venice hung around her neck, slender thread after thread from throat to girdle, invisible now with fineness, and now showing a misty flash in the sun. There was a gold filigree rose in her hair, which at certain movements changed to a red rose, and then to a pallid flame, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Mafia, the small inshore islets like Mombasa and Lamu, and the whole outer rim of the coast from the equator southward to the Rovuma River.[437] The Sultan of Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago, when he had to relinquish the long thread of his ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... He therefore spent several days in covertly watching the habits of his adversary. From the knowledge thus gained he was able one morning suddenly to turn a street corner and confront Number One. Without the least suspicion that Allison was in the country, the man, knowing that his life hung by a thread, jerked his pistol and fired on the instant. As Allison had shrewdly calculated, his enemy was so nervous that his shot flew wild. Number One did not get a second shot. At the inquest several witnesses of the affray swore that Allison did not even draw until after ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the Assiniboine had loosed its locks of ice and rolled and gurgled, full to its low banks, as if the late summer would not see it shrunk to a lazy thread, refusing sometimes even the shallow canoes and barely licking the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... never be mortall sir Cutt: if I rid not after him, till my horse sweat, so that he had nere a dry thread on him, and hollod, and hollod to him to stay him, till I had thought my fingers ends wood have gon off with hollowings; Ile be sworne to yee, & yet he ran his way like a Diogenes, and ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... saw. He used to lecture us on being independent, even in little matters, and not ask servants to do for us what we might easily do for ourselves. He carried in his pocket a small book containing needles, thread, and buttons, and on an emergency was always ready to put in a stitch. A curious habit he had of mending his stockings, which I suppose he acquired when a working mason. He would not permit his housekeeper to touch them, but after his work at ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... poisoned. The other end is burnt to make it still harder, and wild cotton is put round it for about an inch and a half. It requires considerable practice to put on this cotton well. It must just be large enough to fit the hollow of the tube and taper off to nothing downwards. They tie it on with a thread of the silk- grass to prevent its slipping ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... his best clothes. His broad-brimmed hat was richly embroidered; his leather trousers were tight-fitting and adorned with silver buttons; his coat was embroidered with gold thread. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... like much to tell you; but we must keep within the bounds of true history, and content ourselves with the knowledge of that which really did happen. With this safe rule for our guidance, we will therefore proceed at once to take up the thread of our story at that period of George's boyhood, concerning which some certain record has ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... upon himself the command, had found a letter of Demades's, formerly written by him to Antigonus in Asia, recommending him to come and possess himself of the empire of Greece and Macedon, now hanging, he said, (a scoff at Antipater,) "by an old and rotten thread." So when Cassander saw him come, he seized him; and first brought out the son and killed him so close before his face, that the blood ran all over his clothes and person, and then, after bitterly taunting and upbraiding him with his ingratitude and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... inlaid, some gilt in the new French fashion. A great Persian carpet of most exquisite colours softened and blended by age lay on the floor, and the curtains of the doors were of rich old Genoa velvet, with palm leaves woven in gold thread on a faded ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... were not deprived of their front teeth, and wore their beards long; they also differed from the above description in having their hair long and curly. Dampier may have been deceived in this respect, and from the use that they make of their hair, by twisting it up into a substitute for thread, they had probably cut it off close, which would give them the appearance of having woolly hair like ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... of manufacture. For stamped envelopes two threads were generally used. They were placed about half an inch apart and the envelope was usually so printed that the threads would cross the stamp. For adhesive stamps only one thread was used. Great Britain and several of the German States made extensive use of this paper. It has never been successfully counterfeited. The best imitation was made by gumming together two thin pieces of paper with a silk thread ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... in its force—that wish to slay. The emotion had grown, held back by the very force of a mental thread of reason, until, at the very moment when the thread was about to fray and snap, and he would be flung into sudden action, the booming voice of Joe Pollard had cleared his mind as an acid clears a cloudy precipitate. He saw himself for the first time in several ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... to decide how the vast heavenly bodies move in space is easy compared with finding out how to make a sewing machine go. For a needle to thread itself and then rapidly proceed to sew without the help of fingers calls for the discovery of more "hows" than are needed to explain Laplace's "Mecanique celeste." Mass and gravity suffice for the one, but only a Yankee's mind ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... CUT THE MOST AGREEABLE ACQUAINTANCE.—Do this when you are convinced that he lacks principle; a friend should bear with a friend's infirmities, but not with his vices. He that does a base thing in zeal for his friend, burns the golden thread that ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... an account of the relations between the Swiss and French, and in The Labyrinth, [Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem. The various nations appear again as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame, and vice. Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Fanfaro travelled, in company with his sister, Girdel, Bobichel, and Caillette, to Algiers. Before the ship lifted anchor, Fanfaro had received from Irene's lips the promise that she would become his wife. Her mother's life hung on a thread, and as long as she remained on earth the daughter could not ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... legation. He listened attentively to the captain's words and threw inquiring glances toward the Shanghai merchant. The latter, however, was completely absorbed in the dissection of a fish, whose numerous bones continually presented fresh anatomical riddles. In his stead the thread of the conversation was taken up by Dr. Morris, of Brighton, an unusually cadaverous-looking individual, who sometimes maintained absolute silence for days at a time, and who was supposed to possess Japanese bronzes of untold value and to be ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... the Gospel Seryozha knew fairly well, but at the moment when he was saying them he became so absorbed in watching the sharply protruding, bony knobbiness of his father's forehead, that he lost the thread, and he transposed the end of one verse and the beginning of another. So it was evident to Alexey Alexandrovitch that he did not understand what he was saying, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Tua looked again into her basket and found that beneath a layer of dried papyrus leaves were hidden pearls, thousands of pearls of all sizes, and of such lustre and beauty as she had never seen. They were strung upon threads of silk, all those of a like size being set upon a single thread, except the very biggest, which were as great as a finger nail, or even larger, that lay wrapped up separately in cloth at the bottom ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... 17th September made its reconciliation with the King. The surrender of so strong and important a place was as disastrous to the cause of the patriots as it was disgraceful to the citizens themselves. It was, however, the result of an intrigue which had been long spinning, although the thread had been abruptly, and, as it was hoped, conclusively, severed several months before. During the early part of the year, after the reconciliation of Bruges with the King—an event brought about by the duplicity and adroitness of Prince ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... said, as through the aisles they passed, They heard strange voices on the blast, And through the cloister galleries small, Which at mid-height thread the chancel wall, Loud sobs and laughter louder ran, And voices unlike the voice of man, As if the fiends kept holiday. Scott, LAY ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his hand; then his figure swayed; the street waved up and down. He had eaten little during the last two or three days. Scornfully in his own mind he berated that momentary weakness and steadied himself. His eyes, cold and clear, now returned to the colored man; he groped for and took up the thread of the talk where he had ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... camels feed upon the date stone. From the leaves they make couches, baskets, bags, mats, and brushes; from the branches, cages for their poultry, and fences for their gardens; from the fibres of the boughs, thread, ropes, and rigging; from the sap is prepared a spirituous liquor: and the body of the tree furnishes fuel: it is even said, that from one variety of the palm-tree, the Phoenix farinifera, meal has been extracted, which is found among the fibres of the trunk, and ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... that they ought not to esteem difference of positive institutions a sufficient cause of alienation, but [join with us in] the pursuit of virtue and probity, for this belongs to all men in common, and of itself alone is sufficient for the preservation of human life. I now return to the thread of my history. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... front, the pastoral valley of Wester Lothian stretched away mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear mound running through the midst,—from where I stood beside one of the massier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread on the far ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... th' inspiring Band Before thy days their summer-course have run, While, with clos'd shears, the fatal Sisters stand, Nor aim to cut the brilliant thread ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... the suggestions of the Catechism; but in occasional sermons the case is otherwise. In these it is both possible and generally necessary; and the fuller the sketch, and the more clear and continuous the thread of the discourse, the more the preacher will find himself at home when the time of delivery arrives. I have said "generally necessary," for of course there will be exceptional cases, in which such a mode of preparation does not answer, whether from some mistake in carrying it out, or from ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... however, only served him in the open, in the breaks in the deep woodlands he must thread. For the rest his woodcraft, even his instinct, must serve him. A general line of direction was in his mind. On that alone he must seriously depend. His difficulties were tremendous. They must have ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... came to her aid. When the tablets were brought to her, she thus painfully traced some words in Greek, the language of her childhood, and which almost every Italian of the higher ranks was then supposed to know. She carefully wound round the epistle the thread, and covered its knot with wax; and ere she placed it in the hands of Sosia, she ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... daughter was never asked to go out and buy a spool of thread, much less was she consulted in the household economies. All she noticed was that her clothes were smarter than Cousin Marthe's, who had a real dressmaker, and was subject to fits of jealous sulks. No wonder that when ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... I am the last person in the world to need that assurance," she said slowly. "It is only another thread in all the hideous tissue of injustice and iniquity which has been wrapped about us like a pall. What a shame, is it not, that such a man as he should be powerless to do the work I think God intended for him? And what a shame that Alleghenia, needing his clear head and his strong ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... as he spoke, he kept touching his lyre so as to make a thread of music run in and out among his words—"as the little damsel was gathering flowers (and she has really a very exquisite taste for flowers) she was suddenly snatched up by King Pluto and carried off to his dominions. I ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... after we had driven for perhaps a mile, "strange that a thought can do such things! A word is said, the thread of memory is touched by suggestion, and it vibrates back through half a century to some scene of terror stamped ineradicably upon the brain—or if not upon the brain, then where?—and, lo! the reflexes spring into action, and a maniac with Samson's strength takes the place of a ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... before they advanced. The Turks remained below, which was a good sign, as it showed that their aid was not required. Now, far away, the redcoats could be discerned scattered over the hillside. Could it be that they were defeated? No; just then a long thin line, like a scarlet thread, was seen amid the smoke, far, far away, moving up the slope, in one spot having ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... inside him is a roll o' tough silk—tough as spider web. And he's death on liars. Any time a feller tells a lie he's got to look out, or all to oncet one o' them bugs'll come scootin' at him and grab him by the nose with them jaws. Then he'll curl up his tail—the bug, I mean—and run his needle and thread right through the feller's lips and sew his mouth up tight. Then he flies ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... where the king lived and where politicians wrote in the newspapers,—and Francia—and all that was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... droops slow and slower, as the ripples fade from a stone thrown in the stream, the song of the Princess softened and crooned and hushed. Now it was a rich breath, a resonant thread. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... gone through to trust himself to bleed in the arm without great risk of injury, so he decided to perform the operation on the foot, which is far less dangerous. Hot water was brought, and the white phantom removed a pair of white thread stockings of wonderful beauty, then another and another, up to six, and took off a slipper of beaver lined with white. The leg and foot thus left bare were the prettiest in the world; and Besse began to think ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... whom the piece is named and around whom the plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later within." Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off, the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the gods. The ladies of the illustrious Drupada's household approached Kunti and introduced themselves unto her, mentioning their respective names, and worshipped her feet with heads touching the ground. Krishna also, attired in red silk and her wrists still encircled with the auspicious thread, saluting her mother-in-law with reverence, stood contentedly before her with joined palms. Pritha, out of affection, pronounced a blessing upon her daughter-in-law endued with great beauty and every auspicious mark and possessed of a sweet disposition and good ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... prepossessions afflicting her mind. The first thing she did was to summon the most renowned nerve specialists to Melkbridge, where they held a lengthy consultation in respect of Harold's physical condition. Mavis was anxious to know if anything could be done to strengthen the slender thread of his life; she was much distressed to learn that the specialists' united skill could do nothing to stay the pitiless course of his disease. This verdict provided a further sorrow for Mavis, which she had to keep resolutely to herself, inasmuch ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... restored to their proper sex, this is quickly changed, and they exhibit all the boldness of masculinity. (See e.g., Neugebauer, "Beobachtungen aus dem Gebiete des Scheinzwittertumes," Jahrbuch fuer Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jahrgang iv, 1902, esp. p. 92.) At the same time this is only one thread in the tangled skein with which we are here concerned. The mass of facts which meets us when we turn to the study of modesty in women cannot be dismissed as a group of artificially-imposed customs. They gain rather than lose in importance if we have ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... goes, all is hitherto fair and plausible; and here the right honorable gentleman concludes, with commendable prudence, his account of the business. But here it is I shall beg leave to commence my supplement: for the gentleman's discreet modesty has led him to cut the thread of the story somewhat abruptly. One of the most essential parties is quite forgotten. Why should the episode of the poor Nabob be omitted? When that prince chooses it, nobody can tell his story better. Excuse me, if I apply again to my book, and give it you from the first hand: ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... it. Now, our faculties are not so trained up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... determined. The man who signed "Aurelius" had not spared to point out, with a certain melancholy sternness, the plague spots, the defenceless places. Moreover, throughout his exposition there ran a harsh and sombre thread, now felt in denunciation and now in ironic praise. There was more than unveiling of the weakness of any human policy or party; the letter was in part a commination of individual conduct. No name was used, no direct reference given ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... night when we trotted up to the stable, where we left our horses, and obtaining a black to shoulder our portmanteaus, we began to thread the mazes of the capital on foot. New York was certainly, even in 1757, a wonderful place for commerce! Vessels began to be seen some distance east of Fly Market, and there could not have been fewer than twenty ships, brigs, and schooners, lying ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... spontaneously. So much that was unexpected and unaccountable justified the title of "the occult science," "the black art." From being isolated marvels unconnected with one another, these facts had been united. The Chaldee notions of a soul of the world, and of indwelling spirits, had furnished a thread on which all these pearls, for such they proved ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Dumay, who were appointed to watch Modeste, had a certain assumed stiffness of demeanor and a quiver in their voices, which the suspected party did not notice, so absorbed was she in her embroidery. Modeste laid each thread of cotton with a precision that would have made an ordinary workwoman desperate. Her face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the flower she was working. The dwarf, seated between his mistress and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and though I feel that it is doing Mr. Sylvester Davenport Clyde a cruel injustice to bring him to the front again, beside such pictures of exalted humanity as we have just been contemplating, I owe it, in amendment, for my trespass upon the reader's patience, to proceed with the interrupted thread of my story, and can therefore only trust to the generosity of his disposition not to dwell at any length upon the compromising nature of the contrast, but to remember Mr. Clyde, in his more interesting character of bridegroom, at a very showy ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... or two from the salt water. Gradually as you ascend you become more and more hopeful; moist patches of sand appear here and there, then tiny pools that a fallen leaf might cover, then larger ones with little thread-like runs of water between them; larger and larger, till at last you reach some hard ledge of trap, over which a glorious stream gurgles and splashes into a pool ample enough for the bath ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The greater portion of the work fell to the lot of the women, who looked after the housework, tilled the land, laid up a store of wood for the winter, beat the hemp and spun it, and made fishing nets from the thread. They also gathered in the harvest and prepared it for food. The occupation of the men was hunting for deer, fishing, and building their cabins, varied at times by war. When they were free from these occupations, they visited ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... had been extended to Deveny. The knowledge strengthened his conviction that Harlan intended to kill him. And yet, now, facing Harlan, he knew that he would never take up the slender thread of chance that was offered him—to draw his gun, kill Harlan and resume his authority over the ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... skilled in their play. Young goats and lambs skip, jump, run races, throw flips in the air, and gambol; calves have interesting frolics; young colts and mules have biting and kicking games; bears wrestle and tumble; puppies delight in biting and tussling; while kittens chase everything from spools of thread ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... of Panchala—on the sons of Pandu, acted most unfortunately for the husbands of Yajnaseni—these sons of Pritha are as eunuchs. And O Yajnaseni, what joy will be thine upon beholding in the woods these thy husbands dressed in skins and thread-bare rags, deprived of their wealth and possessions. Elect thou a husband, whomsoever thou likest, from among all these present here. These Kurus assembled here, are all forbearing and self-controlled, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... said I, "I fear that her happiness will hang upon a slender thread. But suppose we change the conversation: first, because the subject is so meagre, that we might easily wear it out, and secondly, because such jests may come home. I am not ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... marvellous beauty of her face and form. Her large deep eyes had lost their lustre, her clear creamy skin looked dull and opaque. Even the magnificent hair seemed to have been robbed of its sheen, and here and there amidst its masses gleamed a silvery thread. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... near by, and shook with a silent tempest of sobs, unable to speak. He finished his meal, and remained idly thrown back in his chair, his eyes lost amongst the black rafters of the ceiling. Before him the tallow candle flared red and straight, sending up a slender thread of smoke. The light lay on the rough, sunburnt skin of his throat; the sunk cheeks were like patches of darkness, and his aspect was mournfully stolid, as if he had ruminated with difficulty endless ideas. Then he ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... little bits of chopped gold from where they lay mixed with borax and water upon a piece of slate; these he placed deftly where the gold hoop was weak; over the top of them he laid a delicate slip of gold, and bound the whole together with wire as thin as thread. This done, he put the jewel upon a piece of charred wood, thrust the end of his blow-pipe into the flame of the gas-burner, which he pulled towards him, and with three or four gentle puffs through ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... all looking stiff and uninteresting—on inspecting them at close quarters, they were seen to be not painted but embroidered in colored silks. There hung a melon, the outside of the fruit represented by yellow, green, and brown satin, the stalk by gold thread, the little cracks and roughnesses by gray silk applique, the whole thing fearful and absurd in its exuberance. And wherever one went or stood, sat down or laid one's hand, there wandered a huge wreath of flowers in Berlin wool, or the profile of a warrior in cross-stitch sneered ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Grote, in his History of Greece, "is not a lawmaker, but a judge." He is provided with Themistes, but, consistently with the belief in their emanation from above, they cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle; ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Belov'd, and those how pow'rless, by whose aid The Trojans yet maintain defensive war? Therefore, to join the battle, came we all From high Olympus, that in this day's fight No ill befall him; though the time shall come For him to meet the doom, by fate decreed, When at his birth his thread of life was spun. But if Achilles from a voice divine Receive not this assurance, he may well Be struck with fear, if haply to some God He find himself oppos'd: 'tis hard for man To meet, in presence visible, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... earnest, he spoke in a dry, waggish style, which had all the coarseness and nothing of the cleverness of that of old Rowland Hill, whom I once heard. After a great many jokes, some of them very poor, and others exceedingly thread-bare, on the folly of those who sell themselves to the Devil for a little temporary enjoyment, he introduced the subject of drunkenness, or rather drinking fermented liquors, which he seemed to consider the same thing; and many a sorry joke on the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... a maze of passages into which it was difficult to find entrance; and the Cretan, built by Daedalus, at the instance of Minos, to imprison the Minotaur, out of which one who entered could not find his way out again unless by means of a skein of thread. It was by means of this, provided him by ARIADNE, PERSEUS (q. v.) found his way out after slaying the MINOTAUR ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... back a little on their path, and he marked where the European leader had fallen twice through sheer weariness or because he could not see well enough in the dusk to evade trailing vines. A red thread or two on a bush showed that he had torn his uniform in falling, and the young woods rover laughed. He could not recall another such gratifying night, one in which he had served his own people and also had annoyed the enemy ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... understanding and speaking the language. The emperor had a mind one day to entertain me with several of the country shows, wherein they exceed all nations I have known, both for dexterity and magnificence. I was diverted with none so much as that of the rope-dancers, performed upon a slender white thread, extended about two feet, and twelve inches from the ground. Upon which I shall desire liberty, with the reader's ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... great and admirable prince, our patron, each in his own branch of industry. I can indeed, and with good conscience, affirm that all I am, whatever of good and beautiful I have produced, all this must be ascribed to that extraordinary monarch. So, then, I will resume the thread of my discourse concerning him and the great things I wrought ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... he returned, his arm locked in the arm of Wenham Gardner. The latter had the look of a spoilt child who is in disgrace. He sat sullenly upon a chair and glared at every one. Then he produced a small crumpled doll, with a thread of black cotton around its neck, and began swinging it in front of him, laughing at ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there anywhere a more industrious nation of laborers, had there ever been, before them, a thriftier or a more skilful race? When he looked back on the fate and deeds of nations, on the remotest horizon where the thread of history was scarcely perceptible, that same gigantic Sphinx was there—the first and earliest monument of human joy in creative art—those Pyramids which still proudly stood in undiminished and inaccessible majesty beyond the Nile, beyond the ruined capital of his forefathers, at the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... great quantity, red deer, foxes, sheep, lambs, rabbits, martins and squirrels,' &c. Hemp and flax grew more naturally there than elsewhere, which, being well regarded, would give provision for canvas, cables, cording, besides thread, linen cloth, and all stuffs made of linen yarn, 'which are more fine and plentiful there than in all the rest of the kingdom.' Then there were the best materials of all sorts for building, with 'the goodliest and largest timber, that might compare with ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... borrowed from the Sanskrit. With the help of these lists, and after sixteen years consecrated to the study of the Chinese translations of Sanskrit works and of other original compositions of Buddhist authors, M. Julien at last caught up the thread that was to lead him through this labyrinth; and by means of his knowledge of Sanskrit, which he acquired solely for that purpose, he is now able to do what not even the most learned among the Buddhists in China could accomplish—he is able ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... must go to see him," said Mrs. Hartley, rising. "But now, my children, you must go to bed. You can't learn any more to-night, and to-morrow we will pick up the broken thread. Patty, my dear child, you are doing a ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... it languidly with his handkerchief. His hat had dropped off, and he did not replace it; he did not look at the girl, but let his eyes rest on the thread of falling water that gleamed from the spring. Miss Frances, regarding him with some timidity, thought: How much younger he looks without his hat! He had that sensitive fairness which in itself gives a look of youth and purity; ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... counsels. No other leader commanded so large a share of the confidence and devotion of his party. No other equaled him in the art of giving a velvety touch to its coarsest and most dangerous blows, or of presenting the work of its adversaries in the most questionable guise. It was his habit to thread the mazes of economic and fiscal discussion, and he was never so eloquent or apparently so contented as when he was painting a vivid picture of the burdens under which he imagined the country to be suffering, or giving a fanciful sketch of what might have been if Democratic ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... pressure of Holland's finger, the disarmer's invisible ion-stream tightened to the thread-thin lethal intensity, leaped out against the suit's grid. Then the disarmer was luminous even in the dazzle; even through the flesh of Holland's fist. Holland screamed and squirmed and dropped. Part of him—the part that ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... we will do," spoke the papa giant. "I know, I'll get a spool of thread from the lady giant next door, and that will answer for a table for you, Uncle Wiggily, and you can use another toothpick ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... interest in the love story which serves as a thread for Bellamy's vision of a reconstructed society. But it can be said that it is so palpably a thread of sugar crystal that it need not get in ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... his lectures in London. The play was a success, despite the shamefully inadequate acting of some of those entrusted with important parts. There was once, perhaps there were more occasions than one, where success poised like the soul of a Mohammedan on the invisible thread leading to Paradise, but on either side of which lies perdition. There was none to cry Timbul save Macready, except Miss Helen Faucit, who gained a brilliant triumph as Lady Carlisle. The part of Charles I. was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... known of these minor poets, Thomas Beddoes, was gifted in a way to remind us of the strange genius of Blake. He wrote not much, his life being too broken and disappointed; but running through his scanty verse is a thread of the pure gold of poetry. In a single stanza of his "Dream Pedlary" he has reflected the spirit of the whole ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... vice rewarded, justice and innocence trodden under foot, as is the custom of men. Conduct him through the wild and terrible scenes of human life; let him mistake its aim, and lose among its horrors the guiding thread of virtue. And when he stands separated from all natural and heavenly ties, in doubt concerning the noble destination of his race,—when even pleasure and enjoyment have left him, and the inward worm awakes,—then depict to him, with ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Polly, for the first time catching sight of this, "you can't work with such a long thread. Let me cut ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... husband's coffee and put it beside his plate, as he was too absorbed to take it, and as she did so placed her hand on his shoulder with gentle pressure and their eyes met for an instant. Then grandfather Clide took up the thread. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... everywhere more dense; and low murmurs were heard as if there was wind stirring aloft, although the sea was still glassy as a lake. Signs of some movement about to take place were evident, and the solitary youth watched and watched. And now the sounds increased, and here and there a wild thread of air—whence coming, who could tell? and as rapidly disappearing—would ruffle, for a second, a portion of the stagnant sea. Then came whizzing sounds and moans, and then the rumbling noise of distant thunder—loud and louder yet—still louder—a broad black line is seen sweeping ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... did, in those days;—the currant-bushes had but just leafed out; so George Tucker, going by, saw her; and she, who had seen him coming before she began to weed, accidentally of course, looked up and gave him a very bright smile. That was the first spider-thread, and the fly stepped into it with such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... condition, having suffered a thousand insults from the conspirators, who deprived them of their horses and arms, and even stripped them of their clothes. Ninno was dressed in an old doublet and breeches, without stockings, having only a pair of miserable pack-thread sandals, and had walked all the way with a stick in his hand. The viceroy received him very graciously, praising his loyalty, and told him that he appeared more nobly in his rags than if clothed in the most ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... visit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not tried to see her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity. He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people's moods and whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... measles; the contagion of which I believe to be more volatile, or diffusible in the atmosphere. But as the contagious miasmata of small-pox and scarlet fever are supposed to be more fixed, they may remain for a longer time in clothes or furniture; as a thread dipped in variolous matter has given the disease by inoculation after having been exposed many days to the air, and after having been kept many months in a phial. This also accounts for the slow or sporadic progress of the scarlet fever, as it infects others at but a very small distance ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... obviously desiring the question that would unloose her tongue. But Max was not alert for gossip, he was listening instead to a faint sound, long drawn out and fine as a silver thread, that was slipping through the crevices of M. ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... mind, the other kind of substance, is the unknown recipient both of the sensations and of all the other feelings. Though I call a something myself, as distinct from the series of feelings, the 'thread of consciousness,' yet this self shows itself only through its capacity of feeling or being conscious; and I can, with my present faculties, conceive the gaining no new information but about as yet ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... o'clock, in defiance of prudence, he came back, knocked boldly, and asked to see Miss Templeton—he had a package for her. She came, and placing something in her hand, abruptly left, mounted his horse, and rode away in a fierce gallop, ere she could speak, and again Daisy closed the door upon this thread of her ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... several sorts of Sheeting Linnen. Several sorts of Diapers and Table-Cloths. Several sorts of Cambricks. Mantua Silks, and Grassets. Beryllan, and plain Callimanco. Tamie yard-wide. Men's dyed shammie Gloves. Women's Ditto, Lamb. Stitching Silk, Thread and Silk. Twist for Women. Silk and Ribbands. Double Thread Stockings. Men's white shammie Gloves. Silk Handkerchiefs, & other sorts of Handkerchiefs. Men's glaz'd Gloves, Topp'd. Men's Shoe-Buckles, Bath-metal. ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie's life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... say, that so bold and numerous were the fish in the lakes and rivers he was used to fish in, that they could be taken by the hand, with a crooked pin and coarse thread, or wooden spear; but that was in the lower province; and oh, what glorious tales I have heard him tell of spearing fish ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... retreat; and she flattered herself that at least nothing of this underplot had appeared; and at all events she secured by her services in this embassy, the long-looked-for object of her ambition, Lady Dashfort's scarlet velvet gown—'not yet a thread the worse for the wear!' One cordial look at this comforted her for the loss of her expected OCTOGENAIRE; and she proceeded to discomfit her lady, by repeating the message with which strange old Mr. Reynolds had charged her. So ended all Lady ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... an inch deep), and set on the ice to harden. As soon as it is hard, decorate with the egg rings. Add about three spoonfuls of the liquid jelly, to set the eggs. When hard, add enough jelly to cover the eggs, and when this is also hard, trim the ends of the fillet, and draw out the thread. Place in the centre of the mould, and cover with the remainder of the jelly. If the fillet floats, place a slight weight on it. Set in the ice chest to harden. When ready to serve, place the mould in a pan of warm water for half a minute, and then ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... I got through the operation. Everything required for it—the inhaler, sponges, straight and crooked needles, and thread—was in the chest. The young Arab objected to be sent to sleep. He said it might be well for cowards, but not for a fighting man. I had to assure him that it was not for his sake, but for my own, that I wished him to go ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... a vast sympathy, a wide understanding. It seemed the only explanation. But would he understand her little Chris? she wondered. Would he make full allowance for her dear caprices, her whimsical fancies, her butterfly temperament? Would he ever thread his way through these fairy defences to that hidden shrine where throbbed her woman's heart? And would he be the first to enter there? She hoped ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... Suddenly, in this trouble of innocence in distress, prompt to accuse the unknown, in her dread of a possible fall, Dea, serene notwithstanding, and superior to the vague agonies of peril, but inwardly shuddering at her isolation, found confidence and support. She had seized her thread of safety in the universe of shadows; she put her hand on ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... There is real power in the book—power of insight, power of reflection, power of analysis, power of presentation.... 'Tis a very well made book—not a set of independent episodes strung on the thread of a name or two, but closely interwoven to the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... and his wife had come to the great decision, by the children. The children knew nothing of the great decision nor did they know the sources of their sudden joy. Their spirits were reaching out to clasp this new thread in life at an age when all new ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... arms, as he sculled, was a trawl-tub containing their purchases at Matinicus. These Jim tossed into the stern. Taking the tub, he crept forward. A lanyard of six-thread manila, put across double between holes in the top of its sides, formed a rope bridle or bail. To the middle of this bail Jim tied the thirty-foot painter with a clove hitch. Then he dropped the tub over ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... had commanded before. The rolling country, with the sunset glory fading from it, lay like a panorama at their feet—shadowy woods melting into blue distance, streams glancing here and there into sight, fields rich with cultivation bounded by fences that looked like a spider's thread. To the left Claremont, seated above its terraces, made an imposing landmark. Behind it the moon was rising majestically in a cloudless sky. After they had been silent for some time, Clare turned and looked at his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... butter one cupful of chopped mushrooms, two tablespoonfuls of chopped onion, and one tablespoonful of minced parsley, seasoning with pepper and salt. Cut the soles in fillets, spread with the [Page 396] mixture, tie with thread, put into a buttered pan, cover, and bake. Put each fillet into a small paper case, fill with Cream Sauce, lay a mushroom on the top ...
— How to Cook Fish • Olive Green
... of the enthusiastic Grantham, as, unconsciously touching the hilt of his sword, he replied: "If your hope of avoidance rest on this, sir, it will be found to hang upon a very thread indeed." ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... arrives to take up a post in the Cathedral. The main thread of the novel now emerges as the history of the rivalry of these two men, one simple and elemental, the other calculating, selfish and sure. Ronder sees at once that Brandon is in his way and at once begins his work to overthrow the Archdeacon, not because he dislikes him at all (he ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... seventh heaven, where they shall go about in peace, shielded by (literally, "covered with") the red war club of success, and never to be knocked about by the blows of the enemy. "Breaking the soul in two" is equivalent to snapping the thread of life, the soul being regarded as an intangible something having length, like a rod or a string. This formula, like others written down by the same shaman, contains several evident inconsistencies both as to grammar and mythology, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... to my outward man, or rather boy, I should have been obliged to confine myself to such particulars as I could remember, namely, that I was tall for my age, but slightly built, and so thin, as often to provoke the application of such epithets as "hop-pole," "thread-paper," etc., had it not been that, in turning over some papers a few days since, I stumbled on a water-colour sketch of myself, which I well remember being taken by a young artist in the neighbourhood, just 6before I left home, in the hope of consoling my mother for my departure. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... (remembered) spark came from the Indians, was brightened to living fire by the Puritans from over the sea who called the world they found New England. Somehow, the combination is unique, and the same curious sense of personality runs through everything, linking all together as a golden thread might link many different coloured beads. The cedars crowning the hills could be only American cedars. "Joe Pye weed" (whose Indian name is lost, but whose pinky purple colour is ever present) is so patriotic a plant that it would perish rather ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... worthless trifles she had patched up for gifts, wondering secretly at the delicate sense of colour and grace betrayed in the bits of flannel and leather; and took, with a grave look of wonder, his own package, out of which a bit of woollen thread peeped forth. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... continually. Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin needle with its sinew thread—with all these he was at home; he could construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever saw. He spoke ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... a spider's thread left which binds me to that cruel man. The murder of Titianus has snapped ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gamekeeper's daughter), roaming about in search of amusement, chanced to hit upon a gun hanging up in the hall, and took it down to look at the chasing; and it went off through the open kitchen door, hit the pack, and a slow dark thread of blood came oozing out. (How Miss Pole enjoyed this part of the story, dwelling on each word as if she loved it!) She rather hurried over the further account of the girl's bravery, and I have but a confused idea that, somehow, she baffled the robbers with Italian irons, heated red- ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... you with your pottage of rice: I would fast and fare ill, ere I ate of that price. Would I sell my birthright, being an eldest son? Forsooth then were it a fair thread that I had spun. And then to let it go for a mess of pottage! What is that but both unthriftiness and dotage? Alack, alack, good blessed father Isaac, That ever son of thine should play such a lewd knack! And yet I do not think but ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... Fandor saw this foreign spy system under the form of an immense—a vast spider's web. Could one but lay hands on the originator of the initial thread, or the master-spider himself, then they could strike at the extreme ends of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... only too friendly—cousin the cold shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful letter (after it had had time to work a little), he said to himself that he had perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as he was easily touched by remorse of this kind, he took up the broken thread. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... persisted Ralph. "I could thread my way in and out of the people till I found you. The ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... unhappy day rises up before me. I had cut the thread of the chaplet, while playing with Aurora. Holding the ninety-nine beads in my hand she guessed "Odd," and in order that she might lose I let one bead fall from my hand. Since then I have sought it daily, but it never has ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... of hooded nectaries between them and the stamens, each shorter than the incurved horn within. Stem: 1 to 2 1/2 ft. tall, simple or sparingly branched, hairy, leafy to summit, containing milky juice. Leaves: In upright groups, very narrow, almost thread-like, from 3 to 7 in each whorl. Fruit: 2 smooth, narrow, spindle-shaped, upright pods, the seeds attached to silky fluff; 1 pod usually abortive. Preferred Habitat - Dry fields, hills, uplands. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Maine ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... how long that night seemed to us, and with what trembling eagerness we awaited the first signs of breaking day. Directly it was light I took off and unravelled one of my socks. The thread thus obtained I doubled, and having done this, secured one end of it to the note, which I had rolled into a small compass, attaching the other to my captive mouse's hind leg. Then we set ourselves to wait for six o'clock. The hour came; and minute after minute went by before we heard ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... behind the cedar knobs, towards the little woodland at the end of our domain. Curious to find out the cause of his mysterious disappearances, I followed cautiously. From the edge of the wood I saw him enter a little gap between the rocks, which led down to the water. Presently a thread of blue smoke stole up. Quietly creeping along, I got upon the nearer bluff and looked down. There was a sort of hearth built up at the base of the rock, with a brisk little lire burning upon it, but Perkins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... got 'em all on!" said Burnett. "She has got 'em all on; and how Jack held his own in the room with her I cannot understand. I took one look, and if mine had been a surgical case of stitches the last thread would have bust that instant. I don't believe I dare go out with you. This is a life and death game to Jack, and I won't risk smashing his future by not being able to keep sober in the face ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... Clumber belonged to the Dukes of Newcastle at one time; but to elucidate their settlement upon these vast estates and the subsequent division of the domains, through marriage, we must take up the thread of ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... inn, Strap took up our baggage and, marched behind me in the street with the knapsack on his back, as usual, so that we made a very whimsical appearance. I had dressed myself to the greatest advantage; that is, put on a clean ruffled shirt, and my best thread stockings: my hair (which was of the deepest red) hung down upon my shoulders, as lank and straight as a pound of candles; and the skirts of my coat reached to the middle of my leg; my waistcoat and breeches were of the same piece, and cut in the same ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... stillness is horrible, and the solemn grandeur of the scene surpasses conception. You feel the absence of sound—the oppression of absolute silence. Down, down, down, you see the river attenuated to a thread. If you could only hear that gurgling river, lashing with puny strength the massive walls that imprison it and hold it in their dismal shadow, if you could but see a living thing in the depth beneath you, if a bird ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... none too respectful comment—and took from his pocket a bit of virgin gold strung on a thread of deer sinew. ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... not need them. The minister's wife (a cloak), the banker's daughters (the new sleeve) - they had but to pass our window once, and the scalp, so to speak, was in my mother's hands. Observe her rushing, scissors in hand, thread in mouth, to the drawers where her daughters' Sabbath clothes were kept. Or go to church next Sunday, and watch a certain family filing in, the boy lifting his legs high to show off his new boots, ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... your left shoulder as your boat leaves the Narrows to thread the beautiful waterways that lead to Vancouver Island, you will see the summit of Mount Baker robed in its everlasting whiteness and always reflecting some wonderful glory from the rising sun, the golden noontide, ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... through the fabric of the prophetic books clear from Isaiah to Malachi is the phrase "in that day." Sometimes it thickens into "the day of the Lord," "the great day of the Lord," "Jehovah hath a great day," "at that time." About this thread is woven in turn the whole series of stirring scenes and events that are to mark the coming time. Sometimes it is of local application; most times of the future time, and a few times the meaning slides from one to the other, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... resembles the rogue novel in that it is well peppered with various isolated narratives strung upon the thread of the hero's experience. It differs chiefly in that the study of the hero is serious and without roguery. The conscious attempt to make it as good as a rogue novel on its own ground caused some of the chief faults of the book, the excess ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to abash Mr Venus. He hesitated, and said, 'Very true, sir;' and again, 'Very true, sir,' before resuming the thread of his discourse. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and cursed my cousin savagely. When three days had passed, and I was still at liberty, Adele plucked up heart, but, for the rest of our visit, upon sight of a gendarme she was apt to become distrait and lose the thread of her discourse.) ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... other cities of the Blue Coast, pretty places, coquettish, bepowdered and rouged like women fresh from their dressing tables! Besides there would be too many people there. Venice was better. They would thread the narrow, solitary silent canals there, stretched out in a gondola, kissing each other between smiles, pitying the poor unfortunate mortals crossing the bridges over them, unaware of how great a love was gliding beneath ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... or another, her laugh rang out. And her laugh fascinated Graham. There was a fibrous thrill in it, most sweet to the ear, that differentiated it from any laugh he had ever heard. It caused Graham to lose the thread of young Mr. Wombold's contention that what California needed was not a Japanese exclusion law but at least two hundred thousand Japanese coolies to do the farm labor of California and knock in the head the threatened eight-hour ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... exceptions occur, sex-parasitism appearing in both sex forms, and in some cases it is the female who degenerates and becomes wholly passive and dependent, but this is usually under conditions which afford in themselves an explanation. Thus, in the troublesome thread-worm (Heterodera schachtii), which infests the turnip plant, the sexes are at first alike, then both become parasitic, but the adult male recovers himself, is agile and like other thread-worms, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... little thinking what had been the events of the preceding night, he thought he might as well prove his devotion to the widow, by paying his respects in a snow-storm—but not in the attire of the day before—Mr Vanslyperken was too economical for that; so he remained in his loose thread-bare great-coat and foul-weather hat. Having first locked up his dog in the cabin, and entrusted the key to the corporal, he went on shore, and presented himself at the widow's door, which was opened by Babette, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... looked hard for such little bits of hands. First, cutting with those great heavy shears through the thick, stiff cloth; next, the braiding; and finally, the sewing together with the huge needle, and coarse, waxed thread. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... connection he noticed that a piece of wrought iron mounted on a cork float was attracted by other metals to a slight degree, and he observed also that an ordinary iron bar, if suspended horizontally by a thread, assumes invariably a north and south direction. These, with many other experiments of a similar nature, convinced him that the earth "is a magnet and a loadstone," which he says is a "new and till now ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
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