"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dearest husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short breeches, and pointed ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... published, but upon publication he has no rights except those given him by law, and these he can obtain only by a strict compliance with the requirements of the law. Any one who is sufficiently interested to read the first hundred pages of Drone's "Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions" will be well repaid for the effort, and will obtain considerable light upon how the "right of copying," or printing, a book developed, ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... invisible for their dizzy chattering on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... power," said young Wegg, "reminds me of a plan I've had in mind for some time. I find I've too much time on my hands, Mr. Merrick, and I cannot be thoroughly happy unless I'm occupied. Ethel's farms are let on shares and I'm a drone in the world's busy hive. But we're anchored here at Millville, so I've been wondering what I could do to improve the place and keep myself busy. It has seemed to me that the same rush of water in Little Bill Creek that runs the dynamos at Royal is in evidence—to a lesser extent—at ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... not so. He has made all that is grand in life, that is glorious in thought, depend upon our own exertions. This is as true of women as of men. Then the idler is a leech on himself—his own despoiler. An idle woman is as base a thing as an idle man. She was made for usefulness. A drone in any hive is a base bee—a nuisance, a ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... illustrations are poor in themselves, and are not assisted by the surrounding phraseology. We have seen how in the Republic, and in the earlier dialogues, figures of speech such as 'the wave,' 'the drone,' 'the chase,' 'the bride,' appear and reappear at intervals. Notes are struck which are repeated from time to time, as in a strain of music. There is none of this subtle art in the Laws. The illustrations, such as the two kinds of doctors, 'the three kinds of funerals,' ...
— Laws • Plato
... assented; but as Mrs. Delano wrote, she could not help smiling at her ideas of quietude. Sometimes rapid thumps on the tambourine might be heard, indicating that the saltarello was again in rehearsal. If a piffero strolled through the street, the monotonous drone of his bagpipe was reproduced in most comical imitation; and anon there was a gush of bird-songs, as if a whole aviary were in the vicinity. Indeed, no half-hour passed without audible indication that the little recluse was ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... melon. Pilgrims with great bundles on their backs stood staring vacantly at the walls or at the sea; monks in long grey cloaks, square hats, and long hair, passed in and out like bees about a hive, and from a distance came a musical drone, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... angry ants, among the green-fly on the rose-bushes. The drowsy hum of the kettle on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window, like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later with a helpless fly between her jaws. The first heat of the sun, drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full, sizzling ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... twice the time he would if he had proceeded more leisurely. In a word, everything is done with a bounce, and a thump, and an air, and a flourish, and sharp and eager motions, and perpetual volubility of tongue. His image is that of a blind beetle in the twilight, which, with incessant hum and drone and buzz, flies blundering into the face of every one it chances ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... droop in the heavy prison air; when I wrote that an honest laugh was never heard here, I ought to have made that one exception; he had a fair voice, too, and a large collection of songs, which he chanted out merrily, instead of merging all tunes into one dolorous drone. He was confined at first on the floor immediately under me, but, on the 20th. of May, changed his quarters into one of the large rooms in the main building, with windows opening back and front into the yard and the avenue; these latter were without bars. All through the evening of Sunday, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques recognized it for the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... believe, be frightful. In America, the "boys" get up so early, that it is said they frequently "catch the birds by their tails as they are going to roost;" and it is no doubt owing to this that they are so 'cute. Talk about "catching a weasel asleep," let me see any of my metropolitan drone friends who can ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... reproves me thereupon, More sweet than Nature's, when the drone Of bees is sweetest, and more deep Than when the rivers overleap The shuddering ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... sparkling silver, and snowy covers of the supper room were visible. Here a high-light gleamed upon a bare shoulder; there, a stalwart male back showed, blocked out in bold black upon the bright canvas. Waiters flitted noiselessly about. The drone of that vocal orchestra filled the place: the masculine conversation, the brass and wood-wind—the sweeter tones of women, the violins; their ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... west-wind singing to itself through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill fluted across the deepening silence that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... head far back and saw the machine no longer, it had set my brain spinning, and the pressure of his hands appeared to be urging it round and round, while his voice (for he talked without intermission) mingled and interwove itself with the drone of the music from the table. He was reciting verses; from his favourite poem, no doubt. But though the sound of them ran in my ears like a brook, I can ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... mind's eye I saw this mighty vessel as she had been, the heave of the fathomless sea below, the whirling battle-smoke about her, the air full of the crashing thunder of her guns as she quivered 'neath their discharge. I heard the humming drone of shells coming from afar, a hum that grew to a wail—a shriek—and the sickening crash as they smote her or threw up great waterspouts high as her lofty fighting-tops; I seemed to hear through it all the ring of electric bells from the various fire-controls, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... of vivid emerald where the water fell. To the north it was possible to make out the arms of a semaphore lying idle. There was no sound in the place. The river itself flowed silently. Only the occasional deep drone of a hornet or the note of a mosquito came to the ear. The sun seemed to be drawing the land together, sucking up all the ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of Christiania, from the heights of Egeberg, a well-wooded hill in the southern suburb, it is difficult to believe one's self in Icelandic Scandinavia,—the precise latitude of the Shetland Islands. A drowsy hum like the drone of bees seems to float up from the busy city below. The beautiful fjord, with its graceful promontories, its picturesque and leafy isles, might be Lake Maggiore or Como, so placid and calm is its pale blue surface. Turning ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive—— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the Deacon ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ribbon of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... bullet whizzed through the sultry air and whirled the stage driver's slouch hat from his head. Zip! Zip! Zip! and the air was alive with the whine and drone ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... THE DRONE: An old man by playing craftily at being on the eve of a great invention lives most comfortably on his brother's means; but forces accumulate against him and he is threatened with eviction ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... is an explosion of sound under the decent person's window, and a hand-organ starts off with a jerk like a freight train on a down grade, that joggles a whole string of crashing notes. Then it gets down to work, and its harsh, high-pitched, metallic drone makes the street ring for a moment. Then it is temporarily drowned by a chorus of shrill, small voices. The person—I am afraid his decency begins to drop off him here—leans on his broad window-sill and looks out. The ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Victoria. Better than this is the lot of our restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,—change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,—trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'shake up that drone and drunkard, Carlton; tell him that his master directs that the travelling carriage shall be ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... spring you rose up, all of a sudden, and started in to cure me of being a drone. The medicine you used was strong; it did the business pretty thoroughly. You've no kick coming at the result. I'm going ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... the whining drone of a man's pleading voice and a woman's shrill, insistent tones, a monotony of sound ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... troth," said the fool, thinking. "Since Eve fell into sin, women's counsel is often the best. You, Nunkey, shall be turned into a butterfly, and not into a drone, and grace the flowers as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... drone of a bagpipe, and a good supply of wind is required to fill it. Proverbially applied to those who undertake more than ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... at the screen, and a tiny drone-torpedo came winging its way from the violet dome. It came to within a thousand yards of them and suddenly crashed into an unseen barrier. Broken and blazing, it came falling down ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... waves broke languidly and heavily on the shore, as though sighing "Ouf!" and how slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom, that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's song and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... with me that ours was never the love of a man and woman whose hearts were attuned to one another, and sang in perfect unison. We really drifted into an engagement more because of propinquity than anything else. I am a drone—the product of society at its worst—and you are one of the workers, Donald. I feel quite sure that you will always gain your truest happiness in your work. Although I know how you love children (and I don't), I cannot think of you in the role of a married man, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... sultry-scented trees, The soul of many sunbeams at its core. Well-pleased the wanderer landed on this shore, Beholding all its pleasantness, how sweet And soft, to the tired soul, to the tired feet. And so he sat him down beneath the boughs, And there a low wind seemed to drone and drowse Among the leaves as it were gone astray And like to faint forwearied by the way; Till the persistence of the sound begat An heaviness within him as he sat: So when Sleep chanced to come that way, he found A captive not unwilling to be bound, And on his body those fine fetters ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... have changed; his eyes were bright and feverish; his face was drawn; his voice had lost its shipmaster's brusqueness, and had acquired the drone of the seaman's shore conventicle. There was no doubt about his earnestness; in Clay's mind, there was no doubt about the complications which would ensue ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... and was shining into the room. By its light he could see the outline of the beds. Around him there ascended a choral harmony composed of snores of every degree, reaching from the mild, mellow intonation of Clive, down to the deep, hoarse, sepulchral drone of Uncle Moses. In spite of his vexation about his wakefulness, a smile passed over Bob's face, as he listened to those astonishing voices of ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... the drone emitting A, so that A minor must be regarded as the principal key of this instrument. Indeed, Macdonald, in his Complete Tutor for the Great Highland Bagpipe, gives the odd rule that the "piper is to pay no attention to the flats and sharps marked on the clef, as they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... lived in the place an eccentric, half-witted old woman, who, for the small sum of one halfpenny, used to fall a-dancing on the street to amuse children, and rejoiced in the euphonious though somewhat obscure appellation of "Dribble Drone." Some young fellows, on seeing the eagle divested of its skin, and looking remarkably clean and well-conditioned, suggested that it should be sent to "Dribble;" and, accordingly, in the character of a ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... North, Fox, and Co. Gowff'd Willie like a ba', man; Till Suthron raise, an' coost their claise Behind him in a raw, man: An' Caledon threw by the drone, An' did her whittle draw, man; An' swoor fu' rude, thro' dirt an' bluid, To mak it ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the engines were checked, turning at half speed for a number of revolutions, then ceasing as a bell rang. The only sound was the soughing gurgle of the water as it lapped along the steel plates, and the distant drone of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered, the periods lengthened. ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... the anthropomorphic tendency is further shown by providing the insect with two pairs of limbs each with four or five digits, and a conventionalized face, eyes and mouth. In Pl. 2, fig. 1, the bee is represented without mouthparts but antennae only. This may indicate a drone or a queen bee that takes no active part in the work of gathering honey or making comb. Fig. 2 is perhaps the least reduced of any of the figures and shows the worker bee with ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... good to have things happen, Bat," Standing went on presently. "Hark at the roar of the falls. What is it? Five hundred thousand horsepower of water, summer and winter. Listen to the drone of the grinders." He shook his head. "It's a great song, boy, and they never get tired of singing it. There's only thirty-six of 'em at present. Thirty-six. We'll have a hundred and thirty-six some ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts' top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom's space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and jetmarines were also ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... Secundus was then alive, - Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon finished ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... come. The shouts and hootings ceased. Out of the silence there arose only the champing of a horse's bit or the hysterical giggle of a woman. The high painful drone of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... again and swam easily, as I thought, shoreward. The song went on, but it seemed to ring in my ears as the drone of our miller's pipes comes up from the river on a still summer evening. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... his climbing. The men on the platform fore and aft ceased work, watching the mate and the climbing man intently. The silence following the usual drone of ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... is working well," he said. "It is making a man of Walter. He has been a drone, hitherto. Now he has become a worker, and, though I may not like him better, for he was always near to my ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined something deep, vastly deep, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... by the different shade of green; grass is a deep green, corn appears paler and yet brighter—perhaps the long winter has given it the least touch of yellow. Daisies are up at last—very late indeed. Big humble-bees, grey striped, enter the garden and drone round the banks, searching everywhere for a fit hole in which to begin the nest. It is pleasant to hear them; after the dreary silence the old familiar burr-rr is very welcome. Spotted orchis leaves are up, and the palm-willow bears its yellow pollen. Happily, the wild anemones ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... I have is my own, if labour in getting, and care in augmenting, can make a right of property; and no drone shall feed on my honeycomb. Think on it well: what I have said is not without reflection, and what I resolve upon ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... With but the tiny coverlet And pillow for the baby's head; And pray Thou, may The door stand open and the day Send ever in a gentle breeze, With fragrance from the locust-trees, And drowsy moan of doves, and blur Of robin-chirps, and drone of bees, With afterhushes of the stir Of intermingling sounds, and then The good-wife and the smile of her Filling the silences again— The cricket's call, And the wee cot, Dear Lord ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... pretty garments, with which she had been bedecked, drenched in her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat. The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the men who were making merry without. Then suddenly the news of what had occurred spread among the guests, and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble of excited voices, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both. ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the thumping of stocking feet ceased with the drone of the drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees, then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr. Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the dish-water, she carried the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and said good-by to Mother Binning and went. The ash-tree, the hazels that fringed the water, a point of mossy rock, hid the cot. The drone of the wheel no longer reached his ears. It was as though all that had sunk into the earth. Here was only the deep, the green, and lonely glen. He found a pool that invited, cast, and awaited the speckled victim. In the morning he had had fair luck, but ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... thanks for your hospitality; I shall hope to return it with interest the first time you are in our neighborhood. Mademoiselle, put on your best looks to-morrow, along with your wedding finery; remember that my son's bride must do honor to my son's taste. Justin! my coach—drone, vagabond, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... set the lantern on a table, dropped wearily upon a rough bench before it and looked at the jars beside him, lifted his hand and opened a compact, but thoroughly efficient field wireless "set." His right fingers dropped to the key, and the whining drone of the wireless rose higher and higher as he tuned up. He reached for his receivers, ducked his head and adjusted them with one hand, and sent a call spitting tiny blue sparks from ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the musick of the bagpipe every day, at Armidale, Dunvegan, and Col. Dr. Johnson appeared fond of it, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... that if such a decree is gone forth, you are supporting an idle man in vain?[1]—What end is preaching to answer? Let him lecture with ever such state and assurance, if the time, the place, the manner be all fixed: I say he is an ignorant, lazy drone, who is picking his poor people's pockets; but, perhaps, it was decreed that it ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... advanc there superstischous ways & by boystrous words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let justies and merci be goyned.... You ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... was resting against Luigi's; weariness had overcome him, and for the past five minutes he had been peacefully sleeping. The old ladies had dropped their voices to a lulling drone, to help him to steal the rest his brother wouldn't take him up-stairs to get. Luigi listened a moment to Angelo's regular breathing, then said in a voice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at night the deer feed ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... to find a tent somewhere, and inasmuch as there were none to be had here at Linderman, he would probably have to return to Dyea. That would delay him seriously— enough, perhaps, so that the jaws of winter would close down upon him. Through the drone of pattering drops there came the faint sound of a cough. Mr. Linton sat up in bed. "Pneumonia!" he exclaimed. Well, Jerry was getting exactly what he deserved. He had called him, Tom, an "old fool," ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Of a lazy drone, And a bed on a cushioned knee; But in wild free ways I will spend my days, And at night on the roofs ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... commanders gathered round the great oaken table which ran down the centre of the hall. The mellow evening light was streaming through the three western windows, while the distant babble of the soldiers upon the Castle Green sounded like the sleepy drone of insects. Monmouth paced with quick uneasy steps up and down the further end of the room until all were seated, when he turned towards ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... I won't let it spoil my life," she resolved while she bit back a sob. "Whatever happens, I am not going to let my life be ruined." She had repeated this so often that it had begun to drone in her mind like a line out of a hymn-book; and she was still repeating it when she swept by Stephen without so much as a word or a look. A dangerous mood was upon her. Nothing mattered, she felt, if she could only prove to him that she also had been trifling; that his kiss had meant as little ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... too apt to push on more elevated Spirits to renew the Encounter for atchieving new Conquests, by hazarding too rashly all their former Glory. Accordingly, every Body now began to make his utmost Efforts; and look'd upon himself as a Drone, if he was not employ'd in doing something or other towards pushing forward the Siege of Barcelona it self, and raising proper Batteries for that Purpose. But, after all, it must in Justice be acknowledg'd, ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... steady, humming drone, like a swarm of angry bees—felt a peculiar, soothing warmth about his head; and then ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... earth is burdened by So many a fool, so many a drone, Whose thoughts and deeds are all awry— These trees of flesh, these forms of ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... feet go? how would they stumble and fall? If the hands did not fasten and take hold, how then should we eat? If the feet went not, where then would the hands get anything? Only the maw, that lazy drone, lies in the midst of the body, and is fatted like a swine. This parable, said Luther, teacheth us that mankind should love one another; as also the Greeks' pictures do teach concerning two men, the one lame and the other blind, who showed kindness the one to ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... sit here forever," she mused. "If someone could enchant me, just as I am, with the sun warm on the tips of my toes and this little wind, so full of flowers, cool upon my face. If I need never again hear anything save the drone of sleepy bees, the chirping of fat robins and the ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... squeak of tree-frog as it grieves. The resting eye broods o'er the running grass, Or nodding gestures of the bowed wild oats; Watches the oleander lancers pass, And the bright flashing of the oriole notes. Hushed are the senses with the drone of bees And the far glimmer of the mid-day heat; Dreams stealing o'er one like the incoming seas, Soft as the rustling zephyrs in the wheat; While on the breeze is borne the call of Love To Love, dear Love, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... shadows and the rising drone of night sounds and the whispering of the breeze which was all that was left of the wind, the man came riding cautiously up through a draw to the willow growth just below Sinkhole watering place. He tied his horse there and went on afoot, stepping on rocks ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... to say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... what to do with them. But at length he discovered the ringleader of these "gluttonous loiterers." Him he "worthily punished," and calling the others together, he told them very plainly that any man among them who did not do his share should be banished from the fort as a drone, till he ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... encounters; he it was who always scratched the enemy's skin. The painter knew more about fencing than art. He was a champion with various weapons; he could box, and was even skilled in the favorite blows of the prize fighters of the slums. "Useless as a drone, and as dangerous, too," fretted his father. And yet in the back of his troubled mind fluttered an irresistible satisfaction—an animal pride in the thought that this hare-brained terror was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in neglect,—as some fools pass ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... dull drone of the heavy stuff—the practised ear could gauge its fall, and I retreated a few yards into the passage. The courtyard outside caught it, and the entire chateau trembled violently at the concussion. But why, why these ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... the familiar redolences of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf. These were far away: they had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams. What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a steam-organ many streets away. It belonged to a roundabout, and regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled with the ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... thongless hunting-crop; I hurled my sandwich case at the brute; in fact, I really don't know what more I could have done. And still we lumbered on through the deepening dusk, with that dark uncouth shape lumbering ahead of us, and a drone of lugubrious music floating in our ears. Suddenly Esme bounded aside into some thick bushes, where we could not follow; the wail rose to a shriek and then stopped altogether. This part of the story I always hurry over, because it is really rather horrible. When ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... drowsy drone of honey-laden bees, The poppied breath of gardens blooming fair, The scent of elder blossoms, sweet and rare, Come stealing in on balmy southern breeze; And dying lays, whose long lost melodies Still haunt old storied ruins ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... Danced down beneath the moon, until the night Grew dreamy with a shadowy sweet delight, And with the high-risen moon came pensive thought, And men in love's despite must grow distraught And loiter in the dance, and maidens drop Their gathered raiment, and the fifer stop His dancing notes the pensive drone that chid, And as they wander to their dwellings, hid By the black shadowed trees, faint melody, Mournful and sweet, their soft good-night must be. Far better spoil the gathering vat bore in Unto the pressing shed, than midst the din Of falling houses ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, but it was ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... strides he made his way in the direction in which the monotonously mournful bells were calling him. He arrived early; there was scarcely any one in the church; a deacon was reading the service in the chair; the measured drone of his voice—sometimes broken by a cough—fell and rose at even intervals. Lavretsky placed himself not far from the entrance. Worshippers came in one by one, stopped, crossed themselves, and bowed ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... upon the latter course; and was walking towards his door, along the black alley to the left of the church, when I was suddenly stopped by the sound as of an organ close by, an organ, yes, quite plainly, and the voice of choristers and the drone of a litany. So the church was not shut, after all! I retraced my steps to the top of the lane. All was dark and in complete silence. Suddenly there came again a faint gust of organ and voices. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... wild, weird strain grew louder, and the howling more piteous, till the boat reached the vessel's side, when the drone and squeal of the pipes ceased on the instant, and the dog's howl was changed to a loud, joyous bark, as his handsome head appeared at the gangway, the eyes flashing in the sunlight, ears cocked, and the thick mass of hair about ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... industrial world were too busy and had too little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. And music ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... penetrate our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... nothing ever happens in and around Kennedy Square that Mockburn doesn't know of. Many a time has he helped various unsteady gentlemen up the steps of their houses and stowed them carefully and noiselessly away inside, only to begin his rounds again, stopping at every corner to drone out his "All's we-l-l!" a welcome cry, no doubt, to the stowaways, but a totally unnecessary piece of information to the inhabitants, nothing worse than a tippler's tumble having happened in the forty years of the old ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hear how Lord Strutt has bespoke his liveries at Lewis Baboon's shop? Don't you see how that old fox steals away your customers, and turns you out of your business every day, and you sit like an idle drone, with your hands in your pockets? Fie upon it. Up man, rouse thyself; I'll sell to my shift before I'll be so used by that knave."* You must think Mrs. Bull had been pretty well tuned up by Frog, who chimed in with her learned harangue. No further delay now, ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... amiss! Doomed by Athenian mobs to banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... seemed in her dream, followed them out of that hateful prison, for the bolts clanged behind her, down stairs and into the courtyard, where the sun's light almost blinded her and the fresh air struck her hot brow like ice. Then there were more voices, and people moving to and fro and the drone of a priest praying and a touch upon her hand from which she shrank. And oh! she wished that dream were done, for it was long, long. It wearied her, and grasped her heart with a ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... dear old times! there once it was my hap, Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap; From books degraded, there I sat at ease, A drone, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... was a three-stepped boat which. Verplanck had built for racing, a beautiful craft, managed much like a racing automobile. As she started from the dock, the purring drone of her eight cylinders sent her feathering over the waves like a skipping stone. She sank back into the water, her bow leaping upward, a cloud of spray in ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... back against the wooden column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant—it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repetitions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my mind—incantation. That was ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... few words I can answer you," said the book-hawker. "I was once a monk, a lazy drone. Our convent was rich, and we had nothing to do except to appear for so many hours every day in church, and repeat or chant words, of the sense of which we did not for a moment trouble ourselves. Copies of the blessed gospel, however, were ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... bare "lands" and barren class-rooms, in time waxed wearisome to Sylvanus. He grew to loathe the drone of the classes, the snuffy prelections of professors long settled on the lees of their intellects, who still moused about among the dusty speculations which had done duty for thought when their lectures were new, thirty years ago. "A West Indian nigger," said Sylvanus quaintly, "ain't in it with ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... place. Then, after all, it was a ridiculous position to be smoked out of your fortune with brimstone as soon as you had made it. You would have a very mean opinion of a Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose. He must say he thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea. The drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really cannot attend to the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much to see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the liberty of looking about ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... out of their own hoards; but the bees were selfish and rude, justifying themselves on the ground that Tangle and Mossy were not subjects of their queen, and charity must begin at home, though indeed they had not one drone in their poorhouse at the time. Even the blinking moles would fetch them an earth-nut or a truffle now and then, talking as if their mouths, as well as their eyes and ears, were full of cotton wool, or their ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... tell you the whole story, jest like it was," she went on in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a long way off. "That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin' shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a political race, and we got acquainted ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... because she favoured him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears—Mr. Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon me and reforming my errors of judgment, or perhaps that ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... back—unless you happen to belong to a battery of "Archies." When you are a mere gravel-crusher or a driver in the artillery you have to grin and abide; and the grin is apt to deteriorate into a grimace. You can become accustomed, if not reconciled, to shell-fire; but I personally never heard the drone of an enemy plane overhead without a prickly sensation down the spine and an urgent desire for a large dug-out forty feet below ground; and there were very few of these in Palestine. At one stage in the journey to the dump a wounded Australian made a spirited, if inadequate attempt to bring down ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... permission to sit up and see the moon rise, was perched upon the other end of the bench, Petunia in her arms. A distant drone, which had been audible for some time, was gradually becoming a steady humming roar. A few moments later and a belated hydro-aeroplane passed across the face of the moon, a dragon-fly silhouette against ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... imitation of the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their homely ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... side of the gate were lighted as usual. From one came the low drone of two men's voices; the other was silent. No other sound save that of the rattle of bit-chains as a horse ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... time the intermittent sound of music had grown insistent and continuous. Solemn bodies of priests approached, series after series of the shaven, white-robed ministers of Amen. The murmur had grown to an uproar. The wild clamor of trumpet, pipe, cymbal and sistrum, with the long drone of the arghool as undertone, drifted by. The upper orders of priests followed in the vibrating wake of the musicians. Then came Loi, high-priest to the patron god of Thebes, walking alone, his ancient figure most pitifully mocked by the richness ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... young man had charge of the meeting, and he stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper Cone, who had lost her baby the week ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... short interval, we saw a funeral procession stretching away over the plains—a straggling procession on foot, in dingy white dresses, carrying banners and flags and parasols. The coffin was slung on a pole between bearers, and the wailing drone of a horn, and the thud of a big drum came down the wind. Then the dust rose again, and the melancholy sight was shut out. How curious was this little pleasure spot of the Europeans, in the midst of this barbaric setting, in the heart of old, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... employed in gathering together a little Stock of Gain from the finest Flowers about the Town, I mean the Ladies and the Beaus. I have a numerous Swarm of Children, to whom I give the best Education I am able: But, Sir, it is my Misfortune to be married to a Drone, who lives upon what I get, without bringing any thing into the common Stock. Now, Sir, as on the one hand I take care not to behave myself towards him like a Wasp, so likewise I would not have him look upon me as an Humble-Bee; for which Reason I do all I can to put him upon laying up ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Grendall, first cousin to Miles Grendall, and abstained on behalf of his relatives. An overture was made to Sir Damask Monogram, who certainly could afford the contest. But Sir Damask did not see his way. Melmotte was a working bee, while he was a drone,—and he did not wish to have the difference pointed out by Mr Melmotte's supporters. Moreover, he preferred his yacht and ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... impudence! They haven't the first principles of good manners. And some of 'm in a rage bawl the answer for themselves. Hear that! No, Phil; No, Pat, no: devotion's good policy.—You're not drinking! Are you both of ye asleep? why do ye leave me to drone away like this, when it 's conversation I want, as in the days of our first parents, before the fig-leaf?—and you might have that for scroll and figure on the social banner of the hypocritical Saxon, who's a gormandising animal behind his decency, and nearer to the Arch-devourer ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... holiday-spirit is unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the Cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the Wood-Thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The Bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... to give to the Indian conjuror as an artist, either in sleight-of-hand, in juggling, or as an illusionist. His tricks are as "old as my unpaid bills" and from time immemorial have been performed with the same monotonous patter and the irritating drone of the "bean" or so called musical instrument. I may here say that this musical torture is used to disguise movements of the showman's hand in the same way as the European uses his magic wand, an instrument that does not appeal to me at all, ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... no need of so much gold. Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here, Till the breath of Battle was hot and near, But have sown through the land these useless hoards To spring into shining blades of swords, And keep thine honour sweet and clear. * * * * * Then into his dungeon I locked the drone, And left him to feed there all alone In the honey-cells of his golden hive: Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan Was heard from those massive walls of stone, Nor again was the Kalif seen alive.' This is the story, strange ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... but his life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only—or being believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must utter or die—nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither head nor tail are in reality ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... and pits and houses, now ruined, now whole. By the roadside little huts some three feet square built by their owners, who gathered around little blazing fires now that their day's work was done. The low drone of homing planes filled the air as one by one they swooped down to earth, or rose on some perilous mission, while bursting shrapnel added golden balls of fire to the firmament of heaven, now a deep, ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... thousand scents, and it was hard for them to realize that at that very moment America might be suffering from zero weather or swept by blizzards. Here life moved along serenely and dreamily, lulled by the sound of birds and drone of locusts, wrapped in the warm ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... to which a mid-Victorian wig, kept in place by a band of plaits around the brow, was not unbecoming. Nevertheless, Aunt Emily was entirely modern, modern with that up-to-date femininity which with regard to men takes its key from the bee's impulse toward the drone, stinging him to death once he has fulfilled ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... he said; "not industry alone. Keep good company, my boy. Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... time by the railing of the church, which was lighted up for evening service, listening blankly to the solemn drone of the organ within, unable to summon up resolution to move from the spot and present ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... watched the other as he filled and emptied his glass again. "It is the good wine," said Flores. The candle-light cast a huge, distorted shadow of the Mexican's head and shoulders on the farther wall. The faint drone of the hot wind came to them from the plains above. The candle-flame fluttered. Flores reached down for the jug and set it on the table. "All night we shall drink of the good wine, for no man ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... sabbath-drawler of old saws, Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily; But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy To embattail and to wall about thy cause With iron-worded proof, hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk Brow-beats ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... able to rehearse My Ewie's praise in proper verse, I 'd sound it forth as loud and fierce As ever piper's drone could blaw; The Ewie wi' the crookit horn, Wha had kent her might hae sworn Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor far awa'; Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... about pressing business. But in his sudden surprise he had not time to think of assuming either the nasal drone or the scriptural words peculiar to these black-coated gentry. Struck by his tone, the sergeant sprang ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... the name chorus was given to a primitive bagpipe without a drone. The instrument is best known by the Latin description contained in the apocryphal letter of St Jerome, ad Dardanum: "Chorus quoque simplex, pellis cum duabus cicutis aereis, et per primam inspiratur per secundam vocem emittit." Several illuminated MSS.[1] from the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... not get angry or excited. Games of all kinds that have a tendency to make him nervous must be avoided. The same caution applies to exciting literature. In short, a patient with organic heart disease must be a drone in the hum of this busy, fast-rushing life, if he would hope to keep the spark of life for many years. Sleep, rest and quiet is a better motto for you than the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... papas worried about notes an' bills; they lay on downy beds of ease with the last best seller, an' followed the fortunes of the bold youth until he found his treasure at last in the unhidden chest of the heroine; they created what we are pleased to call the servant problem, which is really the drone problem, caused by the added number who toil not, but have to be toiled for; they grew in fat an' folly. Some were both ox-eyed an' peroxide. Homeliness was to them the only misfortune, fat the only burden, and pimples the great ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... bagpipe is of all instruments the most uncanny and weird. When you see a Highland regiment marching to the music of bagpipes, it seems to be the only true music to which soldiers should march. Its wails and shrieks sound like the groans of the dying, and the drone of the bass notes has a fierce sound as it throbs and marks the tramp of the soldiers' feet, that speaks of battle and conquests, and the advance ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, April 22, 1897, Vol. 1, No. 24 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the drone-fly (Eristalis tenax), force the air through the tiny air-passages in their sides, and as these passages are closed by little plates, the plates vibrate to and fro and make sound-waves. Again, what are those curious sounds ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... protest. No native of Costaguana intruded there. This was the Italian stronghold. Even the Sulaco policemen on a night patrol let their horses pace softly by, bending low in the saddle to glance through the window at the heads in a fog of smoke; and the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory narrative seemed to sink behind them into the plain. Only now and then the assistant of the chief of police, some broad-faced, brown little gentleman, with a great deal of Indian in him, would put in an appearance. Leaving his man outside with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... roof that is flat and has things on it that make it livable, where you can walk, disport yourself, or sleep; a house-top view of your neighbors' affairs; an airy pleasance with a full sweep of stars; a place to listen of nights to the drone of the city; a place of observation, and if you ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... in full blast, the hummers humming, the shouters bellowing, the tappers hard at work upon the benches, while every now and then came a musical cyclone of "Incomparable! Divine!" from the trained phalanx who intoned their applause, their united voices sweeping over the tumult as the drone of the wind dominates the roar of the sea. It was madness—insufferable madness! If this were allowed to pass, there was an end of all musical justice in Greece. Policles' conscience would not permit him to be still. Standing upon his bench with waving hands and upraised ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... he thundered. "Have you again dared to save life, and neglect the object of our expedition? Fool! you will yet be driven forth as a drone from the hive. The girl's dead; throw her into the sea; she will be a dainty morsel for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... The spectres walked in the nocturnal silence and the traces they left behind them were light, curious, and hardly distinguishable. Whispered conversations were heard—lifeless words. The dead walked at random, without any denned order. At the beginning the voices merged into a general drone, and only afterwards, by straining one's ears, it was possible to distinguish separate ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... in grass and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the grass was scant, and that his bed was scratchy. For a moment ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... minutes she laved herself, singing softly the while to herself as is customary with many Polynesian native women when bathing, when suddenly, through the humming drone of the beating surf on the windward reef, she heard the ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Their alert ears caught the sounds of a distant scuffle. Then a pistol shot jarred the peaceful drone ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... love, of thee,'" began Charlie, but Rose cut him short by saying as reproachfully as she could, while the culprit stood regarding her with placid satisfaction: "You ought to have been up and at work like the rest of the boys. I felt like a drone in a hive of very busy bees when I saw them all ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... possible study the colony inside the hive. To do this you will need smoke to subdue the guards and a veil to protect the face. Can you find the queen? Is she larger than the workers? Examine for honey-comb, bee-bread, worker brood, queen cells and drone cells. If possible study the actions ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,—not permanent way,—built ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... does his old Covenant bring, With State raz'd out, and interlin'd with KING. But Nadabs Zeal has too severe a Doom; Whilst serving an ungrateful Absalom, His strength all spent his Greatness to create, He's now laid by a cast-out Drone of State. He rowz'd that Game by which he is undone, By fleeter Coursers now so far outrun, That fiercer Mightier Nimrod in the Chace, Till quite thrown out, and lost he ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... which was to be their future home. The pipers stood at the threshold of Jack Dwyer, and his daughter departed from under the "roof-tree" to the tune of "Joy be with you"; and then the lilters, heading the body-guard of the bride, plied drone and chanter right merrily until she had entered her new home, thanked her old friends (who did all the established civilities, and cracked all the usual jokes attendant on the occasion); and Andy bolted the ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... The drone of the engine having died away down the avenue, I presently found myself alone, but as I crossed the hall in the direction of the library, intending to walk out upon the southern lawns, I saw Val Beverley coming toward me from ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... did the Tonneraire thus prove herself a crack ship. A crack ship with a crack crew and officers, remember; for the best of ships is but a drone unless well managed. Not even a drone, indeed; for a drone is a most duty-full bee, and a most respectable member of the apiarian republic. There is a vast deal of very indifferent music in the very best of fiddles, and I feel quite convinced that had ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... building. He continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on his hands and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black boulder shadowed his eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone and clatter of voices below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending to drop off into a doze of ennui. But all the while he was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... wight, whose drone Bores, sotto voce, you alone With flat colloquial pressure: Debarr'd from general talk, you droop Beneath his buzz, from orient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... gravely. "Ole Gee-Gee is pleased with you. You have demonstrated something between the ears besides strawberry Jello. You have just described the objective of Project Pegasus. We intend to shoot the beast into space and bring the top stage home again by drone control." ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... she said, in her level, crystal-clear tones; "you know nothing of a man. Your men are maromeros. They are fit only to roll cigarettes in the shade until the sun strikes and shrivels them up. They drone in your hammocks and you comb their hair and feed them with fresh fruit. My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home to me more of a man than one thousand of ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... little drama of serious interest was going on upstairs. There sat Kate before the looking-glass, with flushed cheeks and quivering mouth. The low drone of many voices came to her through the floor. Then a dull silence and one voice, and Nancy Joe coming and going ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine |
