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More "Monotone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beyond, and a few moments' walk brings me to the lovely shore, where sails are gliding continually by, and the huge steamers sweep past with echoing tread, and a train of waves, whose rush relieves the monotone of the ripples. In the country behind us are mountain-paths, and lonely glens, with gurgling streams, and many-voiced water-falls. And over all are spread the gorgeous hues ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in a dreary monotone which seemed strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually gleaned from her, had been started as a home ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... a broken tumult of billowy clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly amongst them, a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends, sometimes half submerged, once more gallantly struggling to the surface, and again sunk. The bare boughs of the trees beat together in a dirgelike monotone. Now and again a leaf went sibilantly whistling past. The wild commotion of the heavens and earth was visible, for the night was not dark. The ranger, standing within the rude stable of unhewn logs, all undaubed, ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Martyr, his courage, his patience, his devotion to the Church. As was but natural in the circumstances, there followed an application to local politics. They were there, he informed his hearers (as the old lattices, shaken by the gale, rattled their accompaniment to his monotone) in the character of Englishmen; but he had to notice that to the existing rulers of England they owed no obedience. The so-called Parliament which had judged and murdered the late lamented Monarch, and which now claimed the ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... tone will make the other man "perk up his ears" if his attention wanders; so plan to introduce variety into your manner of speaking. Don't just open the spigot of your mind and let your ideas run out in a monotone. Variety of voice is pleasing, ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... him through the throng, and up to the hostess— Mrs. Burke, stout, honest, with sympathy in her eyes and humor in the lines round her sweet mouth. "Well, Josh," she said in a slow, pleasant monotone, "you HAVE done a lot of growing since I saw you. I always knew you'd come to some bad end. And here you are— in ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Scripture had no elocutionary pretensions about it; it was quiet, and to a large extent gone through in a monotone; but two things about it made it very impressive. One of these was the deep reverence that characterised it, and the other was a note of subdued enthusiasm that ran all through it. It was clear to the listener that behind ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... had been trying to break into her hopeless monotone; finally he succeeded. "The trouble with you is, you know altogether too damned much that isn't so." He was barely able to keep his voice down and his eyes front. "What do you think I'm made of—superefract? I thought the whole performance was an act, to ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... there rose pink, and here again a brilliant green; above their heads the stars were coming out, in the east it was already dusk; and behind them in the town, drums were beginning to beat with their barbaric monotone. Both men walked with their chins sunk upon their breasts, their eyes upon the ground. They had come to the end of hope, they were possessed with a lethargy of despair. Feversham thought not at all of the pine trees on the Surrey hills, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... and decidedly not enough for the dinner itself. He did not see his man at first, and when he did the man did not see him. Van Bibber watched him stop three gentlemen, two of whom gave him some money, and then the Object approached Van Bibber and repeated his sad tale in a monotone. He evidently did not recognize Van Bibber, and the clubman gave him a half-dollar and walked away, feeling that the man must surely have enough by this time with which to get something to eat, if only ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... bushes, laving one's face and hands so gently, this balmy-bright noon, the coolest for a long time, (Sept. 2)—I will not call it sighing, for to me it is always a firm, sane, cheery expression, through a monotone, giving many varieties, or swift or slow, or dense or delicate. The wind in the patch of pine woods off there—how sibilant. Or at sea, I can imagine it this moment, tossing the waves, with spirits of foam flying far, and the free whistle, and the scent of the salt—and that ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... myself; and for me there is music in the poetry of Byron and of Poe, and there is the psychic effect of color. The rhythm in certain of their poems, with the arrangement of word-sound, produces the saddest music possible, I think, to the soul of man—a prevailing monotone so measured as to result in an effect decidedly strange and quite indescribable. But the real peculiarity of their poetry—and in this Poe excels Byron—is a psychic effect the same as that which remains after viewing certain pictures in black and white, the shade gradations ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... constrained monotone, which seemed to Mary, in spite of her genuine regret for the pain she gave ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... states is the art of the actor. Not only would it be impossible for an actor to make an audience believe in the genuineness of his supposed emotion if he stood glassy-eyed and wooden-limbed declaiming his lines in a monotone, without gestures or play of expression of any sort, but it would also be impossible for him to feel even the counterfeit sensation which he is supposed to represent. So definite and so well recognized is this connection, that many ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Cable, to catch the utterances that never came for all his patient coaxing; and ever and anon he iterated, feebly and more feebly, as if all his sinking soul he did outpour into the words, that melancholy monotone which was his only stock and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... drowsy powers!" she hears the pastor cry on a rising wave of monotone, and starts the fan again. Is she in church or in Rosemont? She sees Johanna beckoning in her old, cajoling way, asking, as in fact, not fancy, she had done the evening before, for the latest news of Cornelius, and hearing with pious thankfulness ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... evasive eyes did not cease to regard the illumined face of her old companion as she returned, in her dry, high-pitched monotone: "I don't reckon as how you-all are a-needin' much help, seein' as how you are allus a-watchin' hit. A body'd think you-all was mighty nigh old 'nough, by now, ter look at ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... capable, as we at Norton Bury sometimes knew to our cost, of being roused into fierceness and foam. Now it slipped on quietly enough, contenting itself with turning a flour-mill hard by, the lazy whirr of which made a sleepy, incessant monotone which ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... burnt lower and lower and finally went out and she was left in darkness, but again she was conscious of sounds from the room below. At first it was only a word or a sentence, then the guarded speech became a steady monotone that ran deep into the night; eventually this ceased and Betty fancied ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... there is nothing the bells could not tell, if you would only give them time enough. We have only one chime, for musical purposes, in the town. But, without attempting tunes, only give the bells the Morse alphabet, and every bell in Boston might chant in monotone the words of "Hail Columbia" at length, every Fourth of July. Indeed, if Mr. Barnard should report any day that a discouraged 'prentice-boy had left town for his country home, all the bells could instantly be set to work to speak articulately, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... and he tarried but a moment, yet he explained his paralysis. In the dreary monotone of a chronic sour temper he related that some Confederates, about a year before, had come here impressing horses, and their officer, on being called by him "no gentleman," had struck him behind the ear with the butt of a carbine. I asked ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... wise in a sick room than Mrs. Bundle herself. He contrived to quieten instead of exciting me, and to the sound of his melodious voice reading in soothing monotone from my favourite book of the Bible—the Revelation of St. John ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... mystic splendor. Region of bubbling caldron and boiling pool with fretted rims, rivaling the coral in delicacy of texture and the rainbow in variety of color; of steaming funnels exhaling into the etherine atmosphere in calm, unruffled monotone and paroxysmal ejection, vast clouds of fleecy vapor from the underground furnaces of the God of Nature; sylvan parkland, where amidst the unsullied freshness of flower-strewn valley and bountiful woodland, the native fauna ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... none, according to modern parlance, but it was usual to edge each hanging with a tape of monotone, a woven galloon of quiet hue, which had two purposes; one, to finish neatly the work, as the housewife hems a napkin; the other, to provide space of simple material for hanging on rude hooks ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... master took his pipe, and sought a small store of tobacco which he had left in his hut over winter. He had thought often of it; that and the Cat seemed something to come home to in the spring. But the tobacco was gone; not a dust left. The man swore a little in a grim monotone, which made the profanity lose its customary effect. He had been, and was, a hard drinker; he had knocked about the world until the marks of its sharp corners were on his very soul, which was thereby calloused, until his ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow, drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... garden and dipped into the green meadow. Stafford talked of battles and marches, but he spoke in a monotone, distrait and careless, as of a day-dreaming scholar reciting his lesson. Such as it was, the recital lasted across the meadow, into the wood, yet lit by yellow light, a place itself for day dreams. "No. I did not see him fall. He was leading ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Native Son was flinging rocks at a rattlesnake with the vicious precision of frank abhorrence. Down in the canon bottom Big Medicine and Pink were holding the horses on the shady side of the gorge, and the smoke of their cigarettes floated lazily upward with the jumbled monotone of their voices. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... or sea. But there hath he that woke the sleepless Love Slept through these fifty years, There is the grave that has been wept above With more than mortal tears. And far below I hear the Channel sweep And all his waves complain, As Hallam's dirge through all the years must keep Its monotone of pain. ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... ripple of music from one of the pine trees, "Whee- you, whee-you," a small bird with a spotted breast and a cream-buff coat sang to itself and then began a whistling, ringing monotone that for a moment ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... the lee rigging, handing their eyes to shield the wind and spray. Faint as yet against the sombre monotone of sea and sky, a long line of breaking water leapt to their gaze, then vanished, as the staggering barque drove to the trough; again—again; there could be no doubt. Breakers! ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... was the deepest interest as to what the two visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... moved swiftly, looking sharply ahead of him. The night grew brighter, the stars more brilliant. The zipp, zipp, zipp of the tails of his snow-shoes was the only sound he heard except the first faint, hissing monotone of the aurora in the northern skies, which came to him like the shivering run of steel sledge ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... of some description was taking place, lesser priests and other acolytes performing their various parts, the incantations rising now loudly, now sinking to a hollow monotone, the whole affair being none the less absorbing when Bruno remembered that, perhaps, it might have some connection with the vile plots against the Sun Children, ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... orchards, they swarmed across the hills, column on column, until the entire country seemed flowing forward in steady streams. Sandy River awoke, restlessly listening; lights glimmered behind darkened windows; a heavier, vaguer rumor grew, hanging along the hills. It increased to a shaking, throbbing monotone, like the far dissonance of ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... everything—the thick white square of cardboard, even the stooped old man in the small back room—in the face of the overwhelming fear that reason could not fight down. Only the peculiarly absolute silence that came with the sudden cessation of his droning monotone checked the panic haste of her first rush. With one hand clutching the knob of the outer door ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... burst into tears, her hands to her face. He drew them away gently, mastering her with firm composure. "It was a shock, wasn't it?" he said in a low, vibrating monotone. "But it had to be done in that way. Jim Graham doesn't upset you in that way, I'll be bound. But Jim Graham is a rich, comfortable vegetable; and I'm not exactly that. You don't want to ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... sufficiently terrifying, the air is throbbing with sound. Each Indian pops away for general results as he comes jumping along, and yells shrilly to show what a big warrior he is, while underneath it all is the hurried monotone of hoof-beats becoming ever louder, as the roar of an increasing rainstorm on the roof. It does not seem possible that anything ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Shannon's having known The faces of each other for as long As they had listened there to an old song, Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown Too many times and with a wing too strong To save himself, and so done heavy wrong To more frail elements than ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... high terrace are rich meadows, vocal with frogs rejoicing in the rain, and expressing their joy, not in the sober monotone of our English frogs, but each according to his kind; one bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the next (probably the little green Hylas, who has come down out of the trees to breed) quacking in treble like a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... from the cabin, closing the door behind them and deftly retying the thongs, in order that the discovery of the escape might occur as late as possible. Then they stood a few moments in the shadow of the hut and listened to the sounds of revelry, the monotone of the story-tellers, and the ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lower, and a little later the entering tone finally disappeared from Pekingese. The following monosyllabic dialogue gives a very fair idea of the quality of the four Pekingese tones—1st tone: Dead (spoken in a raised monotone, with slightly plaintive inflection); 2nd tone: Dead? (simple query); 3rd tone: Dead? (an incredulous query long drawn out); 4th tone: Dead! (a sharp and decisive answer). The native learns the tones unconsciously and by ear alone. For centuries their existence ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Colville, who seemed elated. "There may well be. For that man has been saying things in that placid monotone which would have taken your breath away had you been able to understand them. A hundred times I rejoiced that you understood no English, for your impatience, Marquis, might have silenced him as some rare-voiced ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Then, to give artistic piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found in the word nevermore. He next invented a pretext for the frequent but varying use of nevermore. This word could not ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... divine Altara, fool?" he thundered in a dreadful, shaken monotone. "Have those foul swine ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... to the great church was in progress, to pray for a remission of the scourge. Over the line of roofs there was a dull glow of the watch-fires in the streets; where they sat, Scott and the girl could smell the pitch that fed them. And, over all, an unseen sick man gabbled his prayers in a halting monotone. A quick heat of wrath lit in Scott as his thoughts traveled around the situation; for Incarnacion sat with her head bowed, playing with her toes, and the ever-ready terror lest the plague should reach her moved in his heart. He had been away from Superban when the plague arrived, and though he had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... redeemed from the evil hold Of the wood so dreary, and dark, and old, Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew When Time was young, and the world was new, And wove its shadows with sun and moon, Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn. Think of the sea's dread monotone, Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown, Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North, Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth, And the dismal tales the Indian told, Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold, And he shrank from the tawny wizard boasts, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... checking her voice to a low, even monotone. "You are the child of disaster if ever woman was. Your father was a poor, weak fool, a big, handsome, good-hearted fool whom Nature had endowed with nothing more than a perfect exterior. He was a Wall Street man, of a sort. One of those gamblers who live on the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... behind her back and leant against the piano. "There was a man in Paris, a friend of the manager. He heard me sing once. He knew I wanted to take up a profession, and he offered to train me for nothing, and bring me out on the stage. I was to sing those queer, dramatic, half-monotone songs in which one almost speaks the words. He meant to write them specially for me, and I was to wear an oriental costume. He said that every other voice would ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... Mrs. Warren's rooms, the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into one gray curtain, a dead monotone of colour, broken only by the sharp yellow squares of the windows and the blurred haloes of the gas-lamps. As we peered from the darkened sitting-room of the lodging-house, one more dim light glimmered high up ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? There are flashes too of light, of song, the playing of shepherd's pipes, the swoop of horsemen and sudden outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And more than all, it is the mood of Asia, so rarely penetrated, which ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a heavy blow yesterday, which had not yet subsided; and the waves had been lashed into a magnificent fury. Trot, trot, trot, trot, we trundled over the hard sand. The sound of the horse's hoofs rang out sharp against the monotone of the thunderous surf, as we drew nearer and nearer to the long line of the cliffs. At our left, almost from the lofty zenith of the pale evening sky to the high western horizon of the tumultuous dark-green sea, was suspended, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... a dogged sort of devil," he went on almost in a monotone. "The fact did not manifest itself to me until I came to the time when—all the rest of me dropped into a bottomless gulf. That perhaps describes it. I found myself suddenly standing on the edge of it. And youth, and future, and belief in the use of hoping ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the imminent gloom covering him, he felt the old sanctity envelop him with a reproach in its forgotten familiarity. Old incense, old litanies, old rites rushed back to him with the smell of the stagnant fragrance. He heard again from the farther depths of the dark interior the musical monotone of a rabbi reciting a ritual. The voice was young and low. Presently he heard the responses spoken in a woman's voice, so tender, so soft and so sad that he sensed instantly the meaning of the sympathy in the young ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... visible excitement, and in the same deliberate monotone, Deerfoot still looking him ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... observed by those present. A recorder should be at hand to set down everything the seer may give voice to. If any questions are addressed to the seer while the sitting is in progress, they should be spoken in an undertone and as nearly a monotone as may be so that the seer is not suddenly surprised into consciousness of his surroundings, and ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... sky. Lord Beauregard scarcely shot at all, unless he was fairly challenged by a bird flying right past him: he seemed quite content to see his friends having plenty of work; while, in the interest of the beaters, he kept calling out, in a high monotone, "Shoot high! shoot high!" Then there was some motion among the brushwood; here and there a man or boy appeared; and finally the under-keeper with his retriever came across the stream to pick up the ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone—a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall—the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam—a stream of hurrying amber, thirty ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... tree-tops died away; and the thick gray clouds rolled like a massive curtain from under the skies. The stars began to glow white and metallic, and from far in the North there came faintly a crisping moaning sound, like steel sleigh-runners running over frosty snow—the mysterious monotone of the Northern Lights. After that it grew steadily and ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... consolidation was imperceptible in the murk, but nevertheless it took place. We ceased to find clear spaces where we could gallop; a trot became impossible. We were hemmed in. A rank animal odor mingled with the taint of smoke. Gradually the muffled beat of hoofs grew more pronounced, a shuffling monotone that filled the night. We were mere atoms in a vast wave of horn and bone and flesh that bore us onward as the tide ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mrs Rhodes and Mrs Muir came up in their turn, and opened wide eyes of surprise as the strange girl again repeated their names in her high monotone. Evidently this was an American custom. Strange people, the Americans! The ladies simpered, and put the inevitable query: "How do you ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his rapid changes of financial condition, moods, environment—the brief ecstasy of his triumphant flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's whining voice failed to register anything but a dreary monotone of meaningless words in Johnny's ears. Small wonder that Johnny's thoughts dwelt upon little worries that could have no possible bearing upon the big ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Labrador lay to the south—bare, boundless, precipitous; and to the east a glittering iceberg floated slowly towards us, like a palace of gold and emerald. The ship rolled calmly upon the long swells, the ripples plashing in low lulling monotone, and her hull and spars were reflected darkly beneath me. I drew a long gray hair from my temple, and subjected it to a gentle friction between my palm and finger; then I pricked my wrist, and leaning forward, placed it against my heart: five blood-drops—symbols of the five ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... little laugh struggled in his throat. "The Lord hath triumphed gloriously—I could drink some wine, monsieur," he added in the same quaint clerical monotone. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... begins again with a low, liquid monotone, mounting by degrees and swelling into an infinitude of melody—the whole grove dilating, as it were, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... house was just as dark and gloomy as it was without, and as the two visitors entered, a voice came from out the shadows, and said, in a curious monotone and with ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... there really was a hesitation in her voice, or whether I read that into it. She stood there, playing with the knots of the window-cords and speaking in a low monotone. The whole thing, the sad twilight of the place, her tone of voice, seemed tinged with unavailing regret. I had almost forgotten the Dimensionist story, and I had never believed in it. But now, for the first time I began to have my doubts. I was ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... purple shadows of the mountains deepen; and saw the outlines of the tawny foothills grow vague and dim, until they were lost in the dusky monotone of the evening. The last faint tint of sunset color went from the sky back of the San Gabriels; while, close to the mountain peaks and ridges, the stars came out. The rows and the contour of the orange groves could no longer be distinguished ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... The sixth part is the "Lux aeterna," a trio for alto, tenor, and bass which is very dramatic in setting; and this leads to the "Libera," the final division and the climax of the work. It is in its general effect a soprano obligato with chorus. After a monotone recitative and solo, the "Dies Irae" is repeated, likewise the "Requiem aeternam" (which forms the introduction of the mass), and closes with a fugue of majestic proportions that finally ends in the same pianissimo effect as characterizes the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Each admirer seemed to be treated with indifference alike, though there were some who, for reasons best known to themselves, evidently felt that they stood more securely than the rest. She moved through game and dance with a slow yet free grace; she spoke seldom, and in a low, bell-like monotone, containing no hint of any possible emotional development, and for the rest, her shadow of a disdainful smile seemed to stand her in good stead. Clearly as she stood out from among her companions from the first, ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... correctly. Here, listen to this. Now here's a little incident I found this evening that interests me immensely. It proves to my mind one of two points I hold in regard to Marshal Ney. Listen," and he read at length from his book, a dry, sepulchral monotone that grated on the ear ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... right," she replied, once more in her passionless monotone. "Everybody can call themselves whatever they please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me—but they're all right for you. I don't ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... to a large gypsy encampment in the outskirts of the village, where, in acknowledgment of the honor of our visit-and a few kreuzers by way of supplement - the "flower of the camp," a blooming damsel, about the shade of a total eclipse, kisses the backs of our hands, and the men play a strumming monotone with sticks and an inverted wooden trough, while the women dance in a most lively and not ungraceful manner. These gypsy bands are a happy crowd of vagabonds, looking as though they had never a single ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... to Morhange, showing him the seven pale stars, while Eg-Anteouen took up his mournful song in the same monotone: ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... recounting to a congregation, composed chiefly of women, old men, and children, the virtues of their deceased benefactor. Presently, the sermon came to an end, and the colloquial delivery of the discourse was changed for the monotone of a litany recitation: the people answering with ready response, and many of them employing the aid of their rosaries. The fragrance of incense filled the air; tapers and flowers adorned the altar, above which was the statue, not—as one entering by ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... leurs lits, l'ombre qui les couronne, M'enchainent tout le jour sur les bords des ruisseaux; Comme un enfant berce par un chant monotone, Mon ame ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... stories and not bore him with stories of his own prowess. Wherefore, Jack was left alone in peace to fight the sudden, nauseating wave of homesickness, and in a little while found himself listening to the steady monotone of ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... take their children wherever they go—to churches, theatres, concerts, and military reviews—everywhere and anywhere. Hence the low, pensive wail of the individual baby, combining in large numbers, becomes a deep monotone, like the waves of the sea, a sort of violoncello accompaniment to all their holiday performances. It was rather trying to me at first to have my glowing periods punctuated with a rhythmic wail from all sides of the hall; but as soon as I saw that ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... toward a bride! Garmented soft in white, Haughty, and yet how love-imbuing and tender! You stand before us with your gently mournful Memory-haunted eyes and flower-like mouth, Where clinging thoughts—as bees a-cluster Murmur through the leafy gloom, Musical in monotone— Whisper sadly. Yet a lustre As of glowing gold-gray light Shines upon the orient bloom, Sweet with orange-blossoms, thrown Round the jasmine-starred, deep night Crowning with dark hair your brow. ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... suddenly grown strange and fixed, began to detail to us what was passing in this scene, in a curious monotone such as a person might use who was repeating something learned by heart. This was the substance of what ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... they remained listening. Far away to the southeast a low murmuring note came over the low hills. The girl remained with eyes straining to pierce the starlit monotone. The man rose slowly from his seat. Finally he turned about and faced her, and his eyes smiled ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... satisfied," answered Merrihew. He stuffed his pockets with cigars, slammed the boxes into the case, and locked them up. He collected his belongings and repacked the other case, keeping up a rumbling monotone as he did so. "Oh, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... she could no longer keep her attention on the stitches. She paced nervously up and down the little apartment. In the room beneath she could hear the dull muffled sound of men's voices in a long continuous monotone, broken only by the interposition now and again of one voice which was so deep and loud that it reminded her of the growl of a beast of prey. This must belong to the red-bearded stranger. Kate wondered what it could be ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to him sharply, and fearlessly approached him. She began talking in a monotone. His ears went flat against his head, but he submitted to her touch because invariably it soothed him, and because he sensed some undefinable power whenever his gaze met hers. She snapped the leash on his collar just as her father came running up, pale and disturbed. He ran to ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... breath of a sleeping child, and then, as they lisped from the soft, tender leaves of beeches and maples, like the half-articulate whisper of the mother hushing all the intrusive sounds that might awaken it. Then came the pulsating monotone of the frogs from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from an old tree that overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash, and nearer by, the light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his quiet way to his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... endlessly long. The afternoon was an eternity. It was hotter now that the sun had rolled past the zenith, now that the sand had drunk deep of its fiery rays. The air shimmered and danced above the gray monotone of flat country, Conniston's eyeballs were burning with it. And back and arms and shoulders ached together. He had hoped that they would quit work at five o'clock. Five o'clock came and went, and the red-headed ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... thinker. All these thoughts passed singly in swift flashes through his excited brain. Like the steady monotone of the bass accompanying the rise and fall of the air, he constantly heard the assurance that it would be a pity if his splendid twins should ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a child, the effort of thought very soon fatigues him; and this, with the narcotic influence of the flower perfume, the songs of the birds, and the soothing monotone of the waters, produces a drowsiness that terminates in a profound slumber. This time ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... copper saucepans shone resplendently. The black and white pavement looked like an ivory chessboard. Two Sisters were sitting peeling vegetables which they threw into a bowl of water. An enormous pot, on the well-polished stove, was humming its inviting monotone. It was this pot which exhaled the delicious smell that had greeted us when we entered the house. The whole picture recalled one of Bail's appetising canvases. The two Sisters raised their eyes, looked at us and—yes, they smiled too. B., feeling eloquent, wanted to make a ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... plenty to get."—"Oh, quite enough to get, sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes." Thereupon—glowering angrily at Sam, and blinking his eyes more than ever—Mr. Justice Stareleigh remarked, with a heavier cold in the head than hitherto, in a severe monotone, and with the greatest deliberation, "You must not tell us what the soldier says unless the soldier is in court, unless that soldier comes here in uniform, and is examined in the usual way—it's not evidence." Another evening, again, we recall quite as clearly to mind, when the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... now the question whether our Northern cathedrals are better with color or without. Perhaps the great monotone gray of Nature and of Time is a better color than any that the human hand can give; but that is nothing to our present business. The simple fact is, that the builders of those cathedrals laid upon them the brightest colors they could obtain, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Franklin, with his kite, looked out upon the consummation of what he dreamt of when he drew lightning from the summer cloud. For two hours the "White City" blossomed in new beauty. The great basin was bathed in a flood of fairy moonlight. Outside the peristyle the lake beat its monotone against the walls. On the plaza the great orchestra of more than 100 men played patriotic music, and the people were filled and lifted with the spirit ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... on Babalatchi, in a low monotone, as if pursuing aloud a train of thought that had its beginning in the silent contemplation of the unstable nature of earthly greatness—"yes. He has been rich and strong, and now he lives on alms: old, feeble, blind, and without companions, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... heighten the joy of your pleasant life, when wearied Italy, after all her wars and civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful haven. The harbour might be treacherous; the prince might turn to the tyrant; far away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating horses' hoofs and marching feet of men. They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, officina ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... bear—up here," she spoke in an odd, weary monotone, as if she were thinking aloud. "This morning ... I think, if Norah had left anything in the bottle ... ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... had hoped to possess. She maintained an obstinate silence when I urged her to give me at least some tangible reason as to why she would not marry me. She contented herself and maddened me by reflecting in a kind of monotone: "I love you, Karl! and am yours, but I cannot ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... ere he lay him down upon his bed, A soft sweet song was born within his thought; But if he sang the song, or if 'twas nought But the soul's longing whispered to the soul, Himself knew hardly, while the passion stole From that still depth where passion lieth prone, And voiced itself in this-like monotone: ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... away and let the others have his place before the screen. His sense of uneasiness increased as he contemplated the approach of that huge black ship. And he was convinced its color was black, that it was not just the monotone of the view screen that ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... branches of the ancient grove. The groups around the grave, the dark faces, the red garments, the scattered lights, the misty boughs, were weird and strange. The men sang one of their own wild chants. Two crickets sang also, one on either side, and did not cease their little monotone, even when the three volleys were fired above the graves. Just before the coffins were lowered, an old man whispered to me that I must have their position altered,—the heads must be towards the west; so it was done,—though they are in a place so veiled in woods that either rising or ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... aloud, and to be quite unconscious of his audience. Though he was saturated with his subject there was apparently no verbal preparation. Yet his diction was peculiarly apt and pointed. He never looked at a note; used no gesture; scarcely raised or lowered his voice. But in a clear and penetrating monotone he uttered the workings of a profound and reflective mind, and the treasures of a vast experience. Though massive, his style was never ponderous: and it was constantly lightened by the sallies of a pungent humour. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Lord Ribblesdale, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the octave higher. This tone does very well for our everyday life; perhaps a pleasant impression may raise it somewhat, ennui may depress it slightly; but the average tone of our "commonplace" talk, if I may call it that, will be about F. But let some sudden emotion come, and we find monotone speech abandoned for impassioned speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping the voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much higher or lower than ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... scientific exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he described how his best-known poem, the Raven, was systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of lines was first determined and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... due, in all likelihood, to the rapid radiation of surface heat. When the cold air has robbed sand and rock of the temperature acquired from the broiling sun, the atmosphere clears, and the desert reveals itself again in the gloomy monotone of night. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described the day when he and his young wife first came up through the wonderland of the North. "No country is God's Country without a woman!" He found the words running in an unpleasant monotone through his brain. He had made up his mind that he would strike Fond du Lac on his way down, for Jasper's words and the hopeless picture he had made that day beside the little cross under the spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the shadow of trees. In the ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a grassy brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine; or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country holiday on ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people—ah, the people— They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone— They are neither man nor woman— They are neither brute nor human— They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A Paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... elfin monotone was the very voice of the forest itself—the deep, sweet whisper of virgin wilds, sacred, impenetrable, undefiled, tempting forever the sons ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... fronts the Wight, A little church, where "after strife" Reposes Guy de Blanquely, Knight, By Alison his wife: I know their features' graven lines In time-stained marble monotone, While crouched before their feet reclines Their little dog ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... change it seemed to effect in her. Her pale blue eyes, made paler by tears, cleared and brightened under their swollen lids like wiped steel; the lines of her depressed mouth straightened and became firm. Her voice had lost its hopeless monotone. ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Torreon, and Albuquerque. From there across the Uncompahgre plateau into the Uintah country; then at last due west through Nevada to California and to the valley of the San Joaquin." His voice lapsed to a monotone, his eyes becoming fixed; he continued to speak as though half awake, his thoughts elsewhere, seeing again in the eye of his mind the reach of desert and red hill, the purple mountain, the level stretch of alkali, leper white, all the savage, gorgeous desolation ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... every turn. It degenerated at one time into a sermon upon the text of "render unto Caesar," inveighing against the Presbyterian religion. And the dull length of his lordship's periods, combined with the monotone in which he spoke, lulled the wearied lady at the bar into slumber. She awakened with a start when suddenly his fist crashed down and his voice rose in fierce denunciation of the late rebellion. But she was dozing again—so calm and so little moved ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... on, blissfully unconscious. He talked in a quiet monotone; only now and then his voice rose; only now and then there were accompanying gestures. Jim had a straight mile down the broad village street to walk before he reached the church ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... frowning at his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man's thought from day to day with ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... paused—at such a height where overhead The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chill, And all was hushed and calm and very still, Save, from abysmal gorges, where the sound Of tumbling waters rose, and all around The pines, by those keen upper currents blown, Muttered in multitudinous monotone. Here, with the wind in lovely locks laid bare, With arms oft raised in dedicative prayer, Lost in mute rapture and adoring wonder, He stood, till the far noise of noontide thunder, Rolled down upon the muffled harmonies Of wind and waterfall and whispering trees, Made ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and was speaking in a fierce earnest monotone, as though he was reciting some lesson he ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... parlor, you see," came in distinct, suave monotone to my ear. "Room enough for many a couple on gala nights, as even sweet Mistress Juliet will say. Do you like this fireplace, and will there be space enough here for the portrait which Lawrence has promised to make of young Madam Day? I do not like too ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of leaf and branch, without a sound from bird or beast to break its soothing monotone, the two men lay down within a few yards, though out of sight, of each other. And for a time all ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... fog lay over the river, and a steamer, now and then uttering a dull whistle, was slowly forging up against the current. Damp and cold clouds, of a monotone pallor, enveloped the steamer from all sides and drowned all sounds, dissolving them in their troubled dampness. The brazen roaring of the signals came out in a muffled, melancholy drone, and was oddly brief as it burst forth from the whistle. The sound seemed to find no place for itself ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! 75 For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people—ah, the people, They that dwell up in the steeple, 80 All alone, And who tolling, tolling, tolling In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone— 85 They are neither man nor woman, They are neither brute nor human, They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, 90 Rolls A paean from the bells; And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells, And he ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... gave it distinct voice. On silent days it was often heard—a whispering, whimpering sing-song, pitifully weak for so great a tree, but not without appeal. Did it not suggest the sanctuary of some wood-nymph chanting never so faint a death psalm—a monotone which ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... this, that through the whole piece he dragged along just half a beat behind the rest. The others showed a most decided penchant for the ancient Greek music, which, as is well known, having nothing to do with harmony, ran on in unison or monotone. They all sang treble, with slight variations, caused by accidental rising and falling of the voice, say some quarter of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and, gaining ever in degree through the various stages of life, is the divine attribute, the will, the idea. Genius manifest in the greatest and best of humanity, shown indeed, as the Word of God, or as he who holds the mirror up to nature, or by the great power which in colour or monotone can display the love and agony of a dying Christ; by the loving poet, who can soar beyond his age to uphold an unselfish aim of perfection to the world; by all those who, throwing off their mortal ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... money?" said Millard, reddening, and contracting his brows. "Did Phillida take it?" This last was spoken in a low-keyed monotone. ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... To their mates mercurial, And the tree-boughs creak and strain In the wind; When the river's rough with foam, And the new-made clearings smoke, And the clouds that go and come Shine and darken frolicsome, And the frogs at evening croak Undefined Mysteries of monotone, And by melting beds of snow Wind-flowers blossom all alone; Then I know That the bitter winter's dead. Over his head The damp sod breaks so mellow,— Its mosses tipped with points of yellow,— I cannot but be glad; Yet this sweet mood will borrow Something ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... was the mistress of the house, who, as I said, remained alone in the deserted drawing-room. Sybil stood as if turned to stone, and fixed to the spot—motionless in form and face, except that her lips moved and a hollow monotone issued from them, more like the moan of a lost soul, than the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... creeds, but stale the schools, Revamped as the mode may veer, But Orm from the schools to the beaches strays And, finding a Conch hoar with time, he delays And reverent lifts it to ear. That Voice, pitched in far monotone, Shall it swerve? shall it deviate ever? The Seas have inspired it, and Truth— Truth, varying from ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... upon her handsome features. I dreamed that I was hurrying by the spot where she was standing, eager to reach the other side unobserved by her. As I stole with noiseless tread behind her, I heard her talking to the waters in a slow and humdrum monotone: ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... a few rods, gave chase to the retreating Schwartzes. Then, the heavy exertions of the past minute or two began to exact toll on his aging body. Also, the baby was still whimpering in a drowsy monotone, as the paregoric sought to renew its sway on ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... striven would have been to have spent herself in vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the year lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... repeats itself, its tones rose and fell, but with more subtle inflections than the ordinary voice has: there was a note in it that might have belonged to a child's voice; another, more primitive, that betrayed feeling with as little reserve as the cry of an animal. Then it sank, and went on in a monotone, like a Hebrew prayer, as if reiterating things worn threadbare by repetition, and already said too often. Gradually, it died away in the surrounding silence. There was no response but a gentle rustling of the leaves overhead. It began anew, and, in the interval, seemed to have ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the encampment; while inside he listened to a quiet Scotchman, resignedly yet clearly explaining everything in a voice—— there was the puzzle. Where in the world had the reviewer heard that voice before, with its patient monotone, as well known as his oldest friend's, its constant digressions and "reflections," its sentences so familiar, yet so new, sentences which, as each topic came up, he could write before they were uttered. "James Gilmour, M.A." Never knew him, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... that caused startled clerks in all directions to look up from their work he shattered the decorous monotone of the great store by slamming his sales book viciously upon the counter, and without a word of explanation to his fellow clerks marched out of the section toward the ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... portentous, it faded again into the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois—not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... and enjoy, for to-morrow we die" was a universal panacea. He was reckless to the uttermost stretch of recklessness, all serene and quiet though his pococurantism and his daily manner were; and while subdued to the undeviating monotone and languor of his peculiar set in all his temper and habits, the natural dare-devil in him took out its inborn instincts in a wildly careless and gamester-like imprudence with that most touchy tempered and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... father," Zenobia continued in a monotone, "and my brothers killed your brother; and so it will go on now ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... the rocks for our mules. Over the heated rocks scampered brown lizards, chasing each other and revelling in the sunshine. Butterflies on lazy wings came and settled on damp spots, and the cicada kept up his shrill continuous monotone, but not so loudly as he would later on when it got cooler. The cicada is supposed by some to pipe only during midday, but both in Central America and Brazil I found them loudest towards sunset, keeping up their ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... surprised to see that everything seemed to be in its place as usual. Summer is over, the fields have been reaped; there is a comfortable row of stacks in the rickyard; the pleasant humming of an engine came up the valley, as it sang its homely monotone, now low, now loud. After tea—the evenings have begun to close in—I went off to my study, took out my notebook and looked over my subjects, but I could make nothing of any of them. I could see that there were some good ideas among them; but none of them took shape. Often I have found ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually gleaned from her, had been ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... through the leaves,— Passion and mystery touched by deathless pain, Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves For something lost ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... of this dreary exercise they were dismissed to prepare for church where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she valued. She left the church in an unwonted ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... side went down for fully another thousand to where, in the solemn dark depths of the vast canyon or crack in the rocky crust of the earth, a great rushing river ran, its roar rising to where they stood in a strangely weird monotone, like low echoing thunder. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... movement of her hand Mrs. Gibbons caught the little girl, who, behind her back, was making ready to slip off the bed and on the floor, but as she swung her again in place she kept up her talking, and by neither rise nor fall was the monotone of ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... and fringed with clumps of cottonwood and willow, a languid stream flows silently eastward and is lost, with the valley, in the dim distance. Out to the west in long, gradual curve the southward range veers around and spans the horizon. Midway across this monotone of landscape, cutting the stream at right angles, a hard prairie road comes twisting and turning out of one of the southern ravines and, after long, gradual dip to the ford among the cottonwoods, emerges from their leafy shade and goes winding ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and cast it into Beauvais's lap. "Do you recognize that face? Is it not a mute accusation to your warped conscience?" The voice, changing from the monotone of narrative, grew strong and contemptuous. "I know you. I recognized you the moment I laid eyes on you, only I could not place you. Perhaps it was because it did not seem possible that you would dare show ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... trance as usual, and after a short interval, announced in her low monotone that the spirit of ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... the throng, and up to the hostess— Mrs. Burke, stout, honest, with sympathy in her eyes and humor in the lines round her sweet mouth. "Well, Josh," she said in a slow, pleasant monotone, "you HAVE done a lot of growing since I saw you. I always knew you'd come to some bad end. And here you are— in politics and in ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... in early June, when the dew sparkled on the poison ivy and the air was vibrant with the soft monotone of mosquitoes and the public road exhaled a delicate aroma of crude oil, Drusilla and Flavilla, laden with sketching-blocks, color-boxes, camp-stools, white umbrellas and bonbons, descended to the ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... table and flung up her head—she looked straight into the fire and swayed her body to the time of her tune. Her voice was low, so that men bent forward in order that they might hear, and the tune was almost a monotone, her voice rising and falling like the beating of the sea, with the character of her words. She sang of a Cornish pirate, Coppinger, "Cruel Coppinger," and of his deeds by land and sea, of his daring ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... unfastened, drew his homespun coat closer to his throat, and springing down the steps bounded away in search of the cow, who often strayed so far off that she was dispatched to drive her home. In the grand, peaceful, solemn woods, through which the wintry wind now sighed in a soothing monotone, the child's spirit reached an exaltation which, had she lived two thousand years earlier, and roamed amid the vales and fastnesses of classic Arcadia, would have vented itself in dithyrambics to the great "Lord of the Hyle," the Greek "All," the horned and hoofed god, Pan. In every ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to think him unconcerned, but beneath the flippancy I saw the nerves jerking. Then quite simply he began to tell me. He spoke in a low, even monotone, dispassionately, as though for him the incident no longer was ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... become repellent; it was a sepulchral place entombing all she had lost. In the midst of the dusk and gloom her mind groped about—after its habit—for something cheerful, something that would break the colorless monotone of the room and change the atmosphere. In a flash she remembered the primroses; and the remembrance ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the importance of muscular action in emotional states is the art of the actor. Not only would it be impossible for an actor to make an audience believe in the genuineness of his supposed emotion if he stood glassy-eyed and wooden-limbed declaiming his lines in a monotone, without gestures or play of expression of any sort, but it would also be impossible for him to feel even the counterfeit sensation which he is supposed to represent. So definite and so well recognized is this ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... miles away,—a hundred as the crow flies, and not by the tortuous route the cavalry had to follow, through a region that, all in an hour's march, shifted its scene from the dull monotone of barren waves of prairie to bold, beautiful heights and deep sheltered ravines and canons, the winding thread of the Mina Ska went foaming and leaping over its stony bed, taking occasional cat-naps in wide, shadowy ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... he dreamt of when he drew lightning from the summer cloud. For two hours the "White City" blossomed in new beauty. The great basin was bathed in a flood of fairy moonlight. Outside the peristyle the lake beat its monotone against the walls. On the plaza the great orchestra of more than 100 men played patriotic music, and the people were filled and lifted with the spirit of ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... rhythmical gallop, and the vigorously rocked traveller could distinguish in the diminished uproar a strain of music, at first confused like a groan, then more distinct, but always the same cruel, haunting monotone—the fragment of a song that Maria once sang when they were both children. Suddenly a mournful and prolonged whistle would resound through the night. The express rushed madly into a tunnel. Under the sonorous roof, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... also a rumbling monotone preceding each of these vehement interruptions. The Abbe Bardin was pointing out to her that, unmarried, her son would return to Tonquin, that Lizerolles would be left deserted, her house would be desolate without daughter-in-law or grandchildren; and, as he drew these pictures, ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... there was a dull glow of the watch-fires in the streets; where they sat, Scott and the girl could smell the pitch that fed them. And, over all, an unseen sick man gabbled his prayers in a halting monotone. A quick heat of wrath lit in Scott as his thoughts traveled around the situation; for Incarnacion sat with her head bowed, playing with her toes, and the ever-ready terror lest the plague should reach her moved in his heart. He had been away from Superban ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... humming began, from some point overhead. It wavered and shrilled and mounted in intensity, and then fell to a steady monotone. The dome about him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence, and slowly vanished. The hidden room vanished, and he was looking into the shadowy interior of a deserted barn. The barn vanished; blue sky appeared above, streaked with ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... had the deck to themselves and Manhattan had become a shadowy and ragged monotone, she turned and smiled. It was a smile of accepting the inevitable. He went with her to the forward deck where her staterooms were situated, and left her ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... toucan floated to his ears. In the street without he heard at intervals the pattering of bare feet in the hot, thick dust, as tardy fishermen returned from their labors. The hum of insects about his toldo lulled him with its low monotone. The call of a lonely jaguar drifted across the still lake from the brooding jungle beyond. A great peace lay over the ancient town; and when, in the early hours of morning, as the distorted moon hung low ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... blow yesterday, which had not yet subsided; and the waves had been lashed into a magnificent fury. Trot, trot, trot, trot, we trundled over the hard sand. The sound of the horse's hoofs rang out sharp against the monotone of the thunderous surf, as we drew nearer and nearer to the long line of the cliffs. At our left, almost from the lofty zenith of the pale evening sky to the high western horizon of the tumultuous dark-green sea, was suspended, so to speak, one of those gorgeous vertical sunsets ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... on my right, and across the dark expanse, and across the street which cut the other side of it I looked to the long roofs and walls of the convent, all a dull monotone scarcely distinguishable from the night. Only on the corner a solitary street lamp illuminated a little space of the wall and made a pool of ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover." These last expressions are quoted from Poe's whimsical analysis of this very poem, but they indicate precisely the general range of his verse. The climax of "The Bells" is the muffled monotone of ghouls, who glory in weighing down the human heart. "Lenore," The Raven, "The Sleeper," "To One in Paradise," and "Ulalume" form a tenebrose symphony,—and "Annabel Lee," written last of all, shows that one theme possessed him to the end. Again, these are all nothing ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... only—she's a friend of mine, a great friend of mine. Oh, yes!" Then, in an instant, the look of relief vanished, as once again the terrible reality hammered on her consciousness, and an overwhelming dejection showed in the dull eyes and in the drooping curves of the white lips. There was a monotone of desolation as she went on speaking in a whisper meant for the ears of no other. "It's awful—three years! Oh, I didn't understand! It's awful!—awful!" With the final word, she hurried off, her head bowed. She was ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... hesitation Kate placed herself beside him. Without giving her a chance to speak and in the same monotone, he added: "Who told you I ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... I know," her monotone apologized; "a first visit, too—but I'm going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don't allow no one to measure in my house but myself, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Limasito before he awoke from his reverie. The swiftly falling curtain of twilight had wrapped the spreading orchards and haciendas in fragrant gloom and a myriad of mysterious chirpings and rustlings forecasted the coming night, when the harsh, grating screech of a horn blared upon their monotone and a low roadster appeared suddenly around a turn in the road, careening sharply on two wheels, and bore down recklessly upon ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... attribute, the will, the idea. Genius manifest in the greatest and best of humanity, shown indeed, as the Word of God, or as he who holds the mirror up to nature, or by the great power which in colour or monotone can display the love and agony of a dying Christ; by the loving poet, who can soar beyond his age to uphold an unselfish aim of perfection to the world; by all those who, throwing off their mortal attributes at times, can live the ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow, drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... ancient grove. The groups around the grave, the dark faces, the red garments, the scattered lights, the misty boughs, were weird and strange. The men sang one of their own wild chants. Two crickets sang also, one on either side, and did not cease their little monotone, even when the three volleys were fired above the graves. Just before the coffins were lowered, an old man whispered to me that I must have their position altered,—the heads must be towards the west; so it was done,—though they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... a dream. The song had the wild swing of savage life, the deep sweetness of a monotone, but it had also the fine intelligence, the subtle allusiveness of romance. He could read between the lines. The allegory touched him where his nerves were sensitive. Where she had gone he could not go until his eyes had seen and known what hers had seen and known; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as a white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them—a thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-Damned; the vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks, on shifting sand bars—a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp nights when the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he described how his best-known poem, the Raven, was systematically built up on a preconceived plan in ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... low voice, sharp in contradistinction to the monotone of the preacher's, was heard to repeat these words: 'I say I am not sure I shall survive it.' Considerable muttering in the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone. ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... murmured to Morhange, showing him the seven pale stars, while Eg-Anteouen took up his mournful song in the same monotone: ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... and began to pace the foreground of the Gardens of Versailles, back and forth like a tethered beast in a park. His voice was dispassionate. The narrative proceeded in a monotone. But if fiends could conceive a tale more dark, they would whisper it ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... bluebird, straining its little throat in exultant melody, flew from branch to branch of the big chestnut-tree, and the hum of insects made soft monotone to the shrill cry of the locust, which promised greater heat next day. In the distance the Calverton road stretched white and dusty south to town, north to the unknown land, the land of dreams to Peggy and to Peggy's mother, who had never ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... gentle reader, let us walk toward the simple stone seat, which some shepherd boy has erected under yon silvery-stemmed birch tree, where the sound of the waterfall comes only in a pleasant monotone, and where the most romantic part of old Scotland is spread beneath our feet. There you see the eternal foam of the torrent, without being distracted with its roar; and you can trace the course of the stream till it terminates in yon clear and pellucid pool at the foot ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... at the centre of the clock's vast dial, although at our right a big moon was leaving the tree tops and flooding the sky with its light. Toward this she turned, and lifting an arm with the reverence of a priestess said, in impassioned monotone: ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... serious mood passed, and he was now capering about and singing as he went in a joyous monotone as he went to find ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate have been ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... a week," she went on with no change in her monotone; "I can give you an answer in a day or two. To-morrow ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... against the pane. Outside was the dying light of day, but the glare of noonday, the quiet light of evening, the black of the night, were all one to him now. Was it going to be so with his mind, his spirit? Would all that other light, light of the mind and soul, be gulped into this black monotone, this nothingness? ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... which paints in undisguised blackness the facts of life, and over against their blackest darkness, the radiant light of a great hope shining bright and glorious, or one that paints humanity in a uniform monotone of indistinguishable grey involving the past, the present, and the future—which, believing in no disease, hopes for no cure? My text, taken in conjunction with the grand words which follow, about 'The new man, which, after God, is created in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... her in his thoughts other than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Then he asked himself what would become of her—if she would be married, and to whom! Alas! Old Rouault was rich, and she!—so beautiful! But Emma's face always rose before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his ears, "If you should marry after all! If you should marry!" At night he could not sleep; his throat was parched; he was athirst. He got up to drink from the water-bottle and opened the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... fragments that have similarly endured, chiefly fire imagination. Seen grey at gloaming time, golden through sunny dawns, partaking in those spectral transformations cast upon the moor by the movement of clouds, by the curtains of the rain, by the silver of breaking day, the monotone of night and the magic of the moon, these relics reveal themselves and stand as a link between the present and the far past. Mystery broods over them and the jealous wings of the ages hide a measure of their secret. Thus far these ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... rising shore and into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance of winter locked it up. At August dusk, when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found in the word nevermore. He next invented a pretext for the frequent but varying use ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... but I mostly sleeps very little." And to my no small astonishment she now shut up like an umbrella, and at once recommenced her mesmeric monotone. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to catch the utterances that never came for all his patient coaxing; and ever and anon he iterated, feebly and more feebly, as if all his sinking soul he did outpour into the words, that melancholy monotone which was his only stock and store,—"All ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... formerly painted—with some originality of taste—a bright orange hue, relieved with red trimmings round doors, windows and eaves. But the sun had blistered and the hot desert winds had cracked and peeled its originally gaudy hues, and it was now a melancholy monotone of dull, pallid yellow. Here and there the paint had vanished altogether, and the bleached boards showed underneath. Like most of the other structures in Blue Creek—which boasted a general store, post office and Chinese laundry and restaurant combined the National House was coated ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... by the dignity of his calling, then the solemnity of the function, the mystic and tedious pomp, the magnificent monotone of prayer and song in the ancient cathedral, hallowed by so many exalted memories, must have stirred his inmost soul. The pinnacle of all human ambition, the crown of Charles the Great, lay glittering before his longing eyes on the altar of the Prince of the Apostles. The Pope, however, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... lay supine; heavy-lidded eyes half opened upon this tormentress who had somehow succeeded in calling him back into the dimly lighted room from the shadows of Lethe's alluring banks. Miss Beaver, kneeling beside young Frank's bed, talked tenderly to him in a soft monotone. She made all manner of gratuitous promises, if only Frank would try like a good boy to get well. She told him firmly that he could, if he wanted to. She made her suggestions with gently persuasive voice, ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... was born a dogged sort of devil," he went on almost in a monotone. "The fact did not manifest itself to me until I came to the time when—all the rest of me dropped into a bottomless gulf. That perhaps describes it. I found myself suddenly standing on the edge of it. And youth, and future, ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... found that she could no longer keep her attention on the stitches. She paced nervously up and down the little apartment. In the room beneath she could hear the dull muffled sound of men's voices in a long continuous monotone, broken only by the interposition now and again of one voice which was so deep and loud that it reminded her of the growl of a beast of prey. This must belong to the red-bearded stranger. Kate wondered what it could be that they were ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as the Hermit rambled on In one long listless monotone, We heard a wild and mournful groan Come rumbling down the tunnelled way; A voice, an awful mournful bray, Singing some old funereal lay; Then solemn footsteps, muffled, dull, Approached as if they trod on wool, And as they nearer, nearer drew, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... she hears the pastor cry on a rising wave of monotone, and starts the fan again. Is she in church or in Rosemont? She sees Johanna beckoning in her old, cajoling way, asking, as in fact, not fancy, she had done the evening before, for the latest news of Cornelius, and ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... was over; and the more careful men were back in the shed sharpening their shears by two o'clock. Punctually at that hour the bell repeated its summons DE CAPO. The warm afternoon gradually lengthened its shadows; the shears clicked in tireless monotone; the pens filled and became empty. The wool-presses yawned for the mountain of fleeces which filled the bins in front of them, divided into various grades of excellence, and continuously disgorged them, neatly ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... on, and as the leaden listlessness settled down heavier hour by hour, I began to look back regretfully, if not remorsefully. There were moments, not few or far between, when I would have given much to hear the wire-drawn monotone that lately had been an offense to me; ay, even though each slow sentence should ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... lessons should be largely "conversational in style," to cultivate flexibility of voice and to break up the dreary monotone so frequently heard ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... a sweet, sweet song To my dear little boy at play— Merrily singeth all day long, As it spinneth and spinneth away. And my dear little boy He laugheth with joy When he heareth the monotone Of that busy thing That loveth to sing The song that ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... naturally intones or monotones if set to read or recite. And where a congregation have to repeat the same words together, it is absolutely necessary that they should do it on some given note, or the result would be Babel. Children in school, of their own accord, say their lessons together in a monotone. The practice of doing so in the Church dates from the very ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... a low monotone; "how narrow and limited is all that you know compared to what there is surely up there. Yes, if I did not answer you it was because I was thinking of you, and I was filled with grief. You ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Hank's hunting and fishing stories and not bore him with stories of his own prowess. Wherefore, Jack was left alone in peace to fight the sudden, nauseating wave of homesickness, and in a little while found himself listening to the steady monotone of Hank Brown's voice. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... in a more utterly apathetic way than Flower. Her voice neither rose nor fell. She poured out her dreary words in a wailing monotone. ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... of the Rain, who has put out all our hearths with his flood last night, will relight them again with new fire, fresh flame from the sun, rays of our disk, divine, mystic, wonderful," Tu-Kila-Kila proclaimed, in his droning monotone. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... led the way to the cot of a peasant whose cheeks had the spot of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat, Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and then falling back into a monotone, ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... get."—"Oh, quite enough to get, sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes." Thereupon—glowering angrily at Sam, and blinking his eyes more than ever—Mr. Justice Stareleigh remarked, with a heavier cold in the head than hitherto, in a severe monotone, and with the greatest deliberation, "You must not tell us what the soldier says unless the soldier is in court, unless that soldier comes here in uniform, and is examined in the usual way—it's not ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... still standing very straight in the middle of the doorway. She was not looking at the inert thing on the walk below, but into her father's eyes. He did not, could not answer. He seemed frozen stiff. She went on in the same dull, whispered monotone. "I begged him to let me come alone. I begged him to let me see you first. But he would come. He brought me all the way from the West and he—he was not afraid of you. You have done what you said you would do. You did not give him a chance. And always,—always I have ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... an officer, who lay across the path asleep with his men. So tired was he that he did not wake. On over a field to the farm. I delivered my despatch to the Brigade-Major, whose eyes were glazed with want of sleep. He spoke to me in the pitiful monotone of the unutterably weary. I fed off bully, hot potatoes, bread and honey, then ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... wind without was eager and sharp; Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp, And rattles and wrings The icy strings, Singing in dreary monotone A Christmas carol of its own, Whose burden still, as he might ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... boundless, precipitous; and to the east a glittering iceberg floated slowly towards us, like a palace of gold and emerald. The ship rolled calmly upon the long swells, the ripples plashing in low lulling monotone, and her hull and spars were reflected darkly beneath me. I drew a long gray hair from my temple, and subjected it to a gentle friction between my palm and finger; then I pricked my wrist, and leaning ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... end, before the dais, the kneeling figure began to move. Its arms extended slowly, they swept backward, then out again, and three times the figure bowed itself and straightened, and with the movement came a low, human monotone. It was over quickly. Probably two full minutes had not passed since Keith had entered when the kneeling figure sprang to its feet with the quickness of a cat, faced about, and stood there, smiling and bowing and ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... colour of an olive, there rose pink, and here again a brilliant green; above their heads the stars were coming out, in the east it was already dusk; and behind them in the town, drums were beginning to beat with their barbaric monotone. Both men walked with their chins sunk upon their breasts, their eyes upon the ground. They had come to the end of hope, they were possessed with a lethargy of despair. Feversham thought not at all of the pine trees on the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... her expressionless monotone again, "Then you ought to have known better than to get sunburnt. Here, put this in your pocket," she handed me the tube of sunburn cream, "maybe I'd better check up on some of the others and make sure they haven't forgotten." She went off without another word, leaving ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... detail. Happy over the bartered goods, they began to dance, first decorating themselves with tall branches stuck in the back of their belts. They jumped from one foot to the other, sometimes turning round, and singing in a rough, deep monotone. We withdrew to the boats, and they dispersed on the shore, lighted fires and roasted ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... North." There was a trace of surprise now in the general monotone Then she added, as if to leave no doubt in my mind, ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... days later, Sir Francis Vesey was sitting in his private office, a musty den encased within the heart of the city, listening, or trying to listen, to the dull clerical monotone of a clerk's dry voice detailing the wearisome items of certain legal formulae preliminary to an impending case. Sir Francis had yawned capaciously once or twice, and had played absently with a large ink-stained paperknife,—signs ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... and dipped into the green meadow. Stafford talked of battles and marches, but he spoke in a monotone, distrait and careless, as of a day-dreaming scholar reciting his lesson. Such as it was, the recital lasted across the meadow, into the wood, yet lit by yellow light, a place itself for day dreams. "No. I did not see him ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to her education, with unbiased mind. She knew masses and anthems and hymns and chants of all kinds; never had she heard anything of this kind before. It was not congregational, or Gregorian; nor was it repeated by the choir from side to side; nor was it a monotone with a drop at the end; nor was it a florid, tuneful chant such as one may hear in some Anglican services. This Reader, with a rich, strong voice, a baritone of great power, took nearly the whole of the service—it must have been extremely fatiguing—upon himself, chanting it from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... church-steeple fashion, and with a silken veil tied on its tongue to give each stroke a solemn softness and illusion of distance. Small wonder that the most of the company, just risen from "a plumb bait," turned that way and stared, seeing old Joy, with joyless face, tolling out the notes in persistent monotone while in front of her stood the Gilmores at either side of a chair, and on the chair, also standing, the daughter of Gideon Hayle. With her hands and eyes fastened upon a written notice and with the bell tolling steadily at her back she tremblingly ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... began in a low monotone, that nevertheless penetrated to every part of the room. He had a voice of peculiar quality, as sweet as the tones of a tenor, and as pleasant to hear as music; now and then there was a manly ring in it which thrilled his listeners. "A week ago ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly amongst them, a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends, sometimes half submerged, once more gallantly struggling to the surface, and again sunk. The bare boughs of the trees beat together in a dirgelike monotone. Now and again a leaf went sibilantly whistling past. The wild commotion of the heavens and earth was visible, for the night was not dark. The ranger, standing within the rude stable of unhewn logs, all undaubed, noted how ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to bear—up here," she spoke in an odd, weary monotone, as if she were thinking aloud. "This morning ... I think, if Norah had left anything in the bottle ... ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... from a German shore!" (Thus runs the sad refrain,) "Here dwelt thine Emperor, here he bore With fortitude his pain; Hear'st thou the lone, low monotone Of billows tempest-tossed? In that long roll the German soul Still mourns for him ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... make the other man "perk up his ears" if his attention wanders; so plan to introduce variety into your manner of speaking. Don't just open the spigot of your mind and let your ideas run out in a monotone. Variety of voice is pleasing, as well ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... placed and skinned. This done, the bead man of the party, or the most important man present, takes a small part of the entrails or heart, cuts it into fine bits and scatters the pieces in all directions, at the same time chanting in a monotone a few words which mean "Spirits, we thank you for this successful hunt. Here is your share of the spoils." This is done to feed and appease the spirits which the Negritos believe inhabit all places, and the ceremony is never neglected. Then the cutting up and division ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... alto voice, gabbling in a monotone. A phrase would be spoken, the voice would hesitate for just an instant, and then another, totally disconnected phrase would come. The enunciation and pronunciation would vary from phrase to ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... often rising naturally to the surface, and revealing the strength of the foundation on which the subtle, aerial inventions of the author are erected. His frequent dashes of humor gracefully blend with the monotone of the story, and soften the harsher colors in which he delights to clothe his portentous conceptions. In no former production of his pen, are his unrivalled powers of description displayed to better advantage. The rusty wooden house in Pyncheon-street, with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... pike toward the brick house. The white-ruffed fennel reached up its dusty yellow heads to touch her skirts as she passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple iron-weed at the roadside. In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor locust raised its lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the level fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the transparent "heat-waves" that danced above the low ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... The story was so dark and sad—or at least to myself it so appeared—that even the little breaks and turns of lighter thought or livelier manner, which could scarcely fail to vary now and then the speaker's voice, seemed almost to grate and jar upon its sombre monotone. On the other hand, by omitting these, and departing from her homely style, I might do more of harm than good through failing to convey impressions, or even facts, so accurately. Whereas the gist and core and pivot of my father's life and fate are so involved ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the thick lenses of the spectacles. The popeyes remained expressionless, utterly, Teutonically inscrutable. A big heather bee came buzzing among the alpenrosen. Its droning hum resembled the monotone ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... handsome features. I dreamed that I was hurrying by the spot where she was standing, eager to reach the other side unobserved by her. As I stole with noiseless tread behind her, I heard her talking to the waters in a slow and humdrum monotone: ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... gurgled in its throat and its note ceased with the bursting of a bubble, there, held fixedly by living coral, the dead shell could not choose but whistle. So I left it to its wayward pipings, happy to have been the sole auditor to a purely natural, albeit mechanical, monotone. Upon such an instrument did the heavenly maid beguile the time when she was yet uncouthly young—at the hoydenish age when men also cajoled her with clicking sticks and the beating of hollow logs, and music was but ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... velvet toque, with just a suggestion of a coquettish cant on her brown curls, down her healthily round cheeks, a bit flushed, above the fur neckpiece that clasped her throat, Britt's fervent eyes strayed. And some of the words of the Prophet's singsong monotone echoed in the empty chambers of Britt's consciousness, "'Thou hast dove's eyes within thy locks—thy lips are like ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... backs, lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows, and the may-flies flickered and rustled round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows' bills snapped as they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... appointment of a special prosecuting attorney, David," he said in a harsh monotone. ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the leaves of the oaks and chestnuts with a lazy summer stir; white sails spotted the broad bosom of the Shatemuc and came down with summer gentleness from the upper reaches of the river. And here and there a cloud floated over; and now and then a locust sang his monotone; and another soft breath of the North wind said that it was August; and the grasshoppers down in the dell said yes, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... and wonderfully. In the mystic spaces of the night the pines could be heard in their weird monotone, as they softly smote branch and branch, as if moving in ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... as dark and gloomy as it was without, and as the two visitors entered, a voice came from out the shadows, and said, in a curious monotone and with ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... feel naked," went on Cissie in the monotone that succeeds a fit of weeping, "and ashamed—and afraid." She blinked her eyes to press out the undue moisture, and looked at Peter as if asking what else she could do about it than to go away ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... let the others have his place before the screen. His sense of uneasiness increased as he contemplated the approach of that huge black ship. And he was convinced its color was black, that it was not just the monotone of the view ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... what he said in a low, metallic monotone: "Good morning, Sir. I am very pleased to meet you. Can you tell me what o'clock it is? I am much obliged. I wish to descend at Manchester. At what hour do we arrive there? There are few passengers to-day. The weather is fine. I beg your pardon if I do not make myself clear. I do not speak ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... listen to this. Now here's a little incident I found this evening that interests me immensely. It proves to my mind one of two points I hold in regard to Marshal Ney. Listen," and he read at length from his book, a dry, sepulchral monotone that grated on the ear ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... water and sitting in Ruth's room wielding a fan over Ruth's ungrateful face. It consisted in spending of her scant supply of money for medicines, in constant attendance and patient, faithful nursing—accompanied by sharp scoldings and recriminations uttered in a monotone guaranteed not to disturb the sick girl. Perhaps she really fancied she was being hard and unsympathetic and calloused. She talked as if she were, but no single act was in tune with her words.... She grumbled—and served. She complained—and ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... and having the South Foreland west by north, you should find six fathoms of water at a neap tide," muttered Captain Dixon, in a low monotone. His eyes were fixed and far away. He was unconscious of his companion's presence, and spoke like one ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... just as Thoreau used to get at bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out. You see more of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty days of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why people should go to Saratoga, except to see people. True, as a general thing, they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are summering. But if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in the country during the nine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... branches against a diaphanous sky, and the air was full of delicate spider-webs which the breeze shook and tore asunder. The pines and cypresses—all the evergreen trees—took on something of this colourless pallor, seemed to fade and melt into the all-prevailing monotone. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... bullish shoulders hunched forward and his fleshy red neck, rolling over the collar of his coat, leaned across the table in a tense and listening attitude. With his eyes glued to the aperture, Aldous strained his ears to catch what Rann was saying. He heard only the low and unintelligible monotone of his voice. A mocking smile was accompanying Rann's words. To-night, as at all times, this hawk who preyed upon human lives was immaculate. In all ways but one he was the antithesis of the beefy scoundrel who ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... sure of that," she said slowly, looking straight into his eyes and speaking almost in a monotone. He started. For a moment he ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... since they had come within sight of the convent, her chatter had died away into silence. Perhaps she was tired, for she sat quite still now, and showed no wish to resume the conversation. The sound of the city chimes died away; the little bell in the belfry close by kept up its sharp monotone for a minute longer, and then it too was hushed; the trees whispered and rustled, the grasshoppers chirped shrilly all around, but a great stillness seemed to fall upon the darkling earth as the grey evening came ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... slow. However, he was true to himself at least in this, that through the whole piece he dragged along just half a beat behind the rest. The others showed a most decided penchant for the ancient Greek music, which, as is well known, having nothing to do with harmony, ran on in unison or monotone. They all sang treble, with slight variations, caused by accidental rising and falling of the voice, say ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... on the foot-board; the woman's face was cowled in the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston's voice went on in a low monotone, to the ticking of the great clock in the next room. Gaston watched her face, and there came to him like an inspiration little things Jock did, which would mean more to his mother than large adventures. Her lips moved now and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to show signs of nervousness, and from the huddled mass there came sounds of uneasy movements. Mead urged his horse into a quicker walk and with one leg over its neck as they went round and round the herd, he sang to them in a crooning monotone, like a mother's lullaby to a babe that is just dropping into dreamland. It quieted the incipient disturbance, the rumbling thunder ceased for a time, and after a little moving about the cattle settled ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families. She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in her usual muffled monotone, "Brother, I hope the new doctor will be able to do something for you. Solomon says there's great talk of his cleverness. I'm sure it's my wish you should be spared. And there's none more ready to nurse you than your own sister and your own nieces, if you'd only say the word. There's Rebecca, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... took his pipe, and sought a small store of tobacco which he had left in his hut over winter. He had thought often of it; that and the Cat seemed something to come home to in the spring. But the tobacco was gone; not a dust left. The man swore a little in a grim monotone, which made the profanity lose its customary effect. He had been, and was, a hard drinker; he had knocked about the world until the marks of its sharp corners were on his very soul, which was thereby calloused, until ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... you how you figgered to settle wi' Jake," he said. "I guess it'll be all"—he broke off, and glanced out prairieward, but went on almost immediately,—"a settlin'. I've seen you kind o' riled. And I've seen Jake." He stood up and peered into the darkness while he talked in his even monotone. "Yup," he went on, "ther's ways o' dealin' wi' men—an' ways. Guess, now, ef you wus dealin' wi' an honest citizen you'd jest talk him fair. Mind, I figger to know you a heap." His eyes suddenly turned on the man he was addressing, but returned almost at once to their earnest contemplation ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... in a strange absent monotone, as if repeating words he was actually hearing. 'You have broken my laws. Go now to your doom, you and all your brothers. Such priests Kali will not have. Thuggee is no more. I ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... a ceremony of some description was taking place, lesser priests and other acolytes performing their various parts, the incantations rising now loudly, now sinking to a hollow monotone, the whole affair being none the less absorbing when Bruno remembered that, perhaps, it might have some connection with the vile plots against the Sun Children, if not endangering ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... apart, With folded hands and turbaned head, With a nameless burden upon her heart, And the light of youth forever fled. And she sits a swaying to and fro, Like the billowy pine with plume and cone, While a minor strain subdued and slow, She sings in a plaintive monotone: ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people—ah, the people— They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone— They are neither man nor woman— They are neither brute nor human— They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A Paean from ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the laggards to scurry into the silently forming ranks, and finally, with one emphatic rataplan, the morning concert abruptly closed and the gruff voices of the first sergeants, in swift-running monotone, were heard calling the roll of their shadowy companies, and, thoroughly roused, the garrison "broke ranks" for the long routine ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... into this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of leaf and branch, without a sound from bird or beast to break its soothing monotone, the two men lay down within a few yards, though out of sight, of each other. And for a time all was ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... eucalyptus across the street. In the music-room of the white house the young lady of the family had opened the piano and was practising finger-exercises. The scales and arpeggios following one another without interruption, came to his ears in a pleasant monotone. A Chinese "boy" in a stiff blouse of white linen, made a great splashing as he washed down the front steps with a bucket of water and the garden hose. Grocery and delivery wagons came and went, rattling over the cobbles and car-tracks, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... that night the monotone of the soldiers' talk merged into confused and indistinct recollections of his first Sunday at Fort Benton. Eva Thornhill's scornful yet inviting face seemed drawing him through deep waters, to be replaced by the face of the child Winifred, ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... left the office. Court, the gun cradled under one arm, picked up the phone and spoke into it. His voice was a low, crisp monotone. After a while, he replaced the receiver and stood quiet, staring ...
— Criminal Negligence • Jesse Francis McComas
... bells could not tell, if you would only give them time enough. We have only one chime, for musical purposes, in the town. But, without attempting tunes, only give the bells the Morse alphabet, and every bell in Boston might chant in monotone the words of "Hail Columbia" at length, every Fourth of July. Indeed, if Mr. Barnard should report any day that a discouraged 'prentice-boy had left town for his country home, all the bells could instantly be set to work to speak articulately, in language regarding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... sitting in Ruth's room wielding a fan over Ruth's ungrateful face. It consisted in spending of her scant supply of money for medicines, in constant attendance and patient, faithful nursing—accompanied by sharp scoldings and recriminations uttered in a monotone guaranteed not to disturb the sick girl. Perhaps she really fancied she was being hard and unsympathetic and calloused. She talked as if she were, but no single act was in tune with her words.... She grumbled—and served. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... with a low, liquid monotone, mounting by degrees and swelling into an infinitude of melody—the whole grove dilating, as it were, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... no protest, and they entered the forest. The moon shone down through the lofty redwoods that seemed to scrape its crystal; the monotone of the distant sea blended with the faint roar of the tree-tops. The vast gloomy aisles were unbroken ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Comme ce berceau, Et que Marguerite Filait son fuseau, Quand le vent d'automne Faisait tout gemir, Ton cri monotone ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... monotone, pausing slightly at each sentence end, that his evidence may be inscribed.] About ten o'clock this morning, your Worship, I found these two little girls in Blue Street, Fulham, crying outside a public-house. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hills should I behold, Sitting upon an old gray stone That humps its back up through the mold, And piping in a monotone, Pan, as he sat in days of old, My joy would bid ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... said Virginia not daring to raise her voice above a low monotone. "Free, on our yacht, that has brought us from ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... city, negro carriers may be heard at all hours, in couples, engaged in the transportation of clove-bags, boxes of merchandise, &c., from store to "godown" and from "go-down" to the beach, singing a kind of monotone chant for the encouragement of each other, and for the guiding of their pace as they shuffle through the streets with bare feet. You may recognise these men readily, before long, as old acquaintances, by the consistency with which they sing ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... reader, let us walk toward the simple stone seat, which some shepherd boy has erected under yon silvery-stemmed birch tree, where the sound of the waterfall comes only in a pleasant monotone, and where the most romantic part of old Scotland is spread beneath our feet. There you see the eternal foam of the torrent, without being distracted with its roar; and you can trace the course of the stream till it terminates in yon clear and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... returned to his house, gave the money to his wife, and went to his neighbour's. The thrashing machine was humming, and the driver was shouting. The lean horses were going slowly round him, straining at their traces. The driver was shouting to them in a monotone, "Now, there, my dears." Some women were unbinding sheaves, others were raking up the scattered straw and ears, and others again were gathering great armfuls of corn and handing them to the men to feed the machine. The work ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... do the fair thing, say, blow in fifteen per cent, to the central committee, and what they feel like on the outside, then politics, instead of a burden and a reproach, becomes a pleasing duty, a joyous occasion and a picnic to those whose lives might otherwise be a dreary monotone. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... have suggested that he dig in a nearby gravel pit for a basket of rain to hurl against the pirates' window. But hard beans, he says, are better, and he has won the cook's consent. For the slow monotone of water dripping from the roof in our second act, a single bean, he tells me, dropped gently in a pan is ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... such object, in his hand, and putting both hands behind his back, the friend began to bob his head and shoulders up and down in an idiotic fashion, at the same time chanting in a sing-song monotone, "Ho yo, yo ho, hi ya yoho!" for a considerable length of time, while Mozwa staked his blanket, a fine thick green one, purchased at Great Bear Lake. We forget the friend's stake, but it was probably supposed to ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... he tarried but a moment, yet he explained his paralysis. In the dreary monotone of a chronic sour temper he related that some Confederates, about a year before, had come here impressing horses, and their officer, on being called by him "no gentleman," had struck him behind the ear with the butt of a carbine. I asked what punishment ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... one, consisting of —— volumes [here he produced the customary specimen sheets]. You see this one work alone is worth the full amount you pay for life membership [here occurred a "special offer" of some sort, given in a low monotone which the stenographer was unable to hear; and I must confess that I was so stupefied by this astounding fabrication that I myself have not the faintest recollection of what this "special offer" consisted]. We are very anxious to have your name as our honorary vice-president here, because ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... replied, in the same even monotone. "The Countess Nina is, by her own desire, following a strict regime, but to-day being a universal feast-day all rules are somewhat relaxed. The reverend mother desires me to inform you that it is now the hour for mass—she has herself already entered the chapel. If you ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... a trance as usual, and after a short interval, announced in her low monotone that the spirit of Peter Crane ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... change." This provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him.... Eventually the conversation assumed its eternal monotone: "What then? ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... condition of their clothing, to the rain. The saw-dust street was saturated like a sponge. They could feel the quick water rise about the pressure at their feet. From the invisible houses they heard a steady monotone of flowing from the roofs. Far ahead, dim in the mist, sprayed the light ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... round like the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music. Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... at length and wonderfully. In the mystic spaces of the night the pines could be heard in their weird monotone, as they softly smote branch and branch, as if moving in some solemn ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... friends. She's right down timid. She always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I DO introduce them—almost always. If I didn't introduce my gentlemen friends to Mother," the young girl added in her little soft, flat monotone, "I shouldn't think I ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... were not sufficiently terrifying, the air is throbbing with sound. Each Indian pops away for general results as he comes jumping along, and yells shrilly to show what a big warrior he is, while underneath it all is the hurried monotone of hoof-beats becoming ever louder, as the roar of an increasing rainstorm on the roof. It does not seem possible that ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... underlies the whole narrative, often rising naturally to the surface, and revealing the strength of the foundation on which the subtle, aerial inventions of the author are erected. His frequent dashes of humor gracefully blend with the monotone of the story, and soften the harsher colors in which he delights to clothe his portentous conceptions. In no former production of his pen, are his unrivalled powers of description displayed to better advantage. The rusty wooden house in Pyncheon-street, with its seven sharp-pointed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... demand, sung in a chanting kind of monotone, and very seldom refused. A boy is chosen to knock at the farm door and rouse the inmates, it being considered unlucky for the household if a girl first ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... been trying to break into her hopeless monotone; finally he succeeded. "The trouble with you is, you know altogether too damned much that isn't so." He was barely able to keep his voice down and his eyes front. "What do you think I'm made of—superefract? I thought the whole performance was an act, to prove ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... furious cast-iron machine seemed to him tired of howling the deafening rhythmical gallop, and the vigorously rocked traveller could distinguish in the diminished uproar a strain of music, at first confused like a groan, then more distinct, but always the same cruel, haunting monotone—the fragment of a song that Maria once sang when they were both children. Suddenly a mournful and prolonged whistle would resound through the night. The express rushed madly into a tunnel. Under the sonorous roof, the frightful concert redoubled, exasperating him ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... of awe, With these same eyes I saw His head incredible retract its horn Rounding like babe's new born, While silvery phosphorescence played About his dis-horned head. The sneer smoothed from his lip, He beamed blandly on the ship; All winds sank to a moan, All waves to a monotone (For all these seemed his realm), While he laid a strong ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... heights beyond, and a few moments' walk brings me to the lovely shore, where sails are gliding continually by, and the huge steamers sweep past with echoing tread, and a train of waves, whose rush relieves the monotone of the ripples. In the country behind us are mountain-paths, and lonely glens, with gurgling streams, and many-voiced water-falls. And over all are spread the gorgeous hues ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... here he stood in his stall in his night shoes and black habit and cropped head, propped on his misericorde, with the great pages open before him, thumbed and greasy at their corners, from which he was repeating in a loud monotone formula after formula that had had time to grow familiar from repetition, but not yet sweet from associations—here he stood with heavy eyelids after his short sleep, his feet aching and hot, and ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... childish, alto voice, gabbling in a monotone. A phrase would be spoken, the voice would hesitate for just an instant, and then another, totally disconnected phrase would come. The enunciation and pronunciation would vary from phrase to phrase, ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... Lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually gleaned from her, had ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... death's grim reapers stood Waiting the signal with impatient steel; And morning passed, and mid-day. Here and there The crack of rifles on the picket-line, Or boom of solitary cannon broke The myriad-voiced and dreadful monotone. So fled the anxious hours until the hills Sent forth their silent shadows to the east— And then their batteries opened on our left Advanced into the valley. All along The rolling crest of Seminary Ridge Rolled up the smoke of cannon. Answered then The grim ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... up the petty duties of a life apart and lone, Till the slow years wrought a music in its dreary monotone. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... one like this, you are more isolated, farther removed from the soil and its attractions, and an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long, unpeopled vistas ahead; the still, dark eddies; the endless monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or standing like a gaunt spectre ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... behind massed, spitting clouds. Morning, noon, and night the eaves of the shacks dripped steadily, the gaunt limbs of the hardwoods were a line of coursing drops, and through all the vast reaches of fir and cedar the patter of rain kept up a dreary monotone. Whenever the mist that blew like rolling smoke along the mountains lifted for a brief hour, there, creeping steadily ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and repeats them accurately to my ear. While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my mysterious friend were counting my own life away. Then again I am sure that in the faint, persistent monotone of his voice I hear the singing of the old mower's inevitable scythe. The Imagination contemplates this friend of mine with wonder. But Science sees him holding the hand of a captain in his ship at sea, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... integral part of the military fine art of communications. System which is only system is injurious to the mind and spirit of any normal person. One can play a superior part well, and maintain prestige and dignity, without being under the compulsion to think, speak and act in a monotone. In fact, when any military commander becomes over-inhibited along these lines because of the illusion that this is the way to build a reputation for strength, he but doubles the necessity that his subordinates will act at all times like human ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... terminated his speech with this terrible emphasis, he started into an upright attitude, and listened with all his ears for another utterance of that harsh monotone that, borne upon the breeze and rising above the "sough" of the disturbed water, could easily be distinguished as the voice ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... kicking her in the stomach," she said in a monotone. "He must have damaged her insides. Mon Dieu! She was in agony for three days with her stomach all swelled up. Plenty of scoundrels have been sent to the galleys for less than that, but the courts won't ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... a sad monotone if every thing in creation resembled each other; there would be no harmony. But walk in, Mr. Jerrold, my uncle expects you," said May, throwing open ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... curious experiences that had come to him during the many years he had dwelt beside the ocean; and while Albert listened, stealing occasional glances at the sweet-faced but plainly clad girl whose eyes were bent upon her sewing, the neighboring waves kept up their monotone, and the fire sparkled and glowed ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... course for a more exciting life, and for richer dresses than he could afford to give them. His sermons, it must be confessed, were not very instructive, suggestive, or eloquent,—were, in fact, without point, delivered in a drawling monotone; but then his hearers were not used to oratorical displays or learned treatises in the pulpit, and were quite satisfied with the glorious liturgy, if well intoned, and pious chants from surpliced boys, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and looked at Constans indifferently. Then he spoke in the inflectionless monotone of ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... not know! The candle burnt lower and lower and finally went out and she was left in darkness, but again she was conscious of sounds from the room below. At first it was only a word or a sentence, then the guarded speech became a steady monotone that ran deep into the night; eventually this ceased and Betty ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... The white dust rose in clouds. The plague of flies increased. The rattle and creak of wheel, the monotone of the drivers, the cough of dust-afflicted kine made the only sounds for ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... to pray for a remission of the scourge. Over the line of roofs there was a dull glow of the watch-fires in the streets; where they sat, Scott and the girl could smell the pitch that fed them. And, over all, an unseen sick man gabbled his prayers in a halting monotone. A quick heat of wrath lit in Scott as his thoughts traveled around the situation; for Incarnacion sat with her head bowed, playing with her toes, and the ever-ready terror lest the plague should reach her moved in his heart. He had been away from Superban ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... rolled like a massive curtain from under the skies. The stars began to glow white and metallic, and from far in the North there came faintly a crisping moaning sound, like steel sleigh-runners running over frosty snow—the mysterious monotone of the Northern Lights. After that it grew ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... killed my father," Zenobia continued in a monotone, "and my brothers killed your brother; and so it will go on now for ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... a constrained monotone, which seemed to Mary, in spite of her genuine regret for the pain she gave him, unreasonably full ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... from his horse as he came near and made a rush for the tent. The flap was open, but a sentinel who stood in front put up his rifle, and barred the way. A low monotone came from ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Mr. Carden, and took the journal from her. He read in a loud business-like monotone, that, like some blessed balm, dried every tear. "'Manly fellows who never shed a tear before: this disposed of one alternative, and narrowed the inquiry. It was not a personal feud; therefore it was a Trade outrage, or it was nothing. We now ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... appearing to be conscious of what he was doing, took the bow of the violin, and placing the instrument upon his shoulder, leaned his ear down to it, and drew the hair over the strings. A long, sad monotone ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... half gutted; out of its windows roared long, fiery tongues; the structure snapped and volleyed a chorus to the sullen monotone of destruction. The street was littered with the household belongings of the neighborhood, and from the galleries and windows near by came such a flight of miscellaneous articles as to menace the safety of those below. Men shouted, women screamed, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people—ah, the people— They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... beneath the tall cedars whose every sigh seems drawn from the depths of an accepted lover's soul. Exhausted, he sinks down where the waters burst from the foundations of the earth and, dividing into four, seem to reiterate in ceaseless monotone, "Behold my mighty sons." A feeling of utter loneliness, of hopeless desolation falls upon him, such as hammers at the heart when Death has despoiled us of all that Life held dear. He pillows his head upon the sleeping lion and shields himself from the sharp ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... corner chirped loudly, and his shrill notes seemed to say: "The king—the king." Rodolph could hardly believe his ears. How had the cricket learned to chirp these words? It was beyond all understanding. But still the cricket chirped, and still his musical monotone seemed to say, "The king—the king," until, with an angry frown, Rodolph strode from his house, leaving the child to hear ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... the stand; his eyes seem fixed on vacancy; his face is white and rigid; his answers come in a dry monotone. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... hands, palm upwards, to the ceiling, and presently she began to chant in a thrilling monotone: "Hear, O Zeus, that sittest on high, delighting in the thunder, hear the prayer of thy daughter, Aphrodite the peerless, as she calleth upon thee, nor suffer her to be set at nought with impunity! ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... Cassy passed on into a room beyond which other rooms extended, each different, but all in the same key, a monotone attenuated by lustres and the atmosphere, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... crowd of Mongols had gathered near the palace and at last a long rope was let out from one of the buildings. Kneeling, the Mongols reverently touched the rope, which was gently waggled from the other end, supposedly by the Hutukhtu. A barbaric monotone of chanted prayers arose from the kneeling suppliants, and the rope was waggled again. Then the Mongols rode away, silent with awe at having been blessed by the Living God. All this under a blazing electric light beside an automobile at ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... of this night. Franklin, with his kite, looked out upon the consummation of what he dreamt of when he drew lightning from the summer cloud. For two hours the "White City" blossomed in new beauty. The great basin was bathed in a flood of fairy moonlight. Outside the peristyle the lake beat its monotone against the walls. On the plaza the great orchestra of more than 100 men played patriotic music, and the people were filled and lifted with ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... oak is grown Which all winds visit on the lea, While that which lists the monotone Of the long blast that sweeps the sea, And answers ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... children wherever they go—to churches, theatres, concerts, and military reviews—everywhere and anywhere. Hence the low, pensive wail of the individual baby, combining in large numbers, becomes a deep monotone, like the waves of the sea, a sort of violoncello accompaniment to all their holiday performances. It was rather trying to me at first to have my glowing periods punctuated with a rhythmic wail from all sides of the hall; but as soon as I saw that it did not distract ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... became doyen, and of him the following story is told: The great Van Dyck visited him unexpectedly one day, and demanded that he make a sketch of him (Van Dyck) at once, in his presence. Berincx accordingly painted in monotone the sketch in full length, adding the details in carnation, and so charmed was Van Dyck, that he assured him that he would adopt the system in his own work, "if he would permit." He died full of honors the ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... about to pass through the enemy barrage. All well," came the sergeant's unemotional monotone, repeating the voice in his ears. I knew that voice was being listened to in Washington by a little group whose every shoulder bore the stars of high command. My thoughts flashed to them, gazing breathless at the screen that imaged the very ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... growling monotone, and through the stillness she fancied she caught a faint sound, as if some animal were prowling softly under the trees. She listened with a thumping heart. Nearer it seemed to come, and nearer, and then she heard it no more. A sudden gust stirred the pine tops, and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... again into the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... madness—what is the first appalling sign of mental aberration? The mind becomes stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of reflection is interrupted; the thinking power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of a tideless pool putrefy by reason of their stagnation, the mind becomes turbid and corrupt through lack of action; and the perpetual reflection upon one subject resolves itself into monomania. Robert Audley is a monomaniac. The ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the horses loose to graze, Baked his varicolored dough-bread, On a fire of cattle chips; Coffee made of green-scummed water, Nectar to his thirsty lips. On the ground he spread his blanket And reclining there alone, Heard the swiftly sweeping breezes Sing in dreary monotone Strange wild anthems, weird and lonesome, Like lost spirits floating by, While afar in broken measure Swelled the coyotes' ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... four o'clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... castle, on whose grass-grown walk the little lowlander strutted as he played the evening melody of the house of Doom—a pibroch all imbued with passion and with melancholy. This distance lulled it into something more than human music, into a harmony with the monotone of the wave that thundered against the rock; it seemed the voice of choiring mermen; it had the bitterness, the agonised remembrance, of the sea's profound; it was full of hints of stormy nights and old wars. For a little Doom and his visitor sat silent listening ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... of the sea, where the surf was seen only as a white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them—a thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-Damned; the vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks, on shifting sand bars—a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp nights when the wind hauled to the southeast, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... l'ombre qui les couronne, M'enchanent tout le jour sur les bords des ruisseaux; Comme un enfant berc par un chant monotone, Mon me s'assoupit ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... 2. Monotone time tests, which should be quite short, as the constant repetition of the same note in pitch is irritating to the more sensitive ears in a class. This point is sometimes overlooked, with the result that only the less musical ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... his brain. He tried to keep step with their monotone. The storm could not drown them. They were meaningless words to him now, but they kept him company. Also, his rifle was meaningless, but he clung to it. The pack on his back held no significance and no weight for him. He might have travelled a mile ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... action on the current crisis, has declared martial law throughout the nation," a voice said in an important-sounded monotone. "Exempt from this proclamation are members of the Armed Services, Special Agents and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The proclamation, issued this morning, was made public in a ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Grundtvigian movement. People from all walks of life, from the Queen to the common laborer, became regular attendants at the unpretentious sanctuary, and the eyes of some old people still shine when they recall the moving spirit of the services there, the venerable appearance and warm monotone voice of the pastor, and, especially, the hearty, soul-stirring singing. Many of Grundtvig's own great hymns were introduced at Vartov. From there they spread throughout the church. And it was to a large extent the hearty, inspiring ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... the studio, the smell of paint and turpentine, and the monotone wisdom of Kami, who was a leaden artist, but a golden teacher if the pupil were only in sympathy with him. Maisie was not in sympathy that day, and she waited impatiently for the end ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... was apparently no verbal preparation. Yet his diction was peculiarly apt and pointed. He never looked at a note; used no gesture; scarcely raised or lowered his voice. But in a clear and penetrating monotone he uttered the workings of a profound and reflective mind, and the treasures of a vast experience. Though massive, his style was never ponderous: and it was constantly lightened by the sallies of a pungent humour. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Home ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... will make the other man "perk up his ears" if his attention wanders; so plan to introduce variety into your manner of speaking. Don't just open the spigot of your mind and let your ideas run out in a monotone. Variety of voice is ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... Fredericksburg left no hope of such a support. As the only substitute in my reach, I sat on the edge of the pew door and its panel, drew his arm across my knee, raised his head to my shoulder, and held it there by laying mine against it. In this way I could talk in a low monotone to him, and the hopes to which the soul turns when about to leave the tenement of clay. He gasped acquiescence in these hopes, and his words led several men near to draw their sleeves across their eyes; but they all knew ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... wind without was eager and sharp, 225 Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp, And rattles and wrings The icy strings, Singing, in dreary monotone, A Christmas carol of its own, 230 Whose burden[25] still, as he might guess, Was—"Shelterless, ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... a time," began the governess in a gentle monotone, "there lived two girls and they were friends. They loved each other dearly. One was tall and fair and beautiful, and the other was small and dark, and if people ever thought her even pretty it was because love lighted their kind eyes and made it seem that what they looked ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... black mammy in a capacious armchair in Mrs. Peters' door-way. Across her knees lay a small white bundle, and she was swaying softly back and forth, while she crooned in a low, loving monotone her ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... this terrace, and there old Babette sat in the cool shelling peas, shredding beans, and issuing orders to Margot in the sultry atmosphere of the kitchen stove. Bessie, alone in the salon one August morning, heard the shrill monotone of her voice in the pauses of a day-dream. She had dropped her book because, try as she would to hold her attention to the story, her thoughts lost themselves continually, and were found again at every turning of the page astray somewhere ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... a husky monotone, as if to himself. "They's nobody else jes' like her," he declared; "that's a cinch! She's shore the kind that comes one in a box! Whenever I'd look at her, I'd allus think o' a angel, 'r a bird, 'r a little, bobbin' rose." He sighed, uncrossed his shaggy knees, crossed them ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... head, With a nameless burden upon her heart, And the light of youth forever fled. And she sits a swaying to and fro, Like the billowy pine with plume and cone, While a minor strain subdued and slow, She sings in a plaintive monotone: ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... he began in a low monotone relating how he had returned to La Robe Noire with the additional ransom demanded by Le Grand Diable. The "pig Sioux, more gluttonous than the wolverine, more treacherous than the mountain cat," had come out to receive them with hootings. The plunder was taken, "as a dead enemy is picked by carrion ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... in flame, and their low mellow roaring mingled to a monotone with the droning of the cat ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor, the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the grave are there no dreams. Let no one smile at Ben-Hur for doing that which he himself would have done at that time and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... rambled on In one long listless monotone, We heard a wild and mournful groan Come rumbling down the tunnelled way; A voice, an awful mournful bray, Singing some old funereal lay; Then solemn footsteps, muffled, dull, Approached as if they ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... fort. Lifting the tent-flap, we found ourselves inside. A withered creature with snaky, tangled hair, toothless gums, eyes that burned like embers, and a haunched, shrivelled figure, stood gesticulating and crooning over a low monotone in the centre of ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... noise more like the continuous, steady monotone of falling water than a chant had been approaching from the valley, making its darkness vocal. It threatened the gates awhile; now it was at the gates. The Prince's wonder was great, and to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... sharply, and fearlessly approached him. She began talking in a monotone. His ears went flat against his head, but he submitted to her touch because invariably it soothed him, and because he sensed some undefinable power whenever his gaze met hers. She snapped the leash on his collar just as her father came running up, ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... he could have extracted its marrow as faithfully as that of his more customary themes. Yet the grand ocean-pictures which this book contains remind us that it was the domain of external Nature which was his peculiar province; and this sublime monotone of the surges seems his fitting dirge, now that—to use the fine symbol of one who was his comrade on this very excursion—his bark has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Brooke, an' she mayn't," answered the matter-of-fact man of the sea, in the gruff monotone with which he would have summoned all hands to close reef in a hurricane. "If her tackle holds she'll do it. If ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... qui brule et la mer qui moutonne, Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors; Et dans l'enervement des nuits chaudes et calmes, Bercant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t'endors Sous les palmiers, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... judge cleared his throat, nodded to Old Man Curry, fingered his programme, and began to speak in a dull, slurring monotone, droning out the formula as prescribed ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... ears. He wore white kid gloves, which he secured from spot or blemish as much as possible by keeping the tips of the fingers pressed against each other. His speech was quicker than is customary with Western people, but he had their flat monotone and their uncompromising treatment of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... there are the foes that degrade you and your families, forcing you to live little better than wild beasts. Your food is poor, your clothing is in rags, your children are without shoes, your homes are desolate, there are no schools and no social life. Year follows year in dreary monotone, and you finally die, and your neighbors thrust you underground and have an end of you. Misery and wretchedness fill the measure of your days, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... chairs, watching the doors, and glancing at the clock. The high windows gave directly upon Powell Street, where cable-cars were grating to and fro, and where motor-horns honked, but all noises were filtered here to a sort of monotone, and the effect of the room was of silence. When a man came hastily in the door one woman rose, there was a significant smile, a murmured greeting, before the ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... another crowd arrived, and the performance was repeated in every detail. Happy over the bartered goods, they began to dance, first decorating themselves with tall branches stuck in the back of their belts. They jumped from one foot to the other, sometimes turning round, and singing in a rough, deep monotone. We withdrew to the boats, and they dispersed on the shore, lighted fires and roasted ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the even tone was divided into upper and lower, and a little later the entering tone finally disappeared from Pekingese. The following monosyllabic dialogue gives a very fair idea of the quality of the four Pekingese tones—1st tone: Dead (spoken in a raised monotone, with slightly plaintive inflection); 2nd tone: Dead? (simple query); 3rd tone: Dead? (an incredulous query long drawn out); 4th tone: Dead! (a sharp and decisive answer). The native learns the tones unconsciously and by ear alone. For centuries ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... into troubled meditation rendered somewhat vague and inconsequential by his rapid changes of financial condition, moods, environment—the brief ecstasy of his triumphant flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's whining voice failed to register anything but a dreary monotone of meaningless words in Johnny's ears. Small wonder that Johnny's thoughts dwelt upon little worries that could have no possible bearing upon the big things ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... a move, he sat, staring in front of him, until the evening shadows had turned the landscape to a dull monotone. Then he slowly arose, and, with his mind so completely bent upon one subject that his body was a thing apart and its weakness forgotten, stepped out into ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? There are flashes too of light, of song, the playing of shepherd's pipes, the swoop of horsemen and sudden outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And more than all, it is the mood of Asia, so rarely penetrated, which is neither lightness ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... so hoarse, and the pitch alternates so unexpectedly between an "unearthly treble and a preternatural bass" that a boy can usually sing only in monotone, if, with courage proof against the ridicule occasioned by his uncontrollable vocal antics, he tries to join in. In those cases, where the larynx undergoes a slow change in growth, it is often possible for the boy to sing all through the period of change. The upper tones may be lost, while there ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... tropical undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss, singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would always sound if, somehow, one ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... hills, column on column, until the entire country seemed flowing forward in steady streams. Sandy River awoke, restlessly listening; lights glimmered behind darkened windows; a heavier, vaguer rumor grew, hanging along the hills. It increased to a shaking, throbbing monotone, like the far dissonance of ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
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