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Treadmill   /trˈɛdmˌɪl/   Listen
Treadmill

noun
1.
An exercise device consisting of an endless belt on which a person can walk or jog without changing place.
2.
A mill that is powered by men or animals walking on a circular belt or climbing steps.  Synonyms: tread-wheel, treadwheel.
3.
A job involving drudgery and confinement.  Synonym: salt mine.



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"Treadmill" Quotes from Famous Books



... continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been consigned to the treadmill. But the whole was ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... place this world is, anyway. How hard we have to work just to keep the flesh on our bones and that flesh covered, even with nothing better than homespun. And we are getting a little tired of it all, aren't we, my dear? Just a little tired of the treadmill, where, like a sheep in a dairy, we pace our limited beat to bring a handful of inadequate butter. We have trudged to and fro about long enough, and have half a mind to throw up the contract with fate. But hold on a bit. There is something worse than too much work, and that is idleness. ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... office, smoking a good cigar, he found a new interest in the letters and documents left there for his consideration. After all, life was a game. Even the early red men had their sport. Modern routine work without diversion was a treadmill, prisonlike existence. Delbridge was the happy medium. The jovial speculator had never heard of such a fine-spun thing as a conscience. What if Irene and Buckton were having their fun; could he not also enjoy himself? ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... toil but a treadmill? Think not of the grind, But think of the grist, what is done and to do, The world growing better, more like to God's mind, By long, faithful labor of helpers ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... strong muscles, his handsome, boyish face, with its cluster of chestnut hair and steady grey eyes. All that, he knew, wanted life, animation, movement. At twenty-three he was longing for something to take him out of the treadmill round in which he had been fixed for five years. He had no taste for handing out money in exchange for cheques, in posting up ledgers, in writing dull, formal letters. He would have been much happier with an old flannel shirt, open ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... by the most painful economy and daily scrimping; and how can the children consent to stay on, starving body and soul? That explains the 3,318 abandoned farms in Maine at present. And the farmers' wives! what monotonous, treadmill lives! Constant toil with no wages, no allowance, no pocket money, no vacations, no pleasure trips to the city nearest them, little of the pleasures of correspondence; no time to write, unless a near relative is dead or dying. Some one says that their only chance ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... Treadmill, she's all right. Sapps Court's all right of itself. But it ain't the Court I was tracking out. If it was, they'd have known the name of Daverill. Why—the place ain't no bigger than a prison yard! About the length of down your back-garden to the water's edge. It's the wrong ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... you before," said Charlton, "it's conditions that make the human animal whatever it is. It's in the harness of conditions—the treadmill of conditions—the straight jacket of conditions. Change the conditions ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... was one of the earliest of Roman writers. Born at Sarsina in Umbria, of free parentage, he at first worked on the stage at Rome, but lost his savings in speculation. Then for some time he worked in a treadmill, but finally gained a living by translating Greek comedies into Latin. Twenty of his plays have come down to us. They are lively, graphic, and full of fun, depicting a mixture of Greek ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light on ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... going to have us all before the assizes, mother. We'll never get off without the treadmill, any way: it's well av' the whole kit of us don't have to go over the wather at ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time spent in walking the wards ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the gravity of the beggars," he laughed. "Not a smile on them. Solemn as Presbyterians. 'Tention! Present! Recover! Not a lazy bone in their bodies. I say, Collins: a person could make a perpetual motion, with a fly on a sort of a treadmill? Ah! but then it would n't pass muster unless it went of its own accord—would it? Perpetual motion's a thing I've been giving my attention to lately. You remember you advised me to study mechanics? Well, I 've been thinking of arranging ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... world. Certain Alguazils—very like some other Alguazils that I know nearer home—having stood by quietly to see the friendless stranger insulted and assaulted, now felt it their duty to apprehend the poor nun for murderous violence: and had there been such a thing as a treadmill in Valladolid, Kate was booked for a place on it without further inquiry. Luckily, injustice does not always prosper. A gallant young cavalier, who had witnessed from his windows the whole affair, had seen ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... than any other form it is wasted, because of a false regard for social conventions. At how many calls are both parties bored! How many persons—women in particular, who have not the man's freedom in selecting associates—continue in the treadmill round of an uncongenial social circle! To escape from this may require the special exercise of will, and the incurring of criticism, but these ought to be assumed. However, in most cases, a woman may gradually escape ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... privation and work. But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him. But our philanthropies in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... any difference with my baby?" Sadie asked anxiously, her mind working like a treadmill in its ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... they will extend the same favour to us," said Clayley: "God knows we stand in need of rest. I'd give them three months' pay for an hour upon the treadmill, only ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... over my want of curiosity reminds me that on this very occasion Charles Greville offered to take me all over the Coldbath Fields Prison, and show me the delights of the treadmill, etc., and expressed great astonishment that I did not enthusiastically accept this opportunity of seeing such a cheerful spectacle, and still more amazement at my general want of enlightened curiosity, which he appeared to consider ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... beautiful, but she is so small, and somewhat dumpy, that she did not look much like an Orphee. To make the opera shorter they combined the first and second acts, and to allow Orphee to go from hell to heaven without letting down the curtain they had invented a sort of treadmill on which Orphee and Eurydice should walk while the landscape behind them moved. It was a very ungraceful way of walking. They looked as if they were struggling up a hill ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... he sent out no sparks, he carried his own fuel, he made little noise, and he would not explode. His only failing was that he would leave the track; and to remedy this defect the early railroad builders hit upon a happy device. Sometimes they would fix a treadmill inside the car; two horses would patiently propel the caravan, the seats for passengers being arranged on either side. So unformed was the prevalent conception of the ultimate function of the railroad, and ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... things more ship-shape. It doesn't leave room for regret. And there is always the future, the happier to-morrow to which our thoughts go out. I get to thinking of the city again, of the hundreds of women I know going like hundreds of crazy squirrels on their crazy treadmill of amusements, and of the thousands and thousands of women who are toiling without hope, going on in the same old rut from day to day, cooped up in little flats and back rooms, with bad air and bad food and bad circulation, while I ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... at Deercut, five miles off, and walked thither. It had been made, said the hatter, for a young sporting party who attended to a gentleman's stables, and knew a thing or two. He had got into trouble, it was explained, and was "doing his time on the circular staircase," which I took to mean the treadmill. That was the reason the article had been thrown on the maker's hands. It seemed just the thing Tempest described. The top was as flat as the lid of a work-box; indeed, it was precisely like a somewhat broad-brimmed chimney-pot-hat cut down to half height; and after a little ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed

... that yearning towards the miracle of a sun quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved west across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have all, in their day ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... murderer, forger and bad man of the border, in bed, snoring as if he was glad he had always stuck to the treadmill of virtue, and had never murdered a wife to get another with money, or had raised a check for a cool million or so without the formalities of a pious purloiner from the people's purse. No criminal in history had ever slept with a smoother rhythm to his ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... ever climbed a treadmill with more hopeless despair than Buel worked in his little room under the lofty roof. He knew no one; there were none to speak to him a cheering or comforting word; he was ignorant even of the names of the men who accepted the articles from his pen, which appeared unsigned in the daily papers ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr

... absolutely useless if its object is to prevent false witness. Should there be any likelihood of a persecution for perjury, a two-faced Testament-kisser will be on his guard, and be very careful to tell only such lies as cannot be clearly proved against him. He dreads the prospect of daily exercise on the treadmill, he loathes the idea of picking oakum, and his gorge rises at the thought of brown bread and skilly. But so long as that danger is avoided, there are hosts of witnesses, most of them very good Christians, who have been suckled on the Gospel ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... all ways of spelling the name of the blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do at home in the treadmill. ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis

... became immediately successful, not so much for adaptability to the treadmill of that calling as for the brightness and distinctive character of his writing. He easily established a reputation as a humorist, and while he fairly deserved the title he often regretted that he could ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field

... Hodson violently. "I say, old chap, what would you have gained by overtaking the lady?" Cintras sniffed; Berkeley laughingly remarked that the staircase reminded him of the sort you see at a harvest with a horse on the treadmill. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... treated, to say the least, than were Doria's or the King of France's own. Rank and delicate nurture were respected on neither side: a gallant Corsair like Dragut had to drag his chain and pull his insatiable oar like any convict at the treadmill, and a future grand master of Malta might chance to take his seat on the rowing bench beside commonest scoundrel of Naples. No one seemed to observe the horrible brutality of the service, where each ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... sphere and sought to be Europe. She has already taught Europe many things in the sphere of Invention, and is destined to teach her many more; and the fact that her Carriages are condemned as too light and her Pianos as too heavy, her Reaping Machines as "a cross between a treadmill and a flying chariot," &c., &c., by critics very superficially acquainted with their uses, and who have barely glanced at them in passing, proves nothing but the rashness and hostility of their contemners. From ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... girl shall we encourage to enter office work? Not the girl whose talent lies in making things, for to her the routine of the office will be a weary and endless treadmill entirely barren of results; nor the girl who requires the stimulus of people to keep her alert and keyed to her best work; nor the girl who cannot be happy at indoor work. Office work seems to require a temperament in which pleasure in arrangement ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the capitalist system—a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a book-keeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian clergyman, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... grief. "What only don't they do with you, how don't they abuse you, until you grow accustomed to everything, just like blind horses on a treadmill!" In the station house he was received by the district inspector, Kerbesh. He had spent the night on duty, had not slept his fill, and was angry. His luxurious, fan-shaped red beard was crumpled. The right half of the ruddy face was still crimsonly glowing from lying long on the uncomfortable oilcloth ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... October. I planned an engine for describing ellipses by the polar equation A/(1 e cos theta) and tried to make a micrometer with silk threads converging to a point. Mr Cubitt called on Oct. 4 and Nov. 1; he was engaged in erecting a treadmill at Cambridge Gaol, and had some thoughts of sending plans for the Cambridge Observatory, the erection of which was then proposed. On Nov. 19 I find that I had received from Cubitt a Nautical Almanac, the first that ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... double allowance of bread and cheese parings, kissed his finger to me, and then he was gone—gone, never to return. I do not know his history. 'Soup of a sausage-stick!' said the jailer, and I went to him; but I was wrong to trust in him. He took me up, indeed, in his hand; but he put me in a cage, a treadmill. That was hard work—jumping and jumping without getting on a bit, and ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... hangover. Although, actually, that was a consequence of the real trouble. The real trouble was his fiancee. Make that his ex-fiancee. Because last night Jo-Anne had left him. "You—you're just going no place at all, Johnny Sloman," she had said. "You're on a treadmill and—not even running very fast." She had given him back the quarter-carat ring tearfully, but Johnny hadn't argued. Jo-Anne had a stubborn streak and he knew when Jo-Anne's mind was made up. So Johnny had gone and gotten drunk for the ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase

... marriage? Had Shelley, indeed, been a different character, all might have gone smoothly, married as he was to a beautiful girl who loved him; but at present all Shelley's ideas were unpractical. Without the moral treadmill of work to sober his opinions, whence was the ballast to come when disappointment ensued— disappointment which he constantly prepared for himself by his over-enthusiastic idea of his friends? Troubles soon followed the marriage, in the nonarrival of the ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... of doing some good in the world. Oh, it is impossible for you to realize anything of the longing in woman's heart to be someone, to do something, and so to be relieved from the everlasting monotony of the treadmill, which, if men were obliged to submit to it, would make the ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... confident that such a one as Mr. Browborough could have been returned to Parliament by none other than corrupt means! In his present mood he would have been almost glad to see Mr. Browborough at the treadmill, and would have thought six months' solitary confinement quite inadequate to the offence. "I never read anything in my life that disgusted me so much," he said to his ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... this is from Henry Ford, "especially those employed in offices, fall into a routine way of doing their work that eventually makes it become like a treadmill. They do not get a broad view of the entire business. Sometimes that is the fault of the employer, but that does not excuse the young man. Those who command attention are the ones who are actually pushing the boss.... It pays to be ahead of your ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... walk three miles. At this rate, a year's walking represents over a thousand miles. Relaxation is essential to keep up the spirit and prevent life from becoming monotonous, as if one were sentenced to perpetual treadmill. Recreation is necessary, and the pursuit of pleasure is ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... scheme happened to come at the right moment. As far as the move to Chicago was concerned, Ernestine rather welcomed the change: hers had been a monotonous treadmill in one environment. She was ready for a venture in a new city, and curious about Chicago, of which Milly had talked a great deal. But above all, the conclusive reason for her consent was Milly—her ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... the present case the word is not reported—doubtless cried "Amen!" to the wisdom of the alderman. Sir PETER henceforth stands sentinel at the gate of death, and any hungry pauper who shall recklessly attempt to touch the knocker, will be sentenced to "the treadmill for a month as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various

... annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; not even sparing those to whom, on her death-bed, she had recommended the care of her funeral, but condemning one of them, a man of equestrian rank, to the treadmill. [352] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... for several hours in a little stuffy room filled with three or four dozen obviously unwashed humans, reeking with bad tobacco and worse absinthe, and pervaded by the ghosts of inferior meals, it becomes more penitential than the treadmill. A dog's life, said Paragot. Whereat Narcisse sniffed. It was not at all the life for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... active interest in their profession, but I soon found that pounding bark, and gathering herbs, could become as monotonous as other less novel employments. I envied the women their tasks, as it would have been a change, and consequently a relief. It was a treadmill existence, and day succeeded day with unvarying sameness. I arose before dawn and went to the river; after a plunge in the sparkling water I returned to the temple and renewed the paint on my person, which had been effaced by the water. ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... tree was a deep hole where flotsam leaves and twigs performed an endless treadmill dance in the grasp ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... who had been striving like any warrior against the powers and principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried her bleeding heart and walked her woman's treadmill. She scoured faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots. She swept the hearth clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed. Her lot would have been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... bread-winners of the party, had hastened back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on, somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the furniture, ringing ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... the man of action when, with lamplight gloating o'er the scene, I bask at leisure in my den, and read my fav'rite magazine. And so all day I stay at home attending to the treadmill grind; but when night comes afar I roam, and leave ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason

... the advice of the President, in his great solicitude to make the best appointments? We have talent enough in the South to officer millions of men. Mr. Walker is a man of capacity, and has a most extraordinary recollection of details. But I fear his nerves are too finely strung for the official treadmill. I heard him say yesterday, with a sigh, that no gentleman can be fit for office. Well, Mr. Walker is a gentleman by education and instincts; and is fastidiously tenacious of what is due a gentleman. Will his official ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... effectual punishment, and also as a deterrent from future misdoing. "To us it appears an obvious certainty, that whatever punishment is believed to be righteous—whether the whipping of a child, the shooting of a soldier, the constraint of the treadmill, or whatever else—is wholly free from the least tendency to brutalize the officers who inflict it." As to the wisdom of this statement, one would think, there could be no question. He quotes our old laws as regards the practising of public ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... solace from his inner disquiet. For what he sought and could not find, what he listened for and could not hear, was another of those sounds which had relieved the tedium of his brief stay in the mountains, the friendly nicker of the aged mare, gone to toil out her life in the racking treadmill between ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... creditably, too; even if Oom Peter did bully me into making a specialty of botany. Botany! Dry as dust. After the University and after my wanderjahr, I thought it would be another easy task to come here, and 'learn the business.' Easy! As easy as the treadmill. And ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... there to magazine editors, who sometimes sent them back and sometimes printed them, but never seemed to dream of payment, until at last one offered him two guineas for a long Christmas story in rhyme, and he began to see a hope of escape from the treadmill round. He set to work on a blank-verse play, and spent the greater part of a year on it, and was prepared to find himself enthroned with Shakespeare. He put his drama into type, a page at a time, pulling but a single impression ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... gone through the 'rickshaw: so that my first hope that some woman marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this treadmill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... rode silently on his circle about the boy, and Dick turned slowly with him, always facing the eyes that faced him. He could dimly make out the shape of a rifle at the saddlebow, but the Sioux did not raise it, he merely rode on in that ceaseless treadmill tramp, and Dick wondered what he meant to do. Was he waiting for the others ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... genius either for writing, painting, or acting; but in that he resembled most writers, painters, and actors of his own day and ours. He was not beneath the average of what men call art, and it is art's antipodes—treadmill artifice. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... times of torture were mercifully rare. Her heart seemed numb—she worked too hard to think much—at night she was too dead tired to spend the hours in fruitless anguish and tears. Her life went on in a sort of treadmill existence; and until the coming of Inez Catheron nothing ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... and so far brought up there, he knew nothing but Welsh! We were gratified with an inspection of the machine for churning. It was worked very much on the same principle as a treadmill, and exceedingly disliked by the poor dog. Goats are sometimes made to perform the same service. In several instances, we saw horses in like manner made to saw wood, and admired the ingenuity of our cousins in turning to account every particle of power they possess. "What is the ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... caused the various movements which agitated the farmers of the Western States in earlier days. When fingers become hardened and crooked from unceasing toil that achieves nothing but premature old age; when hope withers in a treadmill that grinds to the very ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... workest thou in the earth so fast?" It had travelled by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... experiments extending over several days and the other large enough to take in several individuals at once and to have installed apparatus and working machinery requiring larger space than that furnished by any of the other calorimeters. Near the chair calorimeter a special calorimeter with treadmill is shortly ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict

... of the laws of human mature," said the Traveller; "and for the sake of GOD'S working world and its wholesomeness, both moral and physical, I would put the thing on the treadmill (if I had my way) wherever I found it; whether on a pillar, or in a hole; whether on Tom Tiddler's ground, or the Pope of Rome's ground, or a Hindoo fakeer's ground, or any ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens

... has great hopes of what my uncle may do for me. But it would be more agreeable to me not to be confined to one course. I should like to look about me a little, before I get fairly into the treadmill of business." ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... feeble moral principles that the Struggle for Existtence has been too much for. They are a wonderful system. The weak morality is supplied with bread and water and a cell to develop in, and it is exercised on a treadmill, and allowed to expand and pick oakum, and so it is turned into a ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... Euripidean dramas, as well as, by modern standards, the most easily actable. And I notice that many judges who display nothing but a fierce satisfaction in sending other plays of that author to the block or the treadmill, show a certain human weakness in sentencing the gentle ...
— Alcestis • Euripides

... the sunset on the "Holy Eve," except where the name is as a threat or a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of many sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... usually so lively and brave, did not in the least feel himself at home; he acted as if he were walking on peas, over a slippery floor. How long and wearisome the time appeared; it was like being in a treadmill. And then they went out for a walk, which was very slow and tedious. Two steps forward and one backwards had Rudy to take to keep pace with the others. They walked down to Chillon, and went over the old castle on the rocky ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... Nevertheless Master Odam restored me to my self-respect; for he stared at me till I went to bed; and he broke his hose with excitement. For being in the leg-line myself, I wanted to know what the muscles were of a man who turned a wheel all day. I had never seen a treadmill (though they have one now at Exeter), and it touched me much to learn whether it were good exercise. And herein, from what I saw of Odam, I incline to think that it does great harm; as moving the muscles too much in a line, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... called patience, perseverance, courage, fidelity, are the gains of drudgery. Character comes with commonplaces. Greatness is through tasks that have become insipid, and by duties that are irksome. The treadmill is a divine teacher. He who shovels sand year in and year out needs not our pity, for the proverb is "Every man has his own sand heap." The greatest mind, fulfilling its career, once the freshness has worn off, pursues a hackneyed task and finds ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... laughed, grimly, staring up at her. "I'm not his sort. There are no heroics about me. Men of my stamp don't make theatrical exits; we're too confoundedly sane. Whether we do well or whether we do ill, we plod along on our treadmill round, from the house to the office, and from the office to the grave, as if we never had anything on the conscience. But if I had the spirit of Bienville, do you know what ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... explained Thomas Hardy. "I was in another part of the barn, and I guess Russ must have wandered upstairs, where we keep the old treadmill they used for the threshing machine and churn. He started to walk on the wooden roller platform, and it moved from under him. He had to keep running so he wouldn't slip down. That's what he meant when he said he ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandma Bell's • Laura Lee Hope

... Donald M'Leod. Later Lamb sent Wilson, who seems to have asked for some verse about Defoe, the "Ode to the Treadmill," but Wilson did not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... we had enough so I hadn't any need to work, and you are right," said Henry, with a pathetic firmness. "We have got property enough to keep us, if nothing happens, as long as we live, but I had to go back to that infernal treadmill or die." ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to express are most easily symbolized by skyey images—massed clouds and sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... of the earth. Yes, that was it; the earth was running backward upon its axis; he could actually feel it whirling under his feet. No wonder his journey seemed so long. He was laboring over a gigantic treadmill, balancing like an equilibrist upon a revolving sphere. Well, it was a simple matter to stop walking, sit down, and allow himself to be spun backward around to the place where Rosa was waiting. He pondered this idea for some time, until its absurdity became apparent. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... was the almost challenging reply. "You are not the only great statesman who needs to step off the treadmill now and then." ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... compasses capable of dividing an inch into a thousand parts, and to the sinking of a well in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill, and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs, a person of eleven or twelve stone would draw up a bucket—two buckets being so hung, at the ends of a rope surrounding the wheel, that while one ascended, ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... and satisfaction by walking round and rubbing itself against a person, raising and putting down its fore-feet alternately, with the toes extended, as if practising the goose step or working on some feline treadmill, why that cat did then. The poor animal could not speak, of course, but it really seemed to utter some inarticulate sounds that must have been in cat language a paean of joy and praise and thanks at its deliverance; and, finally, ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... ourselves, we shall find none anywhere else. There will be no meaning for us in anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences; they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their sufferings, shall ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... stride. Men, who for years had felt their strength sapped by the monotony of Government service, were revived by the winds of patriotism which swept from the four corners of the earth. Women who had lost youth and looks in the treadmill of Departmental life held up their heads as if their eyes ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... with the sea since that day. But let us go on, or we'll never get through with this story, any more than the Flying Dutchman will get into port, though he keeps on beating up and down forever; and as for to-day, why, we'll leave off just where we began, like thieves in a treadmill, if we don't get ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes

... of England has something in her liturgy of the spiritual treadmill. It is a very nice treadmill no doubt, but Sunday after Sunday we keep step with the same old "We have left undone that which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done" without ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... knitting stockings, making articles of plain needlework, washing, ironing, housework, cooking, spinning, and weaving. It should in all cases be constant, and in the worst cases, disciplinary labor. She recommends, under strict limitations, the treadmill for hardened, refractory, and depraved women, but only for short periods. All needleworkers especially should receive some remuneration for their work, which remuneration should be allowed to accumulate for their benefit by such time as their sentences ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... would be, when it should come, free of its tasks and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round, but given ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... out and lie down in the darkness—to go through one such day and know that you have to endure three thousand six hundred and fifty-two days like it—that is about all. The life of a blind horse in a treadmill is ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... with—although he might not show to great advantage in a drawing-room. By Jove, you know, Hollister, it doesn't seem like nine months since I settled down in this cabin. Now I'm about due to go back to the treadmill." ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... has departed; and the most humane or romantic of travellers may without scruple consign the modern collector of highway alms to the tender mercies of the next policeman and the reversion of the treadmill. ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... the final chapter of Romance, voting the world a dull place and life a treadmill, anathematizing in no uncertain terms his lack of resource and address, Maitland paid off his cabby, alighted, and to that worthy's boundless wonder, walked into the waiting-room of the railway terminus without deviating a hair's-breadth from the straight and circumscribed ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets—an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... tired of this eternal parade up and down?' he asked his cousin. 'It seems to me like a treadmill—as if a person had to work for his ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr

... nobly in the result of little Annie Eustace, if in no other, and it, no doubt, justified itself in others. Who can say what that weekly gathering meant to women who otherwise would not move outside their little treadmill of household labour, what uplifting, if seemingly futile grasps at the great outside of life? Let no one underrate the Women's Club until the ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... if Elsie had had dimples when she came, she would have lost them ere this," said Mrs. Middleton with unusual energy. "She's been put right into a treadmill, Jack. Only sixteen, sweet sixteen, and she hasn't had any of the gayety a young girl wants and needs, but has just slaved from morning until night ever since she came to us. At her age, she ought to be going to dances and lying late in the morning ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray

... I saw him every morning, in the carpet slippers he wore in the house and the black clothes no tailor could make really fit his gaunt, bony frame, was a homely enough figure. The routine of his life was simple, too; it would have seemed a treadmill to most of us. He was an early riser, when I came on duty at eight in the morning, he was often already dressed and reading in the library. There was a big table near the centre of the room: there I have seen him reading many times. And the book? It was ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... other hand, it was too early to go home. Mrs. Browne had said she should not expect to hear he was in before two or three. On this account he dared not return, for never, never would he confess to her the depths of his cowardice! He therefore continued street-walking with treadmill regularity, cold, hungry, and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... and more evident to me that the ideal of freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of mutual distrust and fear. The appalling scenes of inhumanity and injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a psychology that deals with terror. No cruelty can be uglier in its ferocity than ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... should take the trouble to try and ascertain the immediate intention and ultimate object of their lives. The daily routine of ordinary working, feeding and sleeping existence, varied by little social conventions and obligations which form a kind of break to the persistent monotony of the regular treadmill round, should be, they think, sufficient for any sane, well-balanced, self-respecting creature,—and if a man or woman elects to stand out of the common ruck and say: "I refuse to live in a chaos of uncertainties—I will endeavour to know why my particular atom of self is considered a necessary, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... caricature, entitled, A Shot from Buckingham to Bedford, which cannot be said to be complimentary to either of the principals, one of the walls bearing the inscription in very large letters of "Rubbish may be shot here." Another admirable caricature of the year is entitled, The Treadmill, or Stage-struck Heroes, Blacklegs, and Cadgers stepping it to the tune of Mill, Mill O! a sort of general satire; card-sharpers, decayed "Corinthians," and other vagabonds, are undergoing a course of hard labour upon the wheel, which was then ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... be going a commonplace, treadmill sort of grind, in a small corner of some great manufacturing concern, and be at the same time carrying on a bigger enterprise than the president of his concern. For he may be planning and praying for a world, and actually lifting ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... the huge creature so close, began to run. It was like running on a treadmill. He ran and he ran and after a while the Cyclops reached down and plucked him off the floor. He screamed thinly. There was the same crunching as before—and ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger

... o'nine tails; rope's end. pillory, stocks, whipping post; cucking stool^, ducking stool; brank^; trebuchet^, trebuket^. [instruments of torture: list], triangle, wooden horse, iron maiden, thumbscrew, boot, rack, wheel, iron heel; chinese water torture. treadmill, crank, galleys. scaffold; block, ax, guillotine; stake; cross; gallows, gibbet, tree, drop, noose, rope, halter, bowstring; death chair, electric chair; gas chamber; lethal injection; firing squad; mecate^. house of correction &c (prison) 752. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... dissolvent medium, chance insisted on enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship separated ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... once, to row an excursion party up to Richmond:—you'll enjoy it, I promise you! It is regular treadmill work; see, if you won't afterwards think our plan the best, and adopt it, too, or ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... without something which the God of perfect love could give her if he pleased, but might not please to give her, yet if she was not saved it would be all her own fault: and so ever the round of a great miserable treadmill of contradictions! For a moment she would be able to say this or that she thought she ought to say; the next the feeling would be gone, and she as miserable as before. Her friend made no attempt to imbue her with her own calm indifference, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... rags and shoeless, running the streets, exposed to the pitiless weather, while a splendid equipage passes, in which a lady holds up her lapdog at the window to give it an airing!! Is not this a greater crime than sends many a poor wretch to the treadmill?—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... because they are buying furniture, and they wish to see the best models. They go to Versailles on the coach and "do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon. Beyond that, enthusiasm rarely carries them. As soon as they have settled themselves at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless treadmill of leaving cards on all the people just seen at home, and whom they will meet again in a couple of months at Newport or Bar Harbor. This duty and the all-entrancing occupation of getting clothes fills up every spare hour. Indeed, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... all your circumstances. The smashing of the chains that gave you to that damned treadmill of a typewriter—the unlocking of the door that keeps you mewed-up in that little lodging-house in Kew—rubbing shoulders with bank-clerks, being compelled to listen to their proposals of suburban marriage, with the prospect of feeding your husband as the ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... enlightenment because I was gravely alarmed over the rumours of a strike among the labourers in the Protium Works. I had read in the outside world of the murder and destruction of these former civil wars of industry. With a working population so cruelly held to the treadmill of industrial bondage the idea of a strike conjured up in my fancy the beginning of a bloody revolution. With so vast a population so utterly dependent upon the orderly processes of industry the possible terrors of an industrial revolution were horrible ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... the banker, unheeding the courtesy conveyed in the last sentence, "I do not care three straws—I know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the treadmill." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a shrewd notion, something of an officially petted reformer. Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was offered. Solitary confinement—a punishment outside all nature to a gregarious race—found no advocate in him. "A man's own suffering mind," he argued, "must be, of all moral food, the most poisonous for him to feed on. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... and it was late in the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill stair of labor she was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... stated applies. The way to learn to write is by writing; not just by the dreary treadmill of practicing upon formal "compositions," but by having something to write that one cares to express. The written language lessons should, therefore, always grow out of the real interests and activities of the child in the home, the ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... I was, 'twas a long time before sleep came to make me forget; a weary interval fraught with dismal mental miseries to march step and step with the treadmill rackings of the aching muscles. What grievous hap had befallen my dear lady? and how much or how little was I to blame for this kidnapping of her by my relentless enemy? Was it a sharp foreboding of some such resort to savage violence that had tortured ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... the child makes his own plans, his imagination has free rein, originality is in demand, and constructive ability is placed under tribute. Here are developed a thousand tendencies which would never find expression in the narrow treadmill of labor alone. The child needs to learn to work; but along with his work must be the opportunity for free and unrestricted activity, which can come only through play. The boy needs a chance to be a barbarian, a hero, an Indian. He needs to ride his broomstick on a dangerous raid, and to charge ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... caused, and to look back and see that I have nothing to retract, and no intemperance and violence to reproach myself with, is a career of life which I must think to be extremely fortunate. Strange and ludicrous are the changes in human affairs. The Tories are now on the treadmill, and the well-paid Whigs are riding in chariots: with many faces, however, looking out of the windows (including that of our Prime Minister[132]), which I never remember to have seen in the days of the poverty and depression of Whiggism. Liberality ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... I did not believe the man lived who was such an unmitigated cynical brute as to profess and act upon such principles, and I would willingly agree to any law which would send him to the treadmill. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... the 8 per cent. grind. The homeless wanderer can get shade and shelter from the burning sun and driving storm, and with these is content, for he has long since resigned ambition to those who are willing to continue the hopeless struggle; but the man, on the 8 per cent. treadmill, who has not yet acknowledged defeat, has no way of escape from the glare of the master's eye, except by self-murder or the pauper's grave. There is nothing that excites our hatred against the infamous laws of our times as much as does the sight of this ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... above Garyville. Most of the mountain dwellers still preferred log houses, and the lumber was sent down the mountain by means of a little gravity railway, whose car was warped up after each trip by a patient old mule working in a circular treadmill. ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... which will amaze the American is an old stern-wheeler run by man power. It is provided with a treadmill just forward of the big stern wheel. Two or three tiers of naked, perspiring coolies are working this treadmill, all moving with the accuracy and precision of machinery. The irreverent foreigner calls ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... other women, the real ones, the vast majority, patiently doing the work of servants without even a servant's pay—and neglecting the noblest duties of motherhood in favor of house-service; the greatest power on earth, blind, chained, untaught, in a treadmill. I thought of what they might do, compared to what they did do, and my heart swelled with something that was ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... Plassenburg (now a Penitentiary, with treadmill and the other furnishings) still stands on its Height, near Culmbach, looking down over the pleasant meeting of the Red and White Mayn Rivers and of their fruitful valleys; awakening many thoughts in the traveller. Anspach Schloss, and still more Baireuth ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... was hurting her, but his insurgent youth demanded its right of speech after long repression. "I'm a man," he cried, "and I want to do a man's work in the world and take a man's place. Just because my ancestors chose to slave in a treadmill, I don't have to stay in it, do I? You have no right to keep me ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... substitute for vigorous thought and action,—a lion endeavoring to dine on grass and green leaves. In some cases this mental chlorosis reached such a height as almost to nauseate one with Nature, when in the society of the victims; and surfeited companions felt inclined to rush to the treadmill immediately, or get chosen on the Board of Selectmen, or plunge into any conceivable drudgery, in order to feel that there was still work enough in the universe to keep it sound and healthy. But this, after all, was exceptional and transitory, and our American life still needs, beyond all things ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... Laurie look if he had been taken long ago by Algerine pirates, and torn, with all his civic honours thick upon him, from the magisterial chair, and made hairdresser to the ladies of the harem—threatened with the bastinado for awkwardness in combing, as he now commits other unfortunate fellows to the treadmill for crimes scarcely more enormous? Paul de Kock derives none of his interest from odd juxtapositions. He knows nothing about caves and prisons and brigands—but he knows every corner of coffee-houses, and beer-shops, and ball-rooms. And these ball-rooms give ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various



Words linked to "Treadmill" :   line, occupation, mill, line of work, business, exercise device, milling machinery, job, treadmill test, grinder



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