|
|
|
More "Spin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dream's come true. Ho, lodgers, ho, This portent view. Glyce has vanished, carrying off my cock, My cock that crew! O Mania, help! O reads of the rock Pursue! pursue! For I poor girl, was working within, Holding my distaff heavy and full, Twir-r-r-r-r-rling my hand as the threads I spin, Weaving an excellent bobbin of wool: Thinking 'To-morrow I'll go to the fair, In the dusk of the morn, and be selling it there.' But he to the blue upflew, upflew, On the lightliest tips of his wings outspread; To me he bequeathed ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... tower tall. And maidens three are living there All in the upper chamber fair, Hung with silver, hung with pall, And stories painted on the wall. And softly goes the whirring loom In my ladies' upper room, For they shall spin both night and day Until the stars do pass away. But every night at evening. The window open wide they fling, And one of them says a word they know And out as three white swans they go, And the murmuring of the woods is drowned In ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... inglorious campaign in Italy. The treaty between the Pope and the Duke of Alva was signed on the 14th September (1557), and the Spanish general retired for the winter to Milan. Cardinal Caraffa was removed from the French court to that of Madrid, there to spin new schemes for the embroilment of nations and the advancement of his own family. Very little glory was gained by any of the combatants in this campaign. Spain, France, nor Paul IV., not one of them ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sure, pass in Edinburgh. I saw the kerseymere fabric that obtained the prize in London, and nothing could be more beautiful; for the calicoes, I believe we cannot produce them cheaper or better. A writer in a journal here, observes: 'Why should our cotton go to England to be spun when we can spin it in Massachusetts?' A very pertinent question, well worth thinking of at home. We should be thankful to the projectors of the Crystal Palace, that it has opened our eyes, for nothing else could. There is no manner ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... his wheel and began a spin that terminated only when the biggest Plymouth Rock in Duncan's coop saluted a new day, and long lines of light reddened the east. As he rode he sang, while he sang he worshiped, but the god he tried to glorify was a ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... plain:[61] So comes the squall, blacker than night, Upon the Adrian main. How, by our Sire Quirinus,[62] It was a goodly sight 650 To see the thirty standards Swept down the tide of flight. So flies the spray of Adria When the black squall doth blow, So corn-sheaves in the flood-time 655 Spin down the whirling Po. False Sextus to the mountains Turned first his horse's head; And fast fled Ferentinum, And fast Lanuvium fled. 660 The horsemen of Nomentum Spurred hard out of the fray, The footmen of Velitrae Threw shield and ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... what would have been the novels conceived by Tennyson. Thomas Hardy began with poetry and has returned to poetry; and one cannot help feeling that it is more than anything else the absence of this quality in the autobiographical studies of sex and character which the younger writers of our day spin out that makes them after a time seem so ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... this old car," Westy shouted. "If we leave it maybe the wind will carry it up. Let's tie it with our rope and come back here and eat our supper in it on the way home. After that it can spin around till it gets dizzy for all we ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of adequate expression, "he's here. He is, I fancy, at this moment slapping the skipper on the back and asking him to have a drink. He called me 'old socks.'" The doctor shuddered. "Then he said he expected this was some mess; Naval messes were always hot stuff. He wanted to spin me yarns of his infant excesses, but I choked him off by telling him he ought to report to the skipper. You'll have to look after him, Pay. That will give you some honest work ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... elderly seaman with a wounded thigh. Indeed, my courage had begun to rise so high that I allowed myself a few darting thoughts on what would be the end of the affair; and while I saw certainly that I could spin it out for long, I saw no ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not all the life God giveth them to use; Let them prove their inward souls against the notion That they live in you, or under you, O wheels! Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward, As if Fate in each were stark! And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward, Spin ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... that dwells in that web! For you are a garden-spider, an abominable, dumpy, old garden-spider, for whom a web, such as Hodge is, is much too fine and much too elegant. Be quiet, therefore, old spider, and spin your net elsewhere! You shall not live in my net, but Tib—for, yes, I do know Tib. She is a lovely, charming child of fourteen, as quick and nimble as a kid, with lips red as the coral which you wear on your fat pudding of a neck, with eyes which shine yet brighter than your nose, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... tube by means of a pair of strong hooks at the posterior end of its soft defenceless abdomen. Their food appears for the most part to be of a vegetable nature. Some species, however, are alleged to be carnivorous, and a North American form of the genus Hydropsyche is said to spin around the mouth of its burrow a silken net for the capture of small animal organisms living in the water. Before passing into the pupal stage, the larva partially closes the orifice of the tube with silk or pieces of stone loosely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... no needcessity," said Pop complacently, taking a long twist of tobacco from his pocket. "Sal don't need no larnin'. She's pearter then most gals thet's got book sense. You show me ary one of these gals round here thet kin spin an' weave the cloth to mek ther own dresses, thet kin mold candles, an' mek soap, an' hoe terbaccy, an' handle a ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... so I have been left alone and without means. But since you are kind enough to receive me, I shall repay you for your hospitality. I have been taught the work of women, although my condition did not oblige me to perform it. I can spin and weave linen with thread of various colours; I can imitate flowers and embroider ornaments on stuffs; I can even, when you are tired by your work and overcome by the heat of the day, delight you with song, harp, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Then wed thee Unto some son of clay, and toil and spin! There's Japhet loves thee well, hath loved thee long: Marry, and bring ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... On unpacking our baggage on arrival in the bush, found my mother's spinning-wheel was broken. Gordon managed to mend it and I bought ten pounds of wool. This she washed, teased, and carded, and proud she was when she sat down and began to spin the rolls into yarn. Tuesday afternoon Ailie and Ruth went to pick wild grapes, and the rest of us were at our work in the bush. Grannie was left alone. She had moved her wheel to the door to sit in the sunshine, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... the range to which each individual's attention is confined. It is possible (the writer has known it to be a fact) for the same person to sow the flax, to pull and rot it, to break it, hatchel it, spin it, warp it, weave it, dye or bleach it, and finally make it into clothes. I say this is possible, for I have seen it done, and I dare say many of my readers have seen the same. But how coarse and expensive is such a product, compared with that in which every step in the progress of production ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... of gold and green Such as caterpillars spin, For the fairy ways, I ween, Are very frugal; He'd a bow that he had borne Since the crimson Eden morn, And a honeysuckle horn For ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it need only be said that it is a pleasure resort singularly like other pleasure resorts of the same description, we started bicycling in earnest. We planned a ten days' tour, which, while completing the Black Forest, should include a spin down the Donau-Thal, which for the twenty miles from Tuttlingen to Sigmaringen is, perhaps, the finest valley in Germany; the Danube stream here winding its narrow way past old-world unspoilt villages; past ancient monasteries, nestling in green pastures, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... as the sky, His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together; 'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by, The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; Less of iconoclast than shaper, His spirit, safe behind the reach Of the tornado of his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was worked on communistic principles. Teachers and students must all take their share in manual labour. Lectures on Greek and Latin must be given in the intervals of ploughing, or printing, or teaching Maori children to read or hoe or spin. Each "associate" received a fixed salary; all profits went to the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... little wind storm, I reckon,' says Bachelder. Bachelder was settin', with his legs curled up under him, mendin' sail, and he begun to spin one o' them yarns o' hisn, with his voice pitched up middlin' high, and the boys, they begun to laugh ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... at first without talk of ransom and in high tone, affected, no doubt, by William to spin out the negotiations, and augment the value of his services, did Guy of Ponthieu consent to release his illustrious captive,—the guerdon, a large sum and un bel maneir [189] on the river Eaulne. But whether that guerdon ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... work," thought the dame. "I would I might sing and spin like that!" and with a little sigh she leaned her head against the door-post and closed her eyes; a sweet, pale face, colorless and pure as an Easter lily, and eyes whose blueness seemed to show through the weary lids with their deep golden fringe. A fair woman, a lovely woman, delicately ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... that it is not a book to be read with as much ease as its pleasant style may lead you to imagine. You spin through it as if it were a novel the first time you read it, and think you know all about it; the second time you read it you think you know rather less about it; and the third time, you are amazed to find how little you have really apprehended its ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... They could cut glass, at the most remote periods. Chinese bottles have also been found in previously unopened tombs of the eighteenth dynasty, indicating commercial intercourse reaching as far back as that epoch. They were able to spin and weave, and color cloth; and were acquainted with the use of mordants, the wonder in modern calico-printing. Pliny describes this process as used in Egypt, but evidently without understanding its nature. Writing-paper made of the papyrus is as old as the Pyramids. The Egyptians tanned leather ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... was a farmer, and the stirring life of a farmer's daughter in a new country, fell to her lot. To spin the garments she wore, to make cheese and butter, were parts of her education, while to lend a hand at out-door labor, perhaps helped her to acquire that vigor of body and brain for which ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... I may call again and spin another yarn about old times," he answered, as he took up ...
— The Two Shipmates • William H. G. Kingston
... spin that wheel," he said to the technicians. One of them gave the wheel a spin and dropped the ball. It clattered on its merry way and dropped into ...
— ...Or Your Money Back • Gordon Randall Garrett
... boasting. From their emperor's reply to him, it appeared that they preferred war to a dishonourable peace; that they would take care not to expose themselves to the hazards of a battle against too formidable an enemy; and that, in short, they were resolved on making every sacrifice, in order to spin out the war, and ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... bullock him. It's the same thing all along the line, it seems to me. When you can get work easily you get higher wages, shorter hours, some civility, and only do the fair thing. When you can't, wages come down, hours spin out, the boss puts on side, and you've got to work ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... pass that first guy had made at him. Then, when the second one showed up and dove in, he'd gone into a dead-duck spin. So far, so good. Evidently, they'd been fooled. Probably never saw that gag before. But what had happened after that? He searched ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... as soon as the latter is hatched, it is placed on mulberry-leaves, and for five weeks it does nothing but eat, in that time consuming many times its weight of food.[33] Then it begins to spin the material that forms its chrysalis case or cocoon. The outer part of the case consists of a tough envelope not unlike coarse tissue-paper; the inner part is a fine thread about one thousand feet long that has been wound around the body of the worm. This thread or filament is the basis of the ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... switchman and started out to limber up the "III." I asked him to let me out on the main line, took a five-mile spin, and sidetracked for a freight train. While the man was unlocking the switch, I looked into the eyes and wondered what their owner was, or could be, or had been, to "Scar Faced" Hopkins, and—ran off the switch. Then I wondered if Hopkins was looking into those eyes when he and ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... and sort, and the muscles of steel retain their faithful gripe, and enormous energies run to and fro with an obedient click; while forces that tear the arteries of the earth and heave volcanoes, spin the fabric of an infant's robe, and weave the flowers in a ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Tokroori will be spinning cotton, or working at something that will earn a few piastres. Even during the march, I have frequently seen my men gather the cotton from some deserted bush, and immediately improvise a spindle, by sticking a reed through a piece of camel-dung, with which they would spin the wool into thread, as they walked with the caravan. My Tokrooris had never been idle during the time they had been in my service, but they were at work in the camp during every spare minute, either employed in making sandals ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... were washed into a quiet backwater, in a corner, and from here I determined never to issue till the Last Banjo should indeed sound. Here I sidled vaguely about for a long time, hoping that I looked like a man preparing for some vast culminating feat, a side-step or a buzz or a double-Jazz-spin or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... little mice sat down to spin, Pussy passed by and she peeped in. What are you at, my fine little men? Making coats for gentlemen. Shall I come in and cut off your threads? Oh, no, Miss Pussy, you'd bite ...
— The Tailor of Gloucester • Beatrix Potter
... public, some conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be not a joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the mind, let the boy go and plough, and the girl go and spin." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to the engine room. With the help of the boys he set in motion an auxiliary gravity machine, designed to exert a most powerful influence against the downward pull of the earth. As they watched the great wheels spin around, and heard the hum and whirr of the dynamos, the boys watched the pointer which indicated how low they ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... about twelve feet long and narrowing at the bows, which stood well out of water; handy enough for beaching, but not to be taken through breakers, by reason of its sitting low in the stern. O'Hara, as I yelled at him, pulled his starboard paddle and brought her (for these prams spin round easily) almost broadside on to a tall comber. As we slid up the side of it and hung there, I had a glimpse of a steep clean fissure straight through the wall of rock ahead; and in that instant O'Hara sprawled ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... one might do worse than dream of Hortense. But in spite of all your philosophers say about there being no world but the world we spin in our brains, I could not woo my lady back to it. Like the wind that bloweth where it listeth was my love. Try as I might to call up that pretty deceit of a Hortense about me in spirit, my perverse lady ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the German bullets spin overhead or crack like whips against our sandbags, sending little clods of earth down into the trench; all down the line we stand on our firing platforms, and answer back to the little spurts of flame which mark the enemy trench; ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... neighbours. Their climate is agreeable and healthy; the sky serene, the breezes gentle and delicious. They have numbers of shining groves, the trees of which through continued watering produce a crop like the fleece of a sheep, which the natives make into a delicate wool, and spin into a kind of fine cloth, formerly confined to the use of the nobles, but now procurable by the lowest ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Rachel serve: and I'll work the cost of my keep and more, you shall see. I can spin with the best, and weave too; you'll never come short of linen nor linsey while I'm with you—and Lettice can run about and save steps to us all. What think you?—said ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... religion, they will be in far too much haste, to wait to apply a strict test to their holy men's visions. Furthermore they will have so few visions, that any will awe them; so naturally they will accept any vision as valid. Then their rapid and fertile inventiveness will come into play, and spin the wildest creeds from each vision living ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... long. Yet would I have thee see my children. Forget not the token on my hand which thou holdest. But now get thee to thy folk with no more words; for after all, playmate, the sundering is grievous to me, and I would not spin ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... 'Spin me no spiders' webs of words. Is not the thing the same thing? The one giveth, the other taketh; but the gift passes, and what matters it which is the most guilty? Sorais! oh, I hate her — Sorais is a queen and my sister. She had not stooped so low had he not shown the ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... denied it in the court; but chile, the lie-yers are aworking day and night fur to hang you, and little is made of much, on your side, and much is spun out of little, on theirn. They are more cunning than foxes, and bloodthirstier than panters, and they no more git tired than the spiders, that spin and piece a web as fast as you break it. Three nights ago, I got down on my knees, and I kissed a little pink morocco slipper what your Ma wore the day when she took her first step from my arm to her own mother's knees, and I swore a solemn oath, if I could help free ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "I'll spin my yarn as soon as I've rested a hit, lads," he said, as he finished the last morsel of food. "I'm clean spent, now, and want to stretch ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... blue spots on their heads. Mamma caught them for me, and we put them on a board with some ailantus leaves, and turned a large wire sieve over them. Every morning I gave them fresh leaves to eat, and in two or three days they began to spin themselves into cocoons. Some rolled themselves up in the leaves, while others clung to the side of the sieve, covering themselves at first with a thin white film, through which we could see the worm for half a day working himself back and forth. Then the film grew so thick we could ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... dancing in the flax. But many superstitions have clustered round the latter plant, it having in years gone by been a popular notion that it will only flower at the time of day on which it was originally sown. To spin on Saturday is said in Germany to bring ill fortune, and as a warning the following legend is among the household tales of the peasantry:—"Two old women, good friends, were the most industrious spinners ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Redgrave; "I can do about a hundred and fifty an hour through the atmosphere, and then, you see, if that isn't fast enough I can rise outside the earth's attraction, let it spin round, and then come down where ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... imposed on every woman wearing her hair cut short like a man's; all gaming for amusement or gain was forbidden, and cards and dice were not permitted in the colony. A father was fined if his daughter did not spin as much flax or wool as the selectmen required of her. No Jesuit or Roman Catholic priest was permitted to make his residence within the colony. All persons were forbidden to run or even walk, "except to and from church" on Sunday, ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... leaned back to appraise the effect of this startling proposition on me. At any other moment I should inevitably have broken loose again, but the fascination of his personality was upon me and I let him spin his webs. Any man, and there are scores adrift, who falls under the spell of Henry H. Rogers, invariably, as did the suitors of Circe, pays the penalty of his indiscretion. Some he uses and contemptuously casts aside useless; others he works, plays, and pensions; still others serve as jackals ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Abiah Folger began to spin again, and the wheel and the wind united did indeed make a lonely atmosphere. Uncle Benjamin punched the fire, which roared at times lustily under the great shelf where were a row ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... worked shifts, below and on top, with her husband, when he'd be putting down a prospecting shaft without a mate, as he often had to do—because of her mainly. Old diggers said that it was lovely to see how she'd spin up a heavy green-hide bucket full of clay and 'tailings', and land and empty it with a twist of her wrist. Most men were afraid of her, and few diggers' wives were strong-minded enough to seek a second row with Mother Middleton. Her voice could be heard right across ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... who, being nothing but hands, evidently cannot say, "I beg your pardon, miss." There were children, who always will go where they ought not to go, running against people, and taking hold of their clothes with sticky, smeared hands, asking commercial gentlemen to spin their tops, and corpulent ladies to play at hide and seek. I saw one stern-visaged gentleman tormented in this way till he looked ready to give the child its "final quietus." [Footnote: American juveniles are, generally speaking, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... weakened by a long course of romance writing, did not come to the rescue. As usual Beth lay on the sofa and Laurie sat in a low chair close by, amusing her with all sorts of gossip, for she depended on her weekly 'spin', and he never disappointed her. But that evening Jo fancied that Beth's eyes rested on the lively, dark face beside her with peculiar pleasure, and that she listened with intense interest to an account of some exciting cricket match, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... GRUB is often very injurious. The moth measures about 1/2 inch across, the caterpillars are pale red, with brown neck and black head. They pierce and drop with the fruit, seek shelter in the bark, where they spin a cocoon and pass the winter. If the trees have been scraped, then washed with a mixture of lime and soot, paraffin and grease (see No. III. pears), or sprayed before the buds open with Bordeaux mixture (see No. II.), and also afterwards, ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... play incessantly on the first reclaiming chord which led our ancestral satyr to the measures of the dance, the threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to his partner before it was accorded to him to spin her with both hands and a chirrup of his frisky heels. To keep him in awe and hold him enchained, there are things she must never do, dare never say, must not think. She must be cloistral. Now, strange and awful though it be to hear, women perceive this requirement ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eke Corin Were herdmen both yfere: And Phillida could twist and spin And therto sing ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... grew fainter, and the moon's silver brightened, the passengers became quieter. The Piper went below and listened to the Ancient Mariner spin a yarn, and let the birds along the shore furnish music. The babies fell asleep in the arms of Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, lovers drifted away in pairs to retired nooks. In a quiet corner J. P. Thornton and Lawyer Ed sat and laid once more their final plans for a trip to the Holy Land, certain ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... her mind. At last on the fourth day she ceased to weep and would answer our questions in a low voice, as if resigned; but spent the greater part of every day sitting silently at her wheel. Her fingers, however, which used to be so skilful, either broke the threads they tried to spin, or lay for hours idle in her lap, while she was lost in dreams. Your father's jokes, at which she used to laugh so heartily, made no impression on her, and when I endeavored to reason with her she listened in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... after all, and if we are, there ain't nothing I won't do to make it easier for you, sir, and we'll cut and run, as the sailors say, some day. Ups and downs in life we see; right-tooral-looral-looral-lee. There's only heads and tails to a penny, and if you spin it up in the air, it sometimes comes down one side, and sometimes the other. Well, it's come down wrong way for us this time, next time p'r'aps it may come down right. If it don't, well, you've got too much pluck in you to howl about it: so have ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... women lie like the very devil. You just go and talk with her a bit about her first fall. She'll spin ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... her own rude childhood, she learned to spin the wools, white and grey, to clothe and cover him pleasantly. The spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at present a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange sense of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watching, as her own long-deferred recreation ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... well-defined physical type. They are of medium stature or tall. Their noses are the largest and most prominent in indian Mexico, and are boldly aquiline. The men are rarely idle; even as they walk, they carry with them their netting, or spindle with which they spin cord for making nets. It seems to be law, and is certainly custom, that persons coming to the plaza are expected to be more fully dressed than when travelling on the road or when in their homes. Usually white cotton drawers and shirt are worn in the plaza; outside, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... boy will strip nearly fifteen hundred in a day. But the kayar is not made from the husk, as might be supposed, but from the rind of the nut; which, after being long soaked in water, is beaten with mallets, and rubbed together into fibers. After this being dried in the sun, you may spin it, just like hemp, or any similar substance. The fiber thus produced makes very strong and durable ropes, extremely well adapted, from their lightness and durability, for the running rigging of a ship; while the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... did think there were a reprieve to come for you I would be contented to spin out the time thus; but in good earnest I expect none; unless you had an apprehension you were not to die you would not spin out the time thus, not thus run to ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... slaves of the Lamp, those Silkworms of the Closet, how little had they enjoyed, how little had they lived! Condemned to a mysterious fate by the wholesale destinies of the world, they seemed born but to toil and to spin thoughts for the common crowd—and, their task performed in drudgery and in darkness, to die when no further service could be wrung from their exhaustion. Names had they been in life, and as names they lived for ever, in life as in death, airy and unsubstantial ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fraud. Schiller evidently began the novel in no very strenuous frame of mind. He wished to profit by the popular interest in tales of mysterious charlatanry which had been aroused by the exploits of Cagliostro. So he set out to spin a yarn in that vein, but he had no definite plan and did not himself know where he would bring up. The literary merits of 'The Ghostseer', Schiller's most noteworthy attempt in prose fiction, will come up for consideration in connection with the conclusion, or rather the continuation, which ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... could not put any life in him. When daylight came in the morning, the Princess with the long nose came too, and once more drove her away. When day had quite come, the girl seated herself under the castle windows, to spin with her golden spinning-wheel, and the Princess with the long nose wanted to have that also. So she opened the window, and asked what she would take for it. The girl said what she had said on each of the former occasions—that it was not for sale either for gold or for money, but if she could ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... useful, but it is a little dangerous! I don't think you have suffered as yet. That's what I like in you, Howard, the mixture of practical and unpractical. You seem to me to be very busy, and yet to know where to stop. Of course we can't make other people a present of experience; they have to spin their own webs; but I think one can do a certain amount in seeing that they have experience. It would not suit me; my strength is to sit still, as the Bible says. But in a place like this with Frank whipping his tops—he whips them, while ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It is very bumpy and ends in a big drift; not half so nice as this one. Hop on and we'll have a good spin across the pond;" and Jack brought "Thunderbolt" round with a skilful swing and an engaging air that would have won obedience from anybody ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... now a mind to try how many cobwebs a single spider could furnish; wherefore I destroyed this, and the insect set about another. When I destroyed the other also its whole stock seemed entirely exhausted, and it could spin no more. The arts it made use of to support itself, now deprived of its great means of subsistence, were indeed surprizing. I have seen it roll up its legs like a ball and lie motionless for hours together, but cautiously watching all the time. When a fly happened to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... million Germans should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a house embowered in ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Du Guesclin proudly fixed his ransom at a hundred thousand francs, which seemed a large sum even to the Prince of Wales. "Sir," said Du Guesclin to him, "the king in whose keeping is France will lend me what I lack, and there is not a spinning wench in France who would not spin to gain for me what is necessary to put me out of your clutches." The advisers of the Prince of Wales would have had him think better of it, and break his promise; but "that which we have agreed to with him we will hold to," said the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... spun by the different larvae, both workers and drones spin complete cocoons, or inclose themselves on every side; royal larvae construct only imperfect cocoons, open behind, and enveloping only the head, thorax, and first ring of the abdomen; and Huber concludes, without any hesitation, that the final cause of their forming ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... children's tops is provided and the ability to spin them properly is demonstrated. A few musical tops among them ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... have done some good reading outside your classics, and have got a grip of French and German. The truth is, unless a man can get the prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it's hardly worth while for him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself and be able to spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as a cue. That's all very fine, but in practical life nobody does give you the cue for pages of Greek. In fact, it's a nicety of conversation which I would have you attend to—much ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... flowers in raiment fair, Wondrous to see on deserts bare. Neither they spin nor weave nor sew Yet no king could such beauty show. The ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... for these, my wife, all life and animation, explained to me all the machines I must make, to enable her to spin and weave, and make linen to clothe us from head to foot; her eyes sparkled with delight as she spoke, and I promised her all ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... Timbuctoo. Mrs. Pilgrim was left at home to play "patience," and to keep the house and bairns. She was generally a long-suffering creature, but sometimes she did get into mischief. She could not always spin yarn, so she occasionally varied her task by weaving nets—traps for the unwary who was not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Tom, "I don't count on going on any sort of a trip—that is, any long one. I was just getting ready to take a little spin in the Hawk, and if you'd ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... not spin this note any further, but shall be glad of a line to tell me you are well. I have not seen Mr. Lort since he roosted under the metropolitan Wings of his grace ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... are a thousand pathways, broad and narrow. They all go uphill.... Some day when you spin something out of your own inside, Mr. Banneker, forgive the well-meaning editor and let us see it. It might ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... other, Yeux-gris and Gervais. The latter was almost trampling on me, Yeux-gris had pressed him so close to the wall. Then he forced his way out, and they drove each other round in a circle till the room seemed to spin once more. ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... millstone," he said. "Why don't you old turtlebacks come out of your shells and play square? You've got some shady game on here that you're working underhand. Spin your yarn and I'll tell you what ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... The minor heirs come and took it. I never learnt in books till I went to school. Seem like things was in a confusion after I got big nough for that. I'd sweep and rake and cook and wash the dishes, card, spin, hoe, scour the floors and tables. I would knit at night heap of times. We'd sing some ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... salmon-trout and maskilonge, is a piece of brass, or copper, about the shape and size of the bowl of a tablespoon, with a large hook soldered upon the narrow end. If properly made, and drawn fast through the water, it will spin round and glitter, and thus is sure to attract the fish. I have caught hundreds by this method, and can therefore recommend it as the most certain. Your trolling line, which is attached to your left arm, should not ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... through the populous village, which is noted for its industries. Of all the Lebanon towns, this is, indeed, the busiest; its looms, its potteries, and its bell foundries, are never idle. And the people cultivate little of the silk worm; they are mostly artisans. American cotton they spin, and dye, and weave into substantial cloth; Belgian iron they melt and cast into bells; and from their native soil they dig the clay which they mould into earthenware. The tintinnabulations of the loom can ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... straw hats for the family. The journeyman shoemaker dropped in and fitted out the family with boots. The great city industries were then unknown. The farmer's wife in those days was perhaps the most expert master of trades ever known. She could spin and weave, make a carpet or a rug, dye yarns and clothes, and make a straw hat or a birch broom. Butter, cheese, and maple sugar were products of her skill, as well as bread, soap, canned fruits, and home-made wine. In those days the farm was a miniature factory or combination of factories. ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... degree; as Mr. Brent remarks (5/16. 'Journal of Horticulture' October 22, 1861 page 76.), "Every few seconds over they go; one, two, or three summersaults at a time. Here and there a bird gives a very quick and rapid spin, revolving like a wheel, though they sometimes lose their balance, and make a rather ungraceful fall, in which they occasionally hurt themselves by striking some object." From Madras I have received several specimens of the common Tumbler of India, differing slightly from ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... no. It's no muckle that that comes till. I wadna spin sae weel gin it warna that the Almichty pat some sicht into the pints o' my fingers, 'cause there was nane left i' my een. An' gin ye mak ither thrippence a week oot o' that, ye'll be turnin' the wather that He sent to ca my mill into your dam; an' I doot it'll play ill water ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... said the King, and he went up into the garret and brought her down more flax than she could spin in a hundred years. But the Queen still looked sad, and the King asked her again what was the matter. She answered that she had been walking by the river and had dropped one of her green satin slippers ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... paralyzing him. Still the grasp, the gaze, continue; as Vivia watches that look, a great blue glow from those eyes seems to cloud her own brain. The color rises on Ray's cheeks, his angry eyes fall, his chest heaves, his lips tremble, off from the long black lashes spin sprays of tears, he cannot move, he is so closely held, but slowly he turns his head, meets the red lips of the forgiving girl with his, then casts himself with sobs on Beltran's breast. And all that evening, as the sudden heavy clouds drive down and quench ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,—what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... he said quietly. "Half-an-hour more or less won't make much difference to you on the road. You were talking of travellers' tales, and I reckon you were thinking of fairy yarns that some folks think it smart to spin. Well, maybe those same stories have some foundation in fact, and ain't all works of imagination. Anyhow, my experience has taught me never to disbelieve until I've some good ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Phronsie, as Polly put her down, and stood breathless after her last glorious spin, "I do so wish we might, Polly; oh, ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... had been lucky. This house, where he was born, was lucky,—no one had ever died in it. When his dear mother could not spin any more, they carried her to the Hooghly on a charpoy, and she had breathed her last on the banks of the sacred river. Besides, his grandfather had immediately stuck up a cooking-pot, striped with perpendicular white lines, on a pole at the side of the house; so he had never been in any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... gowd rings ye may buy, maidens, Green mantles ye may spin; But, gin ye lose your maidenheid, Ye'll ne'er ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... won't be so pleasant," he said, making a long face. "However, we shall meet at the end of them; and won't we spin long yarns ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... and soon after removed to Ohio. The girl remained at the old homestead, keeping house for the only brother, and so well did she do the work, that he gave her a dollar a week for her services. This she used in buying books and clothes for school. Besides, she found opportunities to spin and weave for some of the neighbors, and thus added a little ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... then a day's help or a bee,—but a bee's about as broad as it is long,—and we raise just enough to help the year out, but don't sell. We've got a cow and the filly and some sheep; and mother shears and cards, and Lurindy spins,—I can't spin, it makes my head swim,—and I knit, knit socks and sell them. Sometimes I have needles almost as big as a pipe-stem, and choose the coarse, uneven yarn of the thrums, and then the work goes off ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the floor and range themselves in place. The men in authority coolly proceed to collect a tax of two sous from each couple, and then the music and the dance begin. In waltzing the dancers simply put their arms around each other's necks, and thus embracing vigorously, face to face, they spin about the room, bumping against each other, laughing, shouting and chaffing. Waiters in white aprons dodge about among the dancers, taking orders for wine, beer and punch, and exciting our constant amazement that they do ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... down but one good mouthful, I saw M. de Perrencourt lean right across the table. Yet I saw him dimly, for my eyes seemed to grow glazed and the room to spin round me, the figures at the table taking strange shapes and weird dim faces, and a singing sounding in my ears, as though the sea roared there and not on Dover beach. There was a woman's cry, and a man's arm shot out at me. I felt a sharp blow on my wrist, the cup ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... without hearing what a man has to say in his own defence—there's ne'er a Tartar in the sarvice but would allow a man to speak before he orders him to strip. I recollect a story about that in the sarvice, but I'm in no humour to spin a yarn now. Now, you see, Jacob, Master Drummond has done a great deal for you, and now he has undone a great deal! I can't pretend to balance the account, but it does appear to me that you don't owe him much; for what thanks is there if you ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... think him a lamiter, yet, grippie for grippie, he'll make the bluid spin frae under your nails" ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... by the buffaloes forming baths for themselves by ripping the earth open with their heads in soft, oozy spots, and the burrowing of that sharp and watchful little animal the prairie dog, cause both horse and horseman to run considerable risk when taking a spin over the flat. Hill and dale, bluff and level, the landscape broke upon the eye in one of those infinite and fruitful wastes, which strikes the mind with awe at its grand ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of the famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation in modern locomotion to be met at a station with high-class horseflesh instead of the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a quick spin of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedge-girt country roads, the roans turned in at a wide gateway, and went with dancing, rhythmic step along the park drive. The screen of oak-crowned upland suddenly fell away and a grey sharp-cornered building came into view in ...
— When William Came • Saki
... out for exercise). Ah! don't look so bad, ARTHUR, after his spin! They are asking all round if he'll run, if he'll win. They would like much to know, I've no manner of doubt. Why, there isn't a Bookie, a Tipster, or Tout, Not to mention an Owner, or Trainer, or Vet, But desires the straight tip—which I wish they may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... the Tower Room. PRINCESS WINSOME and HERO. Godmother brings spinning-wheel on which Princess is to spin Love's golden thread that shall rescue her brother. Dove comes with letter from Knight. Flower messengers in turn report his progress. Counting the Daisy's petals the Princess learns that her true Knight has ...
— The Rescue of the Princess Winsome - A Fairy Play for Old and Young • Annie Fellows-Johnston and Albion Fellows Bacon
... censured, for passing sentence on several persons as being the instruments of Satan in those diabolical operations, when they were involved in such a dark and dismal scene of providence, in which Satan did seem to spin a finer thread of spiritual wickedness than in the ordinary methods of witchcraft: hence the judges, desiring to bear due testimony against such diabolical practices, were inclined to admit the validity of such a sort of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... lungi un bel cespuglio vede Di spin fioriti e di vermiglic rose, Che de le liquide onde al specchio siede, Chiuso dal Sol fra l' ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... quite simple. First a colorless globe, mounted so as to spin freely on its axis. Then a measured scale of value, specially devised for this purpose, obtained by the daylight photometer.[28] Next a set of carefully chosen pigments, whose reasonable permanence has been tested by long use, and which are prepared so that ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... politely - Mother smiles (but not too brightly) - Doctor mumbles like a dumb thing - Nurse is busy mixing something. - Every symptom tends to show You're decidedly DE TROP - Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho! he! ho! ho! Time's teetotum, If you spin it, Give its quotum Once a minute: I'll go bail You hit the nail, And if you fail The deuce is ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... turnpike-keeper had managed to find his way to the court-house of the army-corps. He had been wandering through street after street; the busy traffic of the capital had made his head spin, and he was tired to death with this unwonted tramping ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... "Spin, spin, Clotho, spin," hummed a gay, masculine voice. "Methinks, fair Mistress Dorris, even the Fates themselves could not be more devoted to their task than are you to that busy ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... Walter Mason are just as thick as leaves on a mulberry tree, Nan Sherwood! I saw you whispering together the other day when Walter came with his cutter to take Grace for a ride. Is he going to take you for a spin behind that ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... mare stop, prick her ears under the hammering of unspurred heels, spin round, bucking as she spun, and toss her rider like a bull. There in the moonlight he lay like lead, with leaden face upturned to the shuddering ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... you would find that the triumph of the right is always applauded by the audience, while the tricks and momentary successes of evil-doers are invariably condemned. This proves more correctly the tendency of the theatre than all the homilies of those who spin fine-threaded arguments from the pulpit and the press. Why, my dear sir, the church itself is unconsciously passing to the theatre, and the theatre equally unconsciously passing to the church. Witness the fairs, the school exhibitions, the tableaux, and the private dramatic entertainments ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... young ladies would be brides-elect before reaching the landing ghat. The increased facilities which improved means of transit now offer to bachelors for running home on short leave have resulted in making the Anglo-Indian "spin" rather a drug in the market; and operating in the same untoward direction is the growing predilection on the part of the Anglo-Indian bachelor for other men's wives, in preference to hampering himself with ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... been in times past a very large monastery with many houses for teachers and scholars within its walls. Nothing of all that is to be seen now except the ruins of a splendid gate and a dry cistern in which the Jews spin, throw, and prepare silk. In front of the church there is a large court surrounded by a covered passage (porticus), which is adorned with beautiful figures from the Old and New Testaments painted on gilded ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... woman's clutches so tight before, Bigot," continued Cadet. "If you let La Pompadour suspect one hair of your head in this matter, she will spin a cart-rope out of it that will drag you to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had received some message, abruptly its ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... he's keepin' company with her, by the looks. I got as nigh to 'em as I could, but I didn't hear much they said. Only, just as they was goin' out, he said somethin' about goin' for a little spin in the car. She said no, her father would want his letters. Carver, he said, why not send Oscar home—that's the chauffeur, you know—with the letters, and he'd run the car himself. She kind of laughed, and said she guessed not, she'd taken one trip with him already that day ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water. It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a knife blade at the other. They make that long sharp end the bow, and you can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about. It has two oars, and sometimes four, and no rudder. You start to go to a given point and you run in fifty different directions before you get there. First one oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are going ahead at once. This ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mice sat down to spin, Pussy passed by and she peeped in. What are you at, my fine little men? Making coats for gentlemen. Shall I come in and cut off your threads? Oh, no, Miss Pussy, ...
— The Tailor of Gloucester • Beatrix Potter
... clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't during blastoff. The inertial gravities didn't bother me so much as the gyroscopic spin they put on the ship so we have a sort of artificial gravity to hold us against the curved floor. It's that constant whirly feeling that gets me. I get sick on ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... down in the straightest chair, and although she had never in her life touched a spinning wheel before, she began to spin. Whirr, whirr, the wheel turned and sang, as fine white thread grew from the bunch of linen floss. The fire danced, and the tea kettle sang, and the spinning wheel whirred merrily. It was so pleasant to have had such a nice tea and to be working in her own little house that the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... pouring a huge jar of water over one's head. Tents in India have always a small side tent with a ditch dug to drain off the water from the copious ablutions of the inmate. I emerged into the room feeling better. It was now quite light, and I proceeded to dress leisurely to spin out the time. As I was drawing on my boots, Isaacs sauntered in quietly and laid his gun on the table. He was pale, and his Karkee clothes were covered with mud and leaves and bits of creeper, but his movements showed he was not hurt in any ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... Burns was so beautiful; the idea I had was more desolate: his 'Rigs of Barley' seemed always to me but a few strips of green on a cold hill—Oh, prejudice!—It was as rich as Devon. I endeavoured to drink in the prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the silkworm makes silk from mulberry leaves. I cannot recollect it. Besides all the beauty, there were the mountains of Arran Isle, black and huge over the sea. We came down upon everything suddenly; there were in our way the 'bonny Doon', with the brig that Tam o' ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... was half a silence on the mob without the door. It is inconceivable that it could become altogether silent, but it was as near to a rational stillness of tongues as it was able. Then there was a loud knocking by a single fist and a new voice began to spin Greek, a voice that was somewhat like the rattle of pebbles in a tin box. Then a startling voice called out in English. " Are you in ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... They expected, further, that their families would not be separated, and that they could be allowed to acquire property for themselves. I know there were many negroes in the South who expected they would neither toil nor spin after being set free, but the belief was by no means universal. The story of the negro at Vicksburg, who expected his race to assemble in New York after the war, "and have white men for niggers," is doubtless true, but it would find ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... Regardless of circumstances, he treads his daily round, avoided by the little child sporting upon the sward. He has work, earnest work, to perform, from which he will not be turned, even at the forfeit of his life. Reaching his appointed place, he ceases even to eat, and begins to spin those delicate fibres which, woven into fabrics of beauty and utility, contribute to the comfort and adornment of a superior race. His work done, he lies down to the sleep from which he never wakes in the old form. But that silent, motionless ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... night by the poor devils who hoped to get something easy. And some of them squandered not merely one day's work but a month's or six months' hard, sweaty toil flipped away with one throw of the dice or one spin of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... common enemies; and it is never necessary to tell them the truth. Expediency is the golden rule in all relations with the common room. And after a very few weeks even Congreve would have had to own that the timid new boy could spin quite as broad a yarn as he. The parents do not realise this. It is just as well. It is a stage in the development of youth. Everyone must pass through it. Yet sometimes it leads to ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... that I intended to have said in far inferior prose. I intended filling three or four sides with exclamations against a University life; but you have showed me how strongly they may be expressed in three or four lines. I can't build without straw; nor have I the ingenuity of the spider, to spin fine lines out of dirt: a master of a college would make but a miserable figure as a hero of a poem, and Cambridge sophs are too low to introduce into a letter ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... ladylike and pretty. A good face, though; straight and clean, with honest eyes and a likable smile. Lack of will, perhaps, or a persistent run of ill luck. Letty had always kept him stiffened up in the old days. Dick recalled one of his father's phrases to the effect that Dave Gilman would spin on a very small biscuit, and wondered ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... slapping that gentleman on the shoulder. "Are you in for a bit of sport? It's a nice moonlight night, and I'm going to take a spin down to Hamilton to meet some chaps, and we can come back on the iceboat, or if you think it too late, you can stay over, and come back ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... in prime of summer, giving me of her best. My heart warmed to her loveliness, and I sniffed the perfume of her breath, mysteriously characteristic as the chosen perfume of some loved woman's laces. It was glorious to spin on, on, between the rows of sentinel poplars, bound for the horizon, yet never reaching it, and regarding crowded haunts of men more as interruptions than as ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... deteriorated, except when they are old. There are among these tribes powerful women of extraordinary height These have almost the entire care of the house and work; namely, they till the land, plant the Indian corn, lay up a store of wood for the winter, beat the hemp and spin it, making from the thread fishing-nets and other useful things. The women harvest the corn, house it, prepare it for eating, and attend to household matters. Moreover they are expected to attend their husbands from place to place in the fields, filling the office of ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... were to spin yarns while steering, Miss Dabstreak," I said, "your fate would probably resemble Sindbad's. You would be wrecked six or seven times ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... one. He gets at the substance of a book directly. He tears out the heart of it." At dinner Johnson told Dilly that, if he wrote a book on cookery, it should be based on philosophical principles. "Women," he said, contemptuously, "can spin, but they cannot make ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a trunk to the sea, or the sea to the cloud, and two funnel-shaped masses were joined together by a long, twisting, whirling column of water that neither sea nor sky seemed able to break away from. It was a weird sight to see this dark shape writhe and spin before the storm, and at last the base of it struck a coral reef, and it disappeared, leaving nothing but a blinding squall of rain and a tumult of white waves breaking on the reef. And then the water whirled and tossed, and flung its white ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wore wuz made on de plantation. De women had to card, spin an' weave de thread an' den when de cloth wuz made it wuz dyed wid berries. My step-father wuz de shoemaker on de plantation an' we always had good shoes. He beat ol' marster out o' 'bout fifteen years work. When ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... occupied males. Unhappy Mr Meggs, accordingly, got it, so to speak, with both barrels. He was fifty-six, and he was perhaps the most unoccupied adult to be found in the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. He toiled not, neither did he spin. Twenty years before, an unexpected legacy had placed him in a position to indulge a natural taste for idleness to the utmost. He was at that time, as regards his professional life, a clerk in ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... began to spin in the air, swinging his body lightly and adroitly. Through the holes of his shirt and pants we caught glimpses of the greyish skin of his slim body, of his sharply bulging and angular shoulder-blades, knees and elbows. It seemed to us as if with one ...
— The Shield • Various
... during our absence; but she said, with a sudden expression of alarm, 'O, no; she would not part with Hannah on any account!' So I said no more, but fancied her preference was dictated more by fear than love. But I spin out a long record for this last evening at home. O, budding vines and flowers! who will train your rich luxuriance into fairy, fantastic clusterings, or watch your opening petals in the summer which is to come? Who listen to the babbling ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... places, entering into long-winded explanations of what was the usual course of the regular master of the form, and others of the stock contrivances of boys for wasting time in school, they could not spin out the lesson so that he should not work them through more than the forty lines; as to which quantity there was a perpetual fight going on between the master and his form, the latter insisting, and enforcing by passive resistance, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... crime. Before her eyes filed, in a statelier pageant than they knew, the long procession of "simple great ones gone for ever and ever by," and the countless lesser ones whose names are quenched in the darkness of a night that shall know no dawn. She saw the "great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change"; but amid all the change, the confusion, the chaos, she saw the finger of God ever pointing, and heard the sublime monotone of the Divine voice ever saying to the children of men, "This is the way, walk ye in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... right. Mme. Sechard will offer to renew your lease; tell her that you are thinking of setting up for yourself. Offer her half the value of the plant and license, and, if she takes the bid, come to me. In any case, spin the matter out. . . ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... be paid. Enid had found her waking thoughts unpleasant, if not almost intolerable, and, being too perfectly healthy to indulge in anything of the nature of moping or sulks, she came to the conclusion that a good sharp spin on her bicycle would be the best mental tonic she could have; so she got a cup of coffee and a biscuit, took out her machine, and started away to work off, as she hoped, the presentiment of coming trouble which seemed to have fastened ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... make bricks by the million, spin and weave both wool and cotton, forge in steel from the finest needle up to a ship's armor, and so add considerably ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... who had come all the way from Clapham Common to look after his life. 'There was not much craft,' he went on to say, 'displayed in that first attempt. You will have to look after me pretty closely in the future. No; I must spin in a hansom—it is the one thing I specially love in London, its hansom. Here, we'll have two hansoms, and I'll take charge of Mrs. Sarrasin, and you'll follow us, or, at least, you'll find your way the best you can, Captain Sarrasin—and let us see ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... standing at bay. Then it began to move slowly towards a patch of ash and wild plums in the head of a coulie, some distance off. Its pursuer rode after it, and when close enough would push by it and fire, while the bear would spin quickly round and charge as fiercely as ever, though evidently beginning to grow weak. At last, when still a couple of hundred yards from cover the man found he had used up all his cartridges, and then merely followed at a safe distance. The bear no longer paid heed to him, but ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... in Hightown to satisfy his curiosity. There were the Bearsarks, who would spin tales of the rich Frankish lands and the green isles of the Gael. From the Skridfinns he heard of the bitter country in the north where the Jotuns dwelt, and the sun was not and the frost split the rocks to dust, while far underground before great fires the dwarves ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... dear!" said Mattie. "And what would become of poor me supposing thou wert any bigger? As it is, I can bake the little loaves thou lovest to eat, and I can spin and knit enough for us both. But, oh, dear! wert thou the size of Farmer Fairweather or Miller Mealy, my ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Racey told him, "you can look out of the window and see two chairs in front of the Kearney House. On the right we have Bill Riley, a Wells Fargo detective from Omaha, on the left Tom Seemly from the Pinkerton Agency in San Francisco. They know something but not everything. Suppose I should spin 'em all my li'l tale of grief—what ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life? And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... not mean to wilfully deceive them. Very probably he had his excuse ready. Malcolm could almost hear his words. "I said nothing about the Jacobis because I knew your prejudice, and I did not want to fluster you. I thought Mrs. Godfrey would spin her yarn, and I left it to her. It was not my fault if the Wallaces took to them, and that they were often up at Fettercairn." Some such words Cedric would say when he ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... vain complaining, cease, my friend, Since thou art yet not numbered with the dead But turn thy thoughts unto thy destined end, Behold thy Fates spin out the vital thread, And often as thy mind to Hell be led, To contemplate the doleful gloom aglow, There will forthwith possess thee such a dread, Which Christ's unbounded mercy doth bestow, Lest thou be doomed to that eternal realm ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... saw black, the room began to spin, he passed his hand across his eyes. "Wait! Let's ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... which emerged the works of Thucydides and Tacitus seem not to be a natural incident of our time. To change slightly the meaning of Lowell, "the bustle of our lives keeps breaking the thread of that attention which is the material of memory, till no one has patience to spin from it a continuous thread of thought." We have the defects of our qualities. Nevertheless, I am struck with the likeness between a common attribute of the Greeks and Matthew Arnold's characterization of the Americans. Greek thought, it ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... a public, spin themselves any reasons or excuses for their hearty approval of Canada's engagement in the war. Her or their contributions of men and money to its fields of slaughter and waste appeared and appear to them natural, proper, inevitable. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... extraordinary!" exclaimed Jasper, who had not yet acquired that material part of his trade, the ability to spin a yarn. "I have always heard that it was certain death to venture in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... chap," Frank said, at the conclusion of one of French's stories of the grandeur of the coming empire, "and I'd like to hear you spin yarns all night, but, if you don't mind, I'll ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... wild exuberance almost every where, without culture, and the women collect such quantities as they consider requisite for their families, which they prepare and spin upon a distaff; the thread is woven, by an apparatus of great simplicity, into fillets, or pieces from six to nine inches broad, which are sewed together to any width, required for use. The indigo, in its indigenous state, and a variety of other ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... one who wants to go back, really wants that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a house embowered ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... and make incision in their Hides, That their hot blood may spin in English eyes, And doubt them with superfluous ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... and allow himself to be spun backward around to the place where Rosa was waiting. He pondered this idea for some time, until its absurdity became apparent. Undoubtedly he must be going out of his head; he saw that it was necessary to keep walking until the back-spin of that treadmill ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... the Old Settlers' Cabin, where they have the relics, the spinning-wheel, the flax-hackle, and the bunch of dusty tow that nobody knows how to spin in these degenerate days; the old flint-lock rifle, and the powder-horn; the tinder-box, and the blue plate, "more'n a hundred years old;" the dog-irons, tongs, poker, and turkey-wing of an ancient fireplace—around back of the Old Settlers' Cabin all the early part of the day ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... and foam flecked. Again as Jim approached him, the minister's boy planted a blow on his ribs that made Jim spin. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was fully prepared to give her a home. My father just then was ashore, and took to the young man amazingly; he must have him spend many an evening at our cottage, and you may be sure that the grog didn't remain in the cupboard. My father had a great many yarns to spin, and liked a good listener; and as listening and talking are both dry work, one glass followed another till the young man's eyes began to sparkle, and my poor sister's to fill with tears; still, he always maintained, when she talked gently to him about it next day, that he knew well what he ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... we have nothing else to do, you or one of your crew would be good enough to spin us a ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... I will not spin this note any further, but shall be glad of a line to tell me you are well. I have not seen Mr. Lort since he roosted under the metropolitan Wings of his ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... it, that's all!" said Harry, with a laugh. "If you'd ever played baseball, you'd understand that easily enough. See? You hold the ball like this—so that your fingers give it a spin ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... big mainsail, and she was painted black, too! Well, their trick succeeded. Just this minute we'd have no more chance of finding 'em than a needle in a haystack. But it may clear again before night, and then we'll see! Go ahead now and spin your yarn, my lad!" ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... the engine room. With the help of the boys he set in motion an auxiliary gravity machine, designed to exert a most powerful influence against the downward pull of the earth. As they watched the great wheels spin around, and heard the hum and whirr of the dynamos, the boys watched the pointer which indicated ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... FORD—If I did think there were a reprieve to come for you I would be contented to spin out the time thus; but in good earnest I expect none; unless you had an apprehension you were not to die you would not spin out the time thus, not ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... while the season lasts; I catch 'em as far as the Braisne. In harvest time, I glean; in winter, I spin." ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... gear of those Who neither toil nor spin; I merely want some standard clo's To drape my standard skin, Wrought of material ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... the offender, dear Lola," said Kilfane, dreamily waving his cigarette towards her. "I have managed to make the last hundred spin out. You have brought me a ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... this,—too many to be told just now,—trust me, and be sure you get everything as good as can be: and if, in the villainous state of modern trade, you cannot get it good at any price, buy its raw material, and set some of the poor women about you to spin and weave, till you have got stuff that can be trusted: and then, every day, make some little piece of useful clothing, sewn with your own fingers as strongly as it can be stitched; and embroider it or otherwise beautify it moderately ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... "No," says he; "you shall be pilot then; you shall con the ship." "Ay," says I, "as long as you please; but you can take the helm out of my hand when you please, and bid me go spin. It is not you," says I, "that I suspect, but the laws of matrimony puts the power into your hands, bids you do it, commands you to command, and binds me, forsooth, to obey. You, that are now upon even terms with me, and I with you," says I, "are the next hour set up upon the throne, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... after the flash has become extinct; and if the body thus illuminated be in motion, it appears at rest at the place where the flash falls upon it. When a colour-top with differently-coloured sectors is caused to spin rapidly the colours blend together. Such a top, rotating in a dark room and illuminated by an electric spark, appears motionless, each distinct colour being clearly seen. Professor Dove has found that a flash of lightning produces the same effect. During a thunderstorm he put a colour-top in exceedingly ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... was measuring his way carefully around a birch tree. Since Toadie Todson's death, he spent a large part of every day looking at trees and measuring distances, so that Stingy could spin his webs in the best ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... of her own rude childhood, she learned to spin the wools, white and grey, to clothe and cover him pleasantly. The spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at present a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange sense of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watching, as her own long-deferred recreation ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... got out of it some easier than I. I had picked out a rangey lank bronco; he would quit the earth and climb the sky like a flying machine; and drop down and strike the rocks with his legs stiff as a post. He would then spin like a top several hundred times play razor back and sun-fish, His head and tail would touch one instant between his legs; and the next instant over his back. I held my breath while he exercised all his tricks then he plunged off while ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... views. According to Maimonides, "Man is the end of the whole creation, and we have only to look to him for the reason for its existence. Every object shows the end for which it was created. The palm-trees are there to provide dates; the spider to spin her webs. All the properties of an animal or a plant are directed so as to enable it to reach its purpose in life. What is the purpose of man? It cannot lie alone in eating and drinking or yielding to passion, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... it. Indeed, the sentence seemed actually visible between them, like a squat and ugly small beast on the shining white cloth. "Sorry, Aunt Lyddy," said Jane, penitently. "I'm a crosspatch to-night, and I ought to sit by the fire and spin, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... distinguished themselves in the cause of humanity and America. On the other hand we were not ignorant that the labour and manufactures of Ireland, like those of the silkworm, were of little moment to herself, but served only to give luxury to those who neither toil nor spin. We perceived that if we continued our commerce with you, our agreement not to import from Britain must be fruitless. Compelled to behold thousands of our countrymen imprisoned; and men, women, and children in promiscuous and unmerited misery—when we found all faith at an end, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... where, with tree o'ergrown, Ran stream, or bubbling fountain's wave did spin, On bark or rock, if yielding were the stone, The knife was straight at work or ready pin. And there, without, in thousand places lone, And in as many places graved, within, MEDORO and ANGELICA were traced, In divers cyphers ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. PARAMORE has been trying to emulate GLORIA, and as the commotion reaches its height he begins to spin round and round, more and more dizzily—he staggers, recovers, staggers again and then falls in the direction of the hall ... almost into the arms of old ADAM PATCH, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of all people in the world, fishermen loved to spin the most exaggerated yarns, and be the heroes of the ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... believe Fortune's wheel turned round for him at length, and that now he enjoys the rest that his years and toils entitle him to. I have many kindly recollections of our camping days together, and of the numerous yarns my mate used to spin of his palmy ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... this conversation to his chivalrous sense of what was due to a woman, the count ceased to talk politics, and as we bored him in our turn by commonplace matters, he presently left us to continue our walk, declaring that it made his head spin to go round and round on the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... into the place; one by one the congregation sank into slumber; the sanctified elders leaned back in their pews, spreading their handkerchiefs over their faces, as if to keep off the flies; while the locusts in the neighboring trees would spin out their sultry summer notes, as if in imitation of the sleep-provoking ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... from a book by Andrew Yarenton an account of the spinning-schools in Germany, as follows: "In all towns there are schools for little girls, from six years old and upwards, to teach them to spin, and to bring their tender fingers by degrees to spin very fine; their wheels go all by the foot, made to go with much ease, whereby the action or motion is very easie and delightful. The way, method, rule, and order how they are governed is, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... uncle and the squirrel boy went on and on through the woods to the top store kept by Mrs. Spin Spider, who had a little toy shop in which she worked when she was not spinning silk ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... furtive and unnatural; the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The under-note of alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her, and presently there came Mother, smiling and seeking through the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betray'd by what is ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... in his temperament to seek rapport with all sorts of men. He was infinitely related;—not an individual of note in his day but was linked with him by some common interest or some polemic grapple; not a savant or statesman with whom Leibnitz did not spin, on one pretence or another, a thread of communication. Europe was reticulated with the meshes of his correspondence. "Never," says Voltaire, "was intercourse among philosophers more universal; Leibnitz servait a l'animer." He writes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... later in the night when he felt himself being dragged into a sitting posture. He remonstrated in a mumbling voice. "'S too early," he said. "Altogether too early. Early. Whew! Watch 'er spin. Jus' his job. ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... eldest daughter got up very early to spin—in the twilight of the dawn it was—and she looked out, and there was the old woman coming from her house on the hill, with a shawl over her head and a tub in her arms. Oh, but she was a really wicked one! for I'll tell you what she did. Well, the girl watched and wondered, ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the shadow, hearing nothing but his own munching; though there was not much of that: for as he came near the end, he took only a little crumb at a time, to spin out the treat; for never was anything so good! Then he had nothing to do but listen: but the waterfall was frozen up; and the mill stood as still as if it was not made to move. If the wheel should creak, it would be a sign that Nipen ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... any neighebour of mine Will not in church unto my wife incline, Or be so hardy to her to trespace,* *offend When she comes home she rampeth* in my face, *springs And crieth, 'False coward, wreak* thy wife *avenge By corpus Domini, I will have thy knife, And thou shalt have my distaff, and go spin.' From day till night right thus she will begin. 'Alas!' she saith, 'that ever I was shape* *destined To wed a milksop, or a coward ape, That will be overlad* with every wight! *imposed on Thou darest not stand by thy ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... not again undergo the vexation Of such a soiree, for the wealth of a nation." "With you I agree," the sage Emperor replied, Who deemed it a lesson to cure them of pride; "And I trust that the thread of our lives will spin out, Ere we ever again attempt such a rout. Alas! we must own we were never designed To flit in the sunshine, or soar on the wind; Nature's changeless decree has allotted its share To each beast of the field, to each bird of the air, To each ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave as well as to spin.—SWIFT. ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... said Drake, showing the butt. "I got them out of your cabin aboard the Su-chen—she got back safely to Tien-tsin, I may tell you; but how I came to be aboard her, or to get up here, is too long a yarn to spin now. Let it wait until we are in less danger than we ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... wavered, and turned. Seeing which, his antagonist dealt him a thwack that made his head spin, and ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... they multiplied fourteen sticks of firewood by two bits of ginger and a larding needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick, and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and round as it did at the time. So I says "if you'll excuse my addressing the chair Professor Jackman I think the period of the lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a good hug of this young scholar." Upon which ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings • Charles Dickens
... glass window of St. Joseph. The girl with the black eyes holds you tight, and you run... and run past the wild, wild towers... and trees in the gardens tugging at their feet and little frightened dolls shut up in the shops crying... and crying... because no one stops... you spin like a penny thrown out in the street. Then the man clutches her by the hair.... He always clutches her by the hair.... His eyes stick out like spears. You see her pulled-back face and her black, black eyes lit up by the glare.... Then everything goes out. Please God, don't let me ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... in his direction, but anyway, he owned several other villages, so although he toiled not neither did he spin, yet he was well clothed and always fed. But my lord Napier was not immortal, for he died, and was buried; and over his grave they erected a monument, and on it are these words: "He was the friend of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... apology. Fred is a peculiar and high-strung boy, but I believe his impulses are right in the main. I will add that I believe his account of how he came to be in this strange plight. He took the car early this morning. I am just returning from a spin in our larger automobile. I saw my runabout at the edge of the road and it occurred to me to stop and see if my son were here. Is there anything more to be said about ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... stick is laid horizontally on a knife-blade on the ground; the operator squatting, places his great toes on each end to keep all steady, and taking the other wand which is of very hard wood cut to a blunt point, fits it into the notch at right angles; the upright wand is made to spin rapidly backwards and forwards between the palms of the hands, drill fashion, and at the same time is pressed downwards; the friction, in the course of a minute or so, ignites portions of the pith of the notched stick, which, rolling over like live charcoal on to the knife-blade, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... out and see what she might be like at nearer view. It might amuse him to play the invalid for a day or two and investigate her. Meantime, he must call up that garage and see what could be done for the car. If he could get it patched up by noon he might take the girl out for a spin in the afternoon. One could judge a girl much better getting her off by herself that way. He didn't seem to relish the memory of that father's smile and haughty tone as he said "My daughter." Probably ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... down in New Hampshire, then, and what ever made father come away up here for, is more than I can tell. I had a hard time after we came up here. I helped father and the boys to clear up our farm. I used to burn brush, and make sugar, and plant potatoes and corn, and spin and knit. I kept school twenty-one seasons, off and on. I didn't know much, but a little went a great way in those days. I used to teach six days in the week, and make out a full week's spinning or weaving, as well. I was strong and smart then, ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... would ever be out at all, for the other ball, the full-pitch as we call it, is, with a flat bat, too easy to hit, for our bowlers swerve very rarely: it is the contact with the ground which enables them to give the ball its extra spin or break. Full-pitches are therefore very uncommon. In cricket a bowler who delivered the ball with the action of a pitcher would be disqualified for "throwing": it is one of the laws of cricket that the bowler's elbow must not ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... were out for a final spin over the course before the race, which had been set for the following day. Beside the Uncas and the Highpoint, the Alton, from farther up the river, had also entered. It was not thought, even by their friends, that the Uncas had ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... reasons. For one, after a gun has been fired a few times the inside is affected. The rifling is worn in places, and that gives a slightly different spin to the shell. It doesn't take much of a change in conditions to alter the course of a shell a good deal. And the weather counts, too. Sometimes there is more air resistance; on a day when it is damp and foggy, with low ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... ourselves, with now and then a day's help or a bee,—but a bee's about as broad as it is long,—and we raise just enough to help the year out, but don't sell. We've got a cow and the filly and some sheep; and mother shears and cards, and Lurindy spins,—I can't spin, it makes my head swim,—and I knit, knit socks and sell them. Sometimes I have needles almost as big as a pipe-stem, and choose the coarse, uneven yarn of the thrums, and then the work goes off like machinery. Why, I can knit two pair, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... continues our narrative, "there lived at Smyrna a man named Phemius, a teacher of literature and music, who, not being married, engaged Critheis to manage his household, and spin the flax he received as the price of his scholastic labours. So satisfactory was her performance of this task, and so modest her conduct, that he made proposals of marriage, declaring himself, as a further inducement, willing to adopt her son, who, he asserted, would become ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... little one, We will spin no more to-day. I prithee go And seek the Lady Gycia. Say to her, By all the memory of our former love I pray that she will come to me at once. Lose ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... sometimes deal in this manner with them. (3.) It is also to the advantage of the righteous, that they be kept and led in that way which will best improve grace already received, and that is, when they spin it out and use it to the utmost; when they do with it as the prophet did with that meal's meat that he ate under the juniper-tree, 'he went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... truer or sadder. These gentlemen ride onto the bridge alone and wave white handkerchiefs; they assure the officer on duty that they, the marshals, are on their way to negotiate with Prince Auersperg. He lets them enter the tete-de-pont. * They spin him a thousand gasconades, saying that the war is over, that the Emperor Francis is arranging a meeting with Bonaparte, that they desire to see Prince Auersperg, and so on. The officer sends for Auersperg; these gentlemen embrace the officers, crack ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... who have no perceptible means of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did own their house), they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and skilful spinning. How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am quite of the opinion of the old lady in "David Copperfield," who says, "Let us have ...
— Our New Neighbors At Ponkapog • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of women better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk to so small dimensions. Nowhere else are there so many women of such a station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day to make up for nights of dissipation. For all those who do not have to concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living easily has been brought to a state of great perfection. The general care of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... a spinning-wheel had their places in another. A farm-house was not considered well furnished in those days without these useful implements, nor was a housewife considered accomplished who could not card, spin, and weave. Angeline carded her own wool, spun her own yarn, and weaved the best homespun made in the settlement; and had enough for their own use and some to sell at the store. In addition to that there was no housewife more expert at the flax-wheel, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... everlasting snows lay at his feet, and the world in all its beauty was stretched out like a map below him; and he longed to go forth to partake of its abundance, and to make for himself a name among men. Then came the Norns, who spin the thread, and weave the woof, of every man's life; and they held in their hands the web of his own destiny. And Urd, the Past, sat on the tops of the eastern mountains, where the sun begins to ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... have made herself wretched under the circumstances; would have accused herself of boldness, and love of display, and a want of consideration for Edna; for Hatty, who was a self-tormentor by nature, could spin a whole web of worries out of a single thread; but Bessie never troubled herself with morbid after-thoughts. "Edna will be all right with me to-morrow," she said to herself; and she was right in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... simply as a prisoner toiling at the treadmill because you must: the well in the garden is a pleasanter conception than all these and wholesomer. Foster it while you may. Now that India has wakened up and begun to spin after the rest of the great world down the ringing grooves of change, these tints of dawn will soon fade away, and in the light of noon the instructed Aryan will learn to see and deplore the monstrous inequalities in the distribution of wealth. He will come to understand the essential equality ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... the house was now in flower. The blossoms, with their four curved petals, seemed to spin like tiny white propellers in the bright air. When he saw them fluttering Gissing had a happy sensation of movement. The business of those tremulous petals seemed to be thrusting his whole world forward and forward, through the viewless ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... will make it," Angela almost snapped. She felt as a certain type of woman feels on hearing that the first man who ever proposed to her has married some one else. And when the codfish, whose name was Sealman, asked her where she would go for a trial spin, she said that he might take her to the shop of Barrymore the jeweller. But that was when Kate ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... he said, as Mary Louise hesitated. "Moor your little hulk 'longside o' me an' I'll spin you ...
— The Iceberg Express • David Magie Cory
... Agra as one of the beautiful architectural triumphs peculiar to the splendid era of Mohammedan rule in India, and which are not to be matched elsewhere. The day following my arrival I conclude to take a spin out on my bicycle as far as the Kootub, and see something of it, the ruins amid which it stands, and the Hindoos in holiday attire. I choose the comparative coolness of early morning for the ride out; but early though it be, the road thither is already swarming with gayly dressed people ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... thoughts and woes Interpreting by Shapes and outward shews: { Where daily nearer me with magic Ties, { What time and where, (wove close with magic Ties Line over line, and thickning as they rise) The World her spidery threads on all sides spin Side answ'ring side with narrow interspace, My Faith (say I; I and my Faith are one) Hung, as a Mirror, there! And face to face (For nothing else there was between or near) One Sister Mirror hid the dreary Wall, { bright compeer But that is broke! And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that Death moreover might be much nearer me than I imagined—I wish I was at Abbeville, quoth I, were it only to see how they card and spin—so off we set. ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... more," he said; and they walked on slowly. "I know what presumption this is; but I will not spin phrases about that. Nor do I ask what is impossible; but I will only ask leave to teach you in my ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... into Marlborough. Indeed, the difference was very conspicuous: this was a smart fellow, with a narrow brimmed hat, with gold cording, a cut bob, a decent blue jacket, leather-breaches, and a clean linen shirt, puffed above the waist-band. When we arrived at the Castle, on Spin-hill, where we lay, this new postilion was remarkably assiduous in bringing in the loose parcels; and, at length, displayed the individual countenance of Humphry Clinker, who had metamorphosed himself in this manner, by relieving from pawn part of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... guessed, Rimrock was hurrying away in order to follow Mary Fortune; and as Rimrock guessed, she had invited him in to keep him from doing just that. She failed, for once, and it hurt her pride; but Rimrock failed as well. After a swift spin through the streets he returned to his hotel and called up his detective in ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... haue mended my haire? To. Past question, for thou seest it will not coole my nature An. But it becoms me wel enough, dost not? To. Excellent, it hangs like flax on a distaffe: & I hope to see a huswife take thee between her legs, & spin it off ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the articles would be exposed amidst cries of wonder and delight, and the house become like a bazaar. Sometimes there would be a mix-up of articles, but the loving messages pinned on to each would clear up the confusion. Mary dearly loved to linger over each gift and spin a little history into it, and she would pray with a full heart, "Lord Jesus thou knowest the giver and the love and the prayers and the self-denial. Bless and accept and use all for Thy glory and for the good of these poor straying ignorant ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... No lilts I spin, their love to win, The viol strings I shun, But lend thine ear and thou shalt hear My ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hue, Hidest grave thoughts, ripe wit, and wisdom old, More skill than I, in all mine arts untrue, To thee my purpose great I must unfold, This enterprise thy cunning must pursue, Weave thou to end this web which I begin, I will the distaff hold, come thou and spin. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... each afternoon, of strolling away from the rest, out of sound of their chaff. On the grassy top of one of the reefs, he found a spot where he could lie comfortably and watch the "quiet one." He used to spin long day-dreams there. She looked so remote far up in the boiling blue, and so strange, that he had an ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... made him a "good man on the round stuff" and in spite of his weight he had no trouble running around on the floating logs, even the small ones. It was said that Paul could spin a log till the bark came off and then run ashore on the bubbles. He once threw a peavy handle into the Mississippi at St. Louis and standing on it, poled up to Brainerd, Minnesota. Paul was a "white water bucko" and rode water so rough it would tear an ordinary man in ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... friends whom he had fondled and tended with such constant care. Never again to swing along through the sweet freshness of the morning before the sun was up to find the earliest snowdrops for Mrs. Hawthorne, or take a spin in the moonlight with every nerve a-tingle across the frozen bosom of the lake, or wander in delight along the wood roads when every tree was clad in the witching beauty of a silver thaw, or sweep across the wide stretching country in the very poetry of motion, or hear ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... acting, the water, instead of flying off in every direction, would merely drip down to the ground as if the dog were not shaking himself at all. A cowboy would find that he could no longer throw his lasso by whirling it around his head. A boy trying to spin his top would discover that the top would not stand on its point while spinning, any better than when it was ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... all this turmoil, about which I am to spin my narrative, lay in her education. I hold that a German princess should never be educated save as a German. By this I mean to convey that her education should not go beyond German literature, German history, German veneration ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... and then, the maids to please, At midnight I card up their wooll; And while they sleepe, and take their ease, With wheel to threads their flax I pull. I grind at mill Their malt up still; I dress their hemp, I spin their tow. If any 'wake. And would me take, I wend me, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... Mme. Sechard will offer to renew your lease; tell her that you are thinking of setting up for yourself. Offer her half the value of the plant and license, and, if she takes the bid, come to me. In any case, spin the matter out. . . ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... out and unhung the pendulum—the striking weight, whose string was broken, was made all right and put for the time being on the table. Then the "moon and stars" which had been fixed for a quarter of a century, were made to spin; the "days of the month" refused to pass in review without a squeak that must be remedied, so I flew into the closet to get some sweet oil which was goose-grease; but shutting the ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... of May Clo's broken ribs had mended. The first day when she was up and dressed, able to go downstairs, and out for a spin in the renovated blue car, she was a very different looking girl from the battered wisp of humanity whose blood had stained the ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... without calling, as it were, and always excited the admiration of Bill Jordan. After dinner that evening Whitey went to the bunk house. Some of the cowpunchers were in from the range, and Whitey loved to hear the yarns they would spin. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... by people. She had one consolation at least; she was not going away with Glory Goldie because of any desire for ease and comfort, but only because her hands were failing her. What else could she do when her fingers were becoming so useless that she could not spin any more? ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... unlike the others who keep on buzz-buzz-buzz, like mosquitoes! You're not aware, sister-in-law, that I actually dread uttering a word to any of the girls outside the few servant-girls and matrons in my own immediate service; for they invariably spin out, what could be condensed in a single phrase, into a long interminable yarn, and they munch and chew their words; and sticking to a peculiar drawl, they groan and moan; so much so, that they exasperate me till I fly into a regular rage. Yet how are they to know that our P'ing Erh too ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to have him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might be with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to make them spin along ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... little about the ocean. In fact, there are some things you don't know, and, if they wanted to, some of the old sailors could spin you yarns that would make your hair ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... from some great lady to send her to a charity school: that she went there every day to learn to read and work, but that the mistress of the charity school used her scholars very severely, and often kept them for hours, after they had done their own tasks, to spin for her; and that she beat them if they did not spin as much as she expected. The little girl's grandmother then said, that she knew all this, but that she did not dare to complain, because the schoolmistress was under the ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... facile, sweet, Free from that solemn vice of greatness, pride; I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to abide, Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should with even powers The rock, the spindle, and the shears control Of destiny, and spin her ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... use hanging around here a minute longer," Jack had finally to tell him. "Get aboard and I'll spin your wheel for you and give you a boost for a start. Then I'll drop out of sight, because some of them may run this way when they hear the ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... I must say," said Mrs. Jones, "this goes quite beyond me. I thought I could spin some; but I sha'n't never dare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... perfectly with what I have said, if we will only just remember that we are not beasts, but men. It may seem a strange thing to have to remind people of, but it is just what they are always forgetting. My friends, we are not animals, we are not spiders to do nothing but spin, or birds only to build nests for ourselves, much less swine to do nothing but dig after roots and fruits, and get what we can out of the clods of the ground. We are the children of the Most High God; we have immortal souls within us; nay, more, we are our souls: ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... the Chancellor was at the summit of human success. Jonson had just sung of him as one "whose even thread the Fates spin round and full out of their choicest and their whitest wool" when the storm burst. The Commons charged Bacon with corruption in the exercise of his office. It had been customary among Chancellors to ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... written only about four months before his death. A little later he wrote: "I spin my thread of life from week to week, rather than from year to year." Constant attacks of bleeding from the lungs sapped his little remaining strength, but did not altogether disable him from lecturing. He was amused by one of his friends proposing to put him under trustees for ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... opening like that? "Clyde, what do you know about Edwin Scott?" That let him spin any yarn he chose—if ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... well as chicks, have a strange habit known as 'waltzing.' After running for a few hundred yards they will also stop, and, with raised wings, spin around rapidly for some time after until quite giddy, when a broken leg occasionally occurs.... Vicious cocks 'roll' when challenging to fight or when wooing the hen. The cock will suddenly bump down on to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... am truly glad to see thee alive and well, friend Christison. I have a long yarn to spin into thine ear, but it is as well that our red friends shall not hear it. They might not hold the white skins in quite as much respect ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... remarked the logical superior person in him, 'you don't mean to argue that a spin of the ball is affected by the spins that have preceded it? You don't mean to argue that, because red wins four times, or forty times, running, black is any the more likely to win at the next spin?' 'You shut up!' retorted the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... more went aboard the boat, seeking the comfortable interior of the cabin, where Maurice could spin his yarn, and a council of war be called to ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... any of the people this brilliant couple had known. I think he wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know. He hadn't a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for, so we didn't spin it very fine; we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor- saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get excellent claret cheap- -and matters like "good trains" and the habits of small game. His lore on these last ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... any sane man expect that we should for ever retain our former exceptional position. Other nations move as well as we. They buy the machines which we invent and make; they employ our foremen to teach them the arts we have acquired, and in time they learn to weave and spin for themselves instead of coming to us for every yard of cloth or every pound of yarn. This relative advancement of foreign nations and, too, of our own Colonies and Dependencies was and is inevitable. It is part of the general ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... circulated, the Lieutenant amused us in his own dry way with some early recollections of service; and knowing that the Major had been quartered in the Emerald Isle in "Ninety-eight," I pressed him to give us some memento of that eventful period. "Come F——, spin us a yarn, as our topmen used to say round the galley-fire, during the night-watch," added ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... makes you think of accident and sudden death. Contrast this ill-boding hand with the quick, skilful, quiet hand of a nurse whom I remember with affection because she took the best care of my teacher. I have clasped the hands of some rich people that spin not and toil not, and yet are not beautiful. Beneath their soft, smooth roundness what a chaos of ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... felt as if I had six legs when we were going the pace. We were all one piece, and had a jolly spin, didn't we, my beauty?" and Ben chuckled as he took Lita's head in his lap, while she answered with a gusty sigh that ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... he had said good-bye to her after a luncheon or tea together, he would turn his car southward and find himself driving down the avenue to Washington square and the old house on the south side, to invite Marcia Terroll for a spin beside him. And sometimes he would call her on the telephone and they would meet for ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... met in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola," application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists who aspire to copy it. Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy than if they had nothing to do with us. I remember seeing an etching of this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible, stern, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... do, friend. If you hav'nt got beds, we'll sit up all night, and warm our toes at the fire, and spin long yarns, as they tell in the Eastern sea-ports. Anything but turn a fellow out ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... she was thinking of unpaid bills; since human lilies of the field, though they neither toil nor spin, must pay for irreproachable shoes and unlimited ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... in the gardens, under the shade of almond-trees, our slaves are singing. Oh, what calm carissime, and what a forgetfulness of former fear and suffering! But it is not the Parcae as thou writest, who spin out our lives so agreeably; it is Christ who is blessing us, our beloved God and Saviour. We know tears and sorrow, for our religion teaches us to weep over the misfortunes of others; but in these tears is a consolation unknown to thee; for ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... fight, bet your boots about that, If we get a clear course without serious obstruction, Of which I'm not sanguine; the practice of PAT Has proved to possess universal seduction. Our last spin was muffed; never mind whose the fault; Let bygones be bygones! But now comes the crisis! It's now win or lose. Every man worth his salt Will pull like a Titan from Cam ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... miniature man to dance, fire a small gun, go through the sword exercise, play on a small fiddle, smoke a cigar, turn a somersault, bow to the company, and hold out his hat for an unlimited number of kopecks. Herr Batz suggests that such a monkey as that might be taught to spin ropes, and our younger Mechlenberger laughs, and says he once read a story of a monkey that shaved a cat, and then cut off his own or the cat's tail, he could not remember which. This reminds the Russian of a countess in Moscow who owned a beautiful little dog, to which she ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... wonderful close down on her face near the ear that he wanted to touch. And a certain heaviness, the heaviness of a very full ear of corn that dips slightly in the wind, that there was about her, made his brain spin. He seemed to be spinning down ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... her life by spinning wool, she was not therefor of so poor a spirit but that she dared to admit into her heart Love, which,—by means of the pleasing words and fashions of a youth of no greater account than herself, who went giving wool to spin for a master of his, a wool-monger,—had long made a show of wishing to enter there. Having, then, received Him into her bosom with the pleasing aspect of the youth who loved her whose name was Pasquino, she heaved a thousand ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Whether the women may not sew, spin, weave, embroider sufficiently for the embellishment of their persons, and even enough to raise envy in each other, without ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... before Pilate, and "My kingdom is not of this world." We who are made kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world's fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon's. Bride Poverty—she who climbed the Cross with Christ—stretched out eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay up treasure against her importunity, ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... with Captain Miles until late in the afternoon; when, the glare of the sun having gone off, we were rowed ashore in the captain's gig. My friend Moggridge took charge of us, and a crew of hardy sailors made the boat spin ashore at a very different rate of speed to that which the heavy old launch displayed on our trip out to the vessel ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of New Mexico, or at least some of them, still manufacture earthen vessels, and spin and weave cotton fabrics in the aboriginal manner, and live in houses of the ancient model. Some of them, as the Mokis and Lagunas, are organized in gentes, and governed by a council of chiefs, each village being independent and self-governing. They observe the same law of hospitality universally ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... more strength in picking Jumbo up bodily from the mat and dropping him all over the place. Jumbo's practice at bridging stood him in excellent stead now, and he got out of many a tight corner by a quick, firm bridge or a sudden spin. ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... the horrors of the scene that ensued. We clewed up the mizzen royal, we lashed the foretop to make it spin upon its heels. The second dog watch barked his shins to the bone, and a tail of men hauled upon the halliards to mast-head the yard. Nothing availed. We had to be wrecked and wrecked we were, and as I clasped ARAMINTA's trustful head to my breast, the pale luminary sailing through the angry ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... Aeroplanes speak to those who love them and understand them. Lots of Pilots know all about it, and can spin you wonderful yarns, much better than this one, if you catch them in a confidential mood—on leave, for instance, and after ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... father, and, without looking up, bade him a good morning. The old man, without any show of feeling, replied "Thank you," and assumed his previous posture. The bride sat down at the other side of the door, put her spinning-wheel in front of her and began to spin industriously, an occupation which custom required her to continue until the moment the bridegroom arrived and conducted her to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well armed with a commodity which is said to be synonymous with yourself—money—they seek to outwit you by crowding a month of merriment into half a dozen hours. Yet their victory is brief and fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by night they will move grindingly on the axle the next morning. None of us can beat you in the end. Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray and dies at last babbling ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... dancing round a punch-bowl. "That woman!" he exclaimed suddenly. "What asses they make of us men! And all these vultures—I'm not carrion yet. But THEY soon will be!" And he laughed and his thoughts began their crazy spin again. ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... that there's no chance for him whatever. Of course, with all that, he has done his best not to let himself go. But there are moments," Mr. Mitchett ruefully added, "when it would relieve him awfully to feel free for a good spin." ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... to Clotho [one of the fates], allowing her to spin thy thread into whatever things ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... and dance, They rustle and murmur and pull at the bough, They shiver, they quiver till they pull themselves loose And are free. Up, up they fly! Little brown specks in the sky. They twist and they spin, They whirl and they twirl, They teeter, they turn somersaults in the air. Then for a moment the wind holds its breath. Down, down, down float the leaves, Still turning and twisting, Still twirling and whirling, The brown leaves float to the earth. Puff! goes ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... chuckled. "Guess he wants to take a spin on the ground," he commented to himself. "Fancy that bird wanting to go to Paris by motor!" Then to show how little he thought of the ground he advanced his throttle rapidly and took off on far less space than should ever be attempted by one who knows, from experience, ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... former aide to the great Frederick, with emphasis, "when you can work in the sun, why cling to the cold corner of a public hearth? Your brain will spin the faster for the fire underneath. You will write great words and be happy besides. Think of that. What a combination! Mein Gott! You will be terribly in love, my son, but your balance is so extraordinary ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... hand, "and will drop in as a friend, I can show you about the largest business in the way of canned provisions and domestic groceries in the State, and give you a look around Battery Street generally. Or if you'll name your day, I've got a pair of 2.35 Blue Grass horses that'll spin you out to the Cliff House to dinner and back. I've had Governor Fiske, and Senator Doolan, and that big English capitalist who was here last year, and they—well, sir,—they were PLEASED! Or if you'd ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Gipsy lying, it is so peculiar that it would be hard to explain. The American who appreciates the phrase 'to sit down and swap lies' would not be taken in by a Romany chal, nor would an old salt who can spin yarns. They enjoy hugely being lied unto, as do all Arabs or Hindus. Like many naughty children, they like successful efforts of the imagination. The old dyes, or mothers, are 'awful beggars,' as much by habit as anything; but they will give as freely ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... that the priest, the wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and refused to aid her. "I must go to the King," persisted the peasant girl, "even if I wear my limbs to the very knees." "I had far rather rest and spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a touching pathos, "for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it." "And who," they asked, "is your Lord?" "He is God." Words such as these ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... my four-in-hand to come round here and pick us up," said Franco. "Shall we all go for a spin, and get an appetite ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... they toil not neither do they spin. They make nothing, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. They merely gamble with the savings of others, and find the business infinitely profitable. Yet they, too, must cultivate the language of sentiment. Though the world is spared the incubus of their philanthropy, they must ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... they were! There was a great roll of thick, soft blue cloth, so that they could all be warmly clad without waiting for the mother to spin the wool from the sheeps' backs. There were nice little squirrel-fur caps for all the children; there were more yellow gold pieces; and then there was a large package of the most enchanting sweetmeats, such as the Bretons make at ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... Why, in that case Rothschild wouldn't be a circumstance. The Pope might go into banking himself, and control the markets of the world. But no. There's a lot of ministers here, and they haven't any head for it. I wish they'd give me a chance. I'd make things spin. ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... appraise the effect of this startling proposition on me. At any other moment I should inevitably have broken loose again, but the fascination of his personality was upon me and I let him spin his webs. Any man, and there are scores adrift, who falls under the spell of Henry H. Rogers, invariably, as did the suitors of Circe, pays the penalty of his indiscretion. Some he uses and contemptuously casts aside useless; ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... curtains on darkness and night! She sat down to spin by the cheery fire-light, While before it, so cozy and warm, Slept the kitten,—a snowy white ball of content— And her wheel, with its humming activity, lent To ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... did not do so. "An Englishman's house is his castle"; an English woman's house is her castle. Atkinson proposed that a woman of full age, living in her own house, should connect her loom or spindles by electric wire to the nearest mill or factory, and then proceed to weave or spin more than the legal limit of nine hours per day. Would the state, under the broadest principles of English constitutional liberty, have the right to come in and tell her not to do so; particularly when the man in the next house remained free? Up to this time there is no doubt that ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... can't—really!" protested Mrs. Fielding. "I shall die if I don't get a little air. I thought perhaps you would like to come for a little spin with me. But I suppose that is out ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... to his old humour: "Young men," began he, "this poetry deceives many; for not only every one that is able to give a verse its numbers, and spin out his feble sence in a long train of words, has the vanity to think himself inspir'd; but pleaders at the bar, when they wou'd give themselves a loose from business, apply themselves to poetry, as an entertainment ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... and dread. And there was puzzlement too. A puzzlement that made his brain spin. Joan had spoken with terror in her voice. Terror that had said somebody was going to kill. And Joan was not a girl to be easily frightened. And she had mentioned Gaddon's name. Gaddon, the man who had shot into the heavens in an experimental ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... going to spin the next stretch of this yarn—and maybe the next after it—in my own way. You will wonder how I happened by certain scraps of information: but you will understand before we come ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... for comes when your hands are tied," says the Turkish proverb. Win had been yearning for a spin. She kept silence and sped on, wondering whether she could surprise the enemy by executing ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... sawdust. (But it ain't strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get the milk-pot to hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch him by both his shoulders, and spin him out into ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... it, please do not trouble and we must just hope that Tuesday morning will be early enough to do all. Of course I fear the exam. will spin me; indeed after this bodily and spiritual crisis I should not dream of coming up at all; only that I require it as a pretext for a moment's escape, which I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... World"! O what a world it is— Where full-grown men cut capers in the German, Cotillion, waltz, or what you will, and whizz And spin and hop and sprawl about like mermen! I wonder if our future Grant or Sherman, As these youths pass their time, is passing his— If eagles ever come from painted eggs, Or deeds of arms succeed ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, but it isn't enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you at all if it isn't your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness—or at least thank the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, hands on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow-it was believed to be his sole accomplishment-snapped his fingers in simulation of bones, and ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... hear that what you in England call a mail is to leave camp this evening; so, that you may have no excuse for not writing to me constantly, I am sitting down to spin you such a yarn as I can under the disadvantages circumstances in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... said, one might do worse than dream of Hortense. But in spite of all your philosophers say about there being no world but the world we spin in our brains, I could not woo my lady back to it. Like the wind that bloweth where it listeth was my love. Try as I might to call up that pretty deceit of a Hortense about me in spirit, my perverse lady came not ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the Roman Empire, there was never the slightest precedent for this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we go eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an hour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... fair than is the sun's bright beams, Or snow-white Alps beneath fair Cynthia! Who would refuse with Hercules to spin, When such fair faces bears us company? Fair Polyxena never was so fair: Nor she that was proud love to Troylus. Great Alexander's love, Queen of Amazons, Was not so fair as is fair Alfrida. But, Perin, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... desire, she observed that it was not necessary for him to be so chary in explaining the basis of the proposed negotiations. It was better to enter into a straightforward path, than by ambiguous words to spin out to great length matters which princes should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to turn in, no chance to whirl his lariat, even for a side throw. There was no time to spin a loop. But his hand detached the rope, flying fingers found the free end as he pivoted in the saddle, thighs welded to ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... "Sit tight and say your prayers, if it pleases you. This is better, after all, than poison, or the cold muzzle of a revolver at your forehead. Close your eyes if you are afraid; or open them, if you have the courage, and see the world spin by. We ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... easily, looking up at the once more placid old man who sat beside him, "I am just now recalling matters that were puzzling me much before the sickness began to spin my head about so fast on my shoulders. The harder I thought, the faster my head went around, until it sent my mind all to little spatters in a circle about me. One thing I happened to be puzzling over was how the impression ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... instance. He is a sailor all over, to be sure—an "old salt," as he would call himself. But that does not confer upon him any license to spin such yarns as he does, to his young shipmates on the forward deck. He has cruised half a dozen years after whales, in the Pacific ocean, and, of course, has seen some sights that are worth speaking of. But that is no reason why ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... spider to the king. This we poor sensitives do feel and see; For subject to the curse you made us be. Tread not upon me, neither from me go; 'Tis man which has brought all the world to woe, The law of my creation bids me teach thee; I will not for thy pride to God impeach thee. I spin, I weave, and all to let thee see, Thy best performances but cobwebs be. Thy glory now is brought to such an ebb, It doth not much excel the spider's web; My webs becoming snares and traps for flies, Do set the wiles of hell ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Kateen-beug and Maurya Jude To dance in Beg-Innish,[13] And when the lads (they're in Dunquin) Have sold their crabs and fish, Wave fawny shawls and call them in, And call the little girls who spin, And seven weavers from Dunquin, To ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... grunted out "Nakasind," and another "Owkasaaend," while a third murmured "O-a-a-send." All, however, made the bridegroom understand what was the cause of their ugliness; while Habetrot slily hinted that if his wife were allowed to spin, her pretty lips would grow out of shape too, and her pretty face get an ugsome look. So before he left the cave he vowed that his little wife should never touch a spinning-wheel, and he kept his word. She used ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... in and take a ride with me, We'll take a spin for a mile or three, And maybe we'll come where the lollypops grow, Pink and yellow, all in ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... of the aura is very variable—terror, excitement, numbness, tingling, irritability, twitching, a feeling of something passing up from the toes to the head, delusions of sight, smell, taste, or hearing (ringing, or buzzing, etc.), palpitation, throbbing in the head, an impulse to run or spin around—any of these may warn a victim that a fit is at hand. Some patients "lose themselves" and ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Garrone jumped up and said, "The first person who touches Nelli will get such a box on the ear from me that he will spin ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... rock stood upward from a great clumping of the moss-bushes unto my left; and I went over to the rock, and made a search about it. And I found that there was a hole into the bottom part of the rock, and I thrust the Diskos into the hole, and made the blade to spin a little, so that it sent out a light; but there was no thing in the hole, and it did seem a dry and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... some land," said Christine; that was the promise, and we thought to raise vegetables and fruits; fowls, too, and perhaps bees; but we can cook, wash the clothes, keep the house clean, spin, and weave, and sew." ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... mother; we'll be rich yet, and I'll make you a queen yourself, and then you need spin no more," said Jim, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... companionable in such company, as he had been accustomed to it from boyhood; and it appears that at this time he was in the habit of composing fables for the entertainment of Julian, not unlike the yarns which sailors often spin to beguile landsmen. [Footnote: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... at police headquarters the chief was awaiting them. Evidently he was not at all averse to this delightful spin across country on a fine July morning and with nothing to pay. Official business might sometimes ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... inebriating delight of gratified vengeance contended in her eyes with the fire of insanity; and she brandished the distaff which she held in her hand, as if she had been one of the Fatal Sisters, who spin and abridge the thread of human life. Tradition has preserved some wild strophes of the barbarous hymn which she chanted wildly amid that scene of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... magnificently as when I had first landed upon Australian soil, to bid me farewell. And we embarked again upon that same old Sonoma that had brought us to Australia. Again I saw Paga-Paga and the natural folk, who had no need to toil nor spin to live upon the fat of the land and be arrayed in the garments that were always up to ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... gloom of spirit is a very contagious thing, very difficult to dissimulate. Perhaps the best practical thing for a naturally melancholy person to try and do, is to treat his own low spirits, as Charles Lamb did, ironically and humorously; and if he must spin conversation incessantly, as Dr. Johnson said, out of his own bowels, to make sure that it is the best thread possible, and of a ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ready to be his servants, and give him milk and wool and food. He brought with him to our shores cows and sheep and goats, horses and dogs. Moreover he made pottery, moulding the clay with his hand, and baking it in a fire. He had not discovered the advantages of a kiln. He could spin thread, and weave stuffs, though he usually wore garments ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... three Fates, the one who cut asunder the thread of life; one of her sisters, Clotho, appointed to spin the thread, and the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with them red whiskers on your face," McGuffey agreed. He refrained from saying more, for instinct told him Mr. Gibney was about to grow reminiscent and spin a yarn, and B. McGuffey had a true seaman's reverence for a goodly tale, whether true, half-true, or ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... evidently cannot say, "I beg your pardon, miss." There were children, who always will go where they ought not to go, running against people, and taking hold of their clothes with sticky, smeared hands, asking commercial gentlemen to spin their tops, and corpulent ladies to play at hide and seek. I saw one stern-visaged gentleman tormented in this way till he looked ready to give the child its "final quietus." [Footnote: American juveniles are, generally speaking, completely destitute of that agreeable shyness which prevents ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... here, in order to save my traveling back and forth, so far, every night and morning. Then this winter I shall have my tools to make,—and to finish the inside of the house, and make the furniture; and if you have any leisure time you can spin. But after all it will not be very comfortable for you, and perhaps you would rather wait ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... to preserve it from slight falls and other trifling accidents. A little practice soon enables the child to take care of itself, and experience acts the part of a nurse. As they advance in life, the girls are taught to spin cotton, and to beat corn, and are instructed in other domestic duties; and the boys are employed in the labours of the field. Both sexes, whether Bushreens or Kafirs, on attaining the age of puberty, are ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... it the statement of the fact that the two straight lines so described go alongside one another, παρ' αλληλας {par' allêlas}, all the way. Similarly a mathematician should know that a rhombus is so called from its resemblance to a form of spinning-top (ῥομβος {rhombos} from ῥεμβω {rhembô}, to spin) and that, just as a parallelogram is a figure formed by two pairs of parallel straight lines, so a parallelepiped is a solid figure bounded by three pairs of parallel planes (παραλληλος {parallêlos}, parallel, and επιπεδος {epipedos}, plane); incidentally, in the latter case, he will ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... kindness of heart which was one of his most pronounced characteristics, took care that I was the hero of the evening, making me spin my yarn in detail to him and his guests; and at the end thereof awarding me a great deal more praise than I was in the least entitled to. Lotta and I slept at the Pen that night, and after all the guests had left, we four, that is to say Sir Timothy, Lady Mary, Lotta, ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... beneath him, and up from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead." He had never before so suffered, nor did he again; but this was his description to me next day, and his excuse for having failed in a ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... (Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc. Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading cake, and puts it down in the pot-oven by the fire; then wipes her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel. NORA, a young girl, puts her head in at ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... Ossaroo did not bespeak any very sanguine hope on his part. Still he was ready to counsel a trial of the scheme. They could try it without any great trouble. It would only need to spin some more rope from the hemp—of which they had plenty—attach it to the leg of the bearcoot, and give the bird its freedom. There was no question as to the direction the eagle would take. He had already had enough of the valley; and would no doubt make to get out of it at the very ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Alexandria to enforce their orders upon Philometor, and sent Euergetes home to Cyrene. Philometor received the Roman ambassadors with all due honours; he sometimes gave them fair promises, and sometimes put them off till another day; and tried to spin out the time without saying either yes or no to the message from the senate. Euergetes sent to Alexandria to ask if they had gained their point; but though they threatened to return to Rome if they were not at once obeyed, Philometor, by his kind treatment and still kinder words, kept them ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... nation, and from the monarchs of foreign lands, for rescuing human lives. I chatted with the men of Deal whose profession it is to work in the storm, and succour ships in distress, and who have little to do but lounge on the beach and spin yarns when the weather is fine. I also listened to the thrilling yarns of Jarman until I felt a strong desire to go off with him to a wreck. This, however, was not possible. No amateur is allowed to go off in the Ramsgate boat on any ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... asked) spin out by these excessive methods a thread of such tenuity? Why go to such lengths for four months longer of fallacious solvency? I expect not to be believed, but I think the Government still hopes. A war-ship, under a hot-headed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attended with a good deal of danger; for not only was there a likelihood of falls leading to broken legs, but broken necks also were an easy possibility by the chance of a slip upon the mossy edge of one or another of the many ledges, followed by a spin through the air ending suddenly upon the jagged rocks below. Indeed, so ticklish did I find my way that I began to think that the Indians had spoken no more than the simple truth in warning me against such dangers, and ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... belief that seven-year-old children will become beautiful by dancing in the flax. But many superstitions have clustered round the latter plant, it having in years gone by been a popular notion that it will only flower at the time of day on which it was originally sown. To spin on Saturday is said in Germany to bring ill fortune, and as a warning the following legend is among the household tales of the peasantry:—"Two old women, good friends, were the most industrious spinners in their village, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... year's monotony. That which the dainty spirits sing thee, The lovely pictures they shall bring thee, Are more than magic's empty show. Thy scent will be to bliss invited; Thy palate then with taste delighted, Thy nerves of touch ecstatic glow! All unprepared, the charm I spin: We're here together, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the old ground, seems to me, tho' I may have dozed a little here and there. Have you been over the old business, and brought me over the water, by the nape of the neck; because, if you haven't—no, I see you have not, so here's to you, Nance, spin on;" and he took from his pocket a black bottle, and drank ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Mr. Amundsen any the less because of his collection of old sagas which he used to spin out for hours on end. Whoppers, some of them were, but we, his whaling and sealing captains, we'd sit there and never let on, eating thin Norwegian bread and goats' cheese and dried chips of ptarmigan, with ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... grip of French and German. The truth is, unless a man can get the prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it's hardly worth while for him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself and be able to spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as a cue. That's all very fine, but in practical life nobody does give you the cue for pages of Greek. In fact, it's a nicety of conversation which I would have you attend to—much quotation of any sort, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... read it to me, noble sir?" said Teresa; "for though I can spin I can't read, not ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... landing; so pull in, lads," said Jack, giving a stroke with his oar that made the boat spin. In a few seconds we ran the boat into a little creek, where we made her fast to a projecting piece of coral, and running up the beach, entered the ranks of the penguins armed with our cudgels and our spear. We were greatly surprised to find that, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... habits she had which, when new, charmed, but, after acquaintance, displeased her companions. She had by nature the same habit and power of excitement that is described in the spinning dervishes of the East. Like them, she would spin until all around her were giddy, while her own brain, instead of being disturbed, was excited to great action. Pausing, she would declaim verse of others or her own; act many parts, with strange catch-words and burdens that seemed to act with mystical power on her own fancy, sometimes stimulating ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... As new growths upon the oldest cedar or baobab do not merely spin themselves out of the wood already formed,—as they thrive and constitute themselves only by original conversation with sun, earth, and air,—that is, in the same way with any seed or sapling,—so generations of Moslems, Parsees, or Calvinists, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... first, no more. There is not a heart-beat in the whole grind. As to Willis—he failed egregiously, when he attempted to 'gild refined gold and paint the lily,' as he did in his so-called 'Sacred Poems.' He can spin a yarn pretty well, and coin a new word for a make-shift, amusingly, but save me from the foil-glitter of his ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... That she may give us edgeing keen, String us for battle, till as play The common strokes of fortune shower. Such meaning in a dagger-day Our wits may clasp to wax in power. Yea, feel us warmer at her breast, By spin of blood in lusty drill, Than when her honeyed hands caressed, And Pleasure, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eye. He seemed born to please without being conscious of the power he possessed. It must be owned, and no one was more ready to confess it than himself, that his literary attainments were by no means of a high order. "We don't spin tops" is a favorite saying amongst artillery officers, indicating that they do not shirk their duty by frivolous pursuits; but it must be confessed that Servadac, being naturally idle, was very much ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... Fauver. He is trying this new chaser. She is the finest thing we have seen here, and he wants to give her a spin with a passenger up. Hop in ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... girl, you are right about that," Uncle John said heartily, "and now run and get your wraps, and we'll spin away to ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... for a little girl in the winter. Rose almost longed for the garden, even if weeds did grow apace. In the old country Mere Dubray had spun flax and wool, here there was none to spin. She had learned a little work from the Indian women, but she was severely plain. What need of fringes and bead work and laying feathers in rows to be stitched on with a sort of thread made of fine, tough grass? And as for cooking, one had to be economical and make everything ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... very grand house, and he married a young lady that had been delicately brought up. In her husband's house she found everything that was fine—fine tables and chairs, fine looking-glasses, and fine curtains; but then her husband expected her to be able to spin twelve hanks o' thread every day, besides attending to her house; and, to tell the even-down truth, the lady could not spin a bit. This made her husband glunchy with her, and, before a month had passed, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the board walk to study types. But types of what? Perhaps she was observing the lilies of the board walk whose raiment was so dazzling that Solomon would not have arrayed himself like one of these even though he could. They are true lilies for they toil not, neither do they spin, unless it be a fabulous yarn about some fair rivals, and for this lack of toil they lose the real meaning and significance of life. Everything about them is toil, not that grinding toil with no final goal to reach but that exhilarating joyful kind as seen in the waves, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... cupful of water. Bring 1 cupful of water to the boiling point, dissolve the gelatine in it, and place in ice water to cool. Put the sugar to cook with 1/2 cupful of water, and cook until the sirup will spin a thread or until it will form a firm ball when tried in cold water. Beat the egg whites, pour the hot sirup gradually over them, and continue beating. Add the gelatine, which by this time should be commencing to solidify. Divide the mixture into three equal parts. To ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 4 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... to try on, And how to spin, I spies an ensign with a Bloody Lion, And bears away to leeward for the inn, Beats round the gable, And fetches up before the coach-horse stable: Well—there they stand, four kickers in a row. And so I just makes free to cut a brown 'un's cable. But riding isn't in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. Ye have, like the French infidels, made reason your goddess, and are exalting her above the Bible; and, in your unitarianism and neology ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... for the boy; but he dared not touch it, for if he did, he got a rap over the fingers. While his mother spun, he would sit for hours together looking at the buzzing spindle and the revolving wheel, and then he had his own thoughts. Oh! if he only durst spin that wheel! His father and mother slept; he looked at them, he looked at the wheel, and then by degrees a little naked foot was stuck out of bed, and then another naked foot, then there came two small legs, and, with a jump, he stood on the floor. He turned round once more, to see if his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... and as I bailed, the edge of the cask lifted itself above the water. When it had risen some two inches, the shark, enraged at my escape, came to the surface, and turning on its side, bit at the tub so that I heard its teeth grate on the wood and iron bands, causing it to heel over and to spin round, shipping more water as it heeled. Now I must bail afresh, and had the fish renewed its onset, I should have been lost. But not finding wood and iron to its taste, it went away for a while, although I saw its fin ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... valiant efforts to learn to spin before I played Margaret. My instructor was Mr. Albert Fleming, who, at the suggestion of Ruskin, had recently revived hand-spinning and hand-weaving in the North of England. I had always hated that obviously ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... said quickly. It was a lie, but he thought a pardonable one. The truth was just too complicated to spin out; he had ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... forth their changes, made the very air spin. Put 'em down. Put 'em down! Good old Times, Good old Times! Facts and Figures, Facts and Figures! Put 'em down, Put 'em down! If they said anything they said this, until the ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... course of romance writing, did not come to the rescue. As usual Beth lay on the sofa and Laurie sat in a low chair close by, amusing her with all sorts of gossip, for she depended on her weekly 'spin', and he never disappointed her. But that evening Jo fancied that Beth's eyes rested on the lively, dark face beside her with peculiar pleasure, and that she listened with intense interest to an account of some exciting ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Alone, and to the presence of the man Whose hand hath slain so many of thy sons, Many and brave? an iron heart is thine! But sit thou on this seat; and in our hearts, Though filled with grief, let us that grief suppress; For woful lamentation nought avails. Such, is the thread the Gods for mortals spin, To live in woe, while they from cares are free. Two coffers lie beside the door of Jove, With gifts for man: one good, the other ill; To whom from each the Lord of lightning gives, Him sometimes evil, sometimes good befalls; To whom the ill alone, him foul disgrace ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... of them, as suffering drivers will testify. Casey Ryan, known wherever men of the open travel and spin their yarns, famous for his recklessly efficient driving of lurching stagecoaches in the old days, and for his soft heart and his happy-go-lucky ways; famous too as the man who invented ungodly predicaments from which he could extricate himself and be pleased if he kept his shirt on his back; Casey ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... four months before his death. A little later he wrote: "I spin my thread of life from week to week, rather than from year to year." Constant attacks of bleeding from the lungs sapped his little remaining strength, but did not altogether disable him from lecturing. He was amused by one of his friends proposing to ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... - Seven fine churches, And five old mills, Farms in the valley, And sheep on the hills; Old Man's Acre And Dead Man's Pool All left behind, As they danced through Wool. And Wool gone by, Like tops that seem To spin in sleep They danced in dream; Withy - Wellover - Wassop-Wo- Like an old clock Their heels did go. A league and a league And a league they went, And not one weary, And not one spent. And Io, and ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... the stained glass window of St. Joseph. The girl with the black eyes holds you tight, and you run... and run past the wild, wild towers... and trees in the gardens tugging at their feet and little frightened dolls shut up in the shops crying... and crying... because no one stops... you spin like a penny thrown out in the street. Then the man clutches her by the hair.... He always clutches her by the hair.... His eyes stick out like spears. You see her pulled-back face and her black, ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... over this result, and the Tower cannon proclaimed the happy reconciliation between Monk and the Government. But Monk's Commissioners had been too hasty, or had been outwitted; and Clarges, who arrived in London that day, had come too late to stop them and spin out the time. A pledge of both parties against Charles Stuart or any single-person Government was in the forefront of the Treaty; and the rest of the Articles simply admitted Monk and the officers of the Scottish Army to a share ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... "I used to spin and make soap. My last husband and I was married fifteen years and eight months and we never did buy a bar of soap. I used to be a good soap maker. And knit all ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... why? Because too frequently the family has but one producer. The wife, herself a consumer, produces more consumers. Daughters grow up around a man like lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin. Every member of every family in the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother, for a child can hardly be born with cheerful views of living whose mother's life ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... creatures the world has ever known. No picture was ever so perfect and beautiful as she. Her robes were lovelier than those of any other goddess. Sometimes they were of gold and scarlet, sometimes of purest white, and many times of modest green. She loved to spin, and no spider ever spun so fine a thread as she on her spinning wheel. She worked so faithfully that Woden changed the wheel into shining stars, and when you look up at Orion again remember that the Norse people called that ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... the Rovers saw the boat ahead spin around and the two men leap to their feet in alarm. But then the craft steadied itself, and a moment later shot into the shadows of the trees beside the old ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... not reduce his speed to take to the brush. The car beneath him flung clean off the ground as he swung to climb out of the grooves. It landed with all four wheels a-spin, but only struck on two. A sudden swerve, far out of the course, and the monster righted abruptly. Another sharp turn, and away it went again, crushing the brush and flinging up the sand in a track of its own that paralleled the road, but rougher though ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... hands in blindness spin No self-determined plan weaves in; The shuttle of the unseen powers Works out a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... nobly distinguished themselves in the cause of humanity and America. On the other hand we were not ignorant that the labour and manufactures of Ireland, like those of the silkworm, were of little moment to herself, but served only to give luxury to those who neither toil nor spin. We perceived that if we continued our commerce with you, our agreement not to import from Britain must be fruitless. Compelled to behold thousands of our countrymen imprisoned; and men, women, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... spider, that in the ante-chamber quietly dost spin thy web over the expectant's foot, spin my eyelids close in a sleep as still as the horse's pace! Patience? no, she was not with us in the carriage to Zaether. But to the inn, by the road side, close to the far-famed valley, I got at ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... in a glance of contempt—made safe by the darkness—at this partisan, and with the air of one who knows that he has an interesting yarn to spin, began at the beginning and worked slowly up for his effects. The expediency of brevity and point was then tersely pointed out to him by both listeners, the highly feminine trait of desiring the last ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... of sugar over the fire with half a cup of grape-juice, bring to a boil and cook until it will spin a thread from the tip of the spoon. Have ready the yolks of three eggs, beaten well, pour the grape-juice syrup upon it, and add two cups of whipped cream. Turn into a mold, pack in ice, salt ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... spun himself round with velocity in the opposite direction; continued to spin until his long cloak was all wound neatly about him; clapped his cap on his head, very much on one side (for it could not stand upright without going through the ceiling), gave an additional twist to his corkscrew moustaches, ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... acquaintance, Time, drops in, And while the running sands Their golden thread unheeded spin, He ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... place at an altitude of six thousand feet. My next impression was that I seemed to be in the centre of a whirling vortex, around which all creation revolved at an extraordinary speed, and realised that my trusty steed was indulging in a particularly violent "spinning nose dive." A "spin" at the best of times rather takes one's breath away, so, shutting the throttle, I endeavoured to come out of it in the usual way. To my surprise, the engine refused to slow down, or any of the controls to respond, except one, which only ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward. Far otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing and the waving of the Whirlwind element come tones of a melodious Death-song, which end not but in tones of a more melodious Birth-song. Nay, look into the Fire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see." Let us actually look, then: ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... now, while barley by the road Do hang upon the bough, O, A-pull'd by branches off the lwoad A-riden hwome to mow, O; While spiders roun' the flower-stalks Ha' cobwebs yet to spin, O, We'll cool ourzelves in out-door walks, When night's ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... great freedom. The mother is not over solicitous to preserve it from slight falls and other trifling accidents. A little practice soon enables the child to take care of itself, and experience acts the part of a nurse. As they advance in life, the girls are taught to spin cotton, and to beat corn, and are instructed in other domestic duties; and the boys are employed in the labours of the field. Both sexes, whether Bushreens or Kafirs, on attaining the age of puberty, are circumcised. This painful ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... try!" cried the Tinker. "Sly may he be, but sly am I, too. I would I had him here now, man to man!" And he made his heavy cudgel to spin again. "But what manner ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... rugs of the inveterate reader, the hurried tread and irascible eye of the carnivorous passenger, and the everlasting pipe of the ocean talker, who feels time before him and the world at his feet wherein to spin yarns—has any one not ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... did not mean to wilfully deceive them. Very probably he had his excuse ready. Malcolm could almost hear his words. "I said nothing about the Jacobis because I knew your prejudice, and I did not want to fluster you. I thought Mrs. Godfrey would spin her yarn, and I left it to her. It was not my fault if the Wallaces took to them, and that they were often up at Fettercairn." Some such words Cedric would say ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... claim, his knees began to smite together, and he felt so weak he could hardly drag one foot after the other. He threw down his pick; he began to tremble and spin around. The world seemed to be turning over and over, and he trying in vain to hold on to it. He jerked the pipe from his teeth, and throwing it down on the bank, he tumbled down too, and clutching at the grass with both hands tried hard, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... the gods: But wait, at least, till Caesar's near approach Force us to yield. 'Twill never be too late To sue for chains, and own a conqueror. Why should Rome fall a moment ere her time? No—let us draw our term of freedom out In its full length, and spin it to the last: So shall we gain still one day's liberty. And, let me perish, but, in Cato's judgment, A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty, Is worth a whole eternity ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... this, and I feel as if I'd rather wait for a good wind, clap on all sail, and make a dash for it, going right ahead for the gunboat as if you meant to run her down, and when we got very close, give the wheel a spin and shoot by her. They'd think we were coming right on to her, and it might scare the crew so that they wouldn't be able to shoot straight till we got ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak—dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism—are ludicrously false to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... plays upon his pipe all the day long, the picture of peace and innocence, or prowls in the passes with a murderous long gun, if there are foreigners in the air. The women toil at carrying their scant supply of drinking-water from great distances during a part of the day, and in the evening they spin industriously by their firesides or upon their doorsteps, as the season will have it. It is an old life, the same to-day as a thousand years ago, and perhaps as it will be a thousand years hence. The men ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... They'll have the dream quality of 'You Win a Million' and the lottery-shows. They'll be things to dream about but never to think of doing anything about. We're going to make the series disappointingly short, in order to make it more convincingly factual. We won't spin it out for its entertainment-value until it ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the piskies and brownies, loved to come at night and help the sad and ill and poor, and those who were good and kind. They would come when folks were asleep, and tidy their kitchen for them, or chop their wood, and spin their flax. Sometimes, for the very poor, they would bake a batch of bread or cakes, and have all ready for them; and when the poor people came down in the morning, cold and weak and hungry, wondering how they would manage to get any food to eat, they would find ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... day, the eldest daughter got up very early to spin—in the twilight of the dawn it was—and she looked out, and there was the old woman coming from her house on the hill, with a shawl over her head and a tub in her arms. Oh, but she was a really wicked one! ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... follow. Hanno gives us facts, not speculations—the things which he has observed, not those of which he has dreamt; and he delivers his facts in the fewest possible words, and in the plainest possible way. He does not cultivate flowers of rhetoric; he does not unduly spin out his narrative. It is plain that he is especially bent on making his meaning clear, and he ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... solemn face of an unusually good-looking young man who wore his silk hat at a jaunty angle and whose every detail of attire suggested that he was of that singularly blessed class who toil not neither do they spin, Miss Mamie McCorkle, public telephone operator in the tallest-but-one skyscraper below the Fulton street dead line, expected to be asked to look up some number in the telephone book and be generously rewarded for the trifling ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and which disappear at the first reasonable thought. I run into harmless passengers as if I would knock the breath of life out of them, and tangle our umbrellas together so fearfully that they spin round and round some time after their separation. O that umbrella of mine! Sometimes I hook it in the drooping branches of trees, and, losing my hold in the suddenness of the shock, have the gratification of feeling it tip up, and go down over my shoulder into the mud ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... chugging machine whizzed him off in the direction where, surrounded by cash, awaited the 8 per cent. expectations of Messrs. Proctor and Greenlee. Later still he descended with said cash upon the offices of Haynes, Forster & Company. And even later, after an exhilarating spin in the country, he arrived safe and blithesome at his well-appointed rooms in the Hotel Fulton, ready to remove with good soap and pure aqua the stains of mart and road before ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... out of his waistcoat and tried again. He had just succeeded in getting the thing to spin when Mr. Downing arrived. The sound of his footsteps disturbed Psmith and ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a house embowered in vines—there ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... to whom Hercules was sold for three years for murdering Iphitus, and who so won his affection that he married her, and was content to spin her wool for her and wear the garments of a woman while she donned and wore ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... remembrance, that horror of death of which you sometimes spoke to me. I thought to myself: I shall lie thus in the dark, only this heart will be still, this blood will be cold, and there will be no dawn for me,—yet the world will spin on as before, and those who loved me will smile again. I feared death for the first time, because, for the first time, life is dear to me. It is the outcome of my great content; I cling to my happiness, and Death is my only enemy, the only power that could knock this cup of bliss out of my hands. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... but that love should be of the party), she pulled a ring from one lithe finger, and looked down while the lad kissed it for a holy relic and put it in his bosom reverently,—pretending not to see. But, Ilaria, you knew well what gave colour to the faint and worn old words about Fior di spin giallo, or O Dea ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... grab in and turn a trick for the general good of all hands. But you can't dump your friends. You've got to stand by your own party first. You do anything else, and you'll simply get the reputation of being a kicker and an insurgent. And then you can't spin a thread. Your own party doesn't want you and the other side is afraid of you. Ideals are blasted good in their way, but in politics cut out the I and attend to the deals. It's the only way you'll ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... rapidity, and power of movement are always correlated with the number of these. The one before us could sweep across the field with majestic slowness, or dart with lightning swiftness and a swallow's grace. It could gyrate in a spiral, or spin on its axis in a rectilinear path like a rifled bullet. It could dart up or down, and begin, arrest, or change its motion with a grace and power which at once astonish and entrance. Fixing on one of these monads then, we followed it doggedly by a never-ceasing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... now, and I'll take you and Ephy for a spin, and, incidentally, I'll teach you both how to ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... of the forest increased, moving about like so many fireflies in the night; the nauseous odours grew heavier, more persistent, and for a moment Helen felt ill; her head began to spin around at the thought of what she was going to see, but quickly she recovered herself and went on by the side of the girl who never faltered. Helen wondered at such ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... and I must begin to brush up and sober down, or I'll be the black sheep of the flock,—as if I wasn't always that. But you really are getting terrible good, Kittie; I've seen it for a long time and it makes me uncomfortable; spin around and be gay like ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... all of a sudden. "That's a hot one, ain't it?" he grins at Sampson. "Sure, old top, we'll give you a spin!" he says, jabbin' the floor board with his feet. "That's if this boiler will roll. Some of you guys will have to give the motor a little spin, if you want to go away from here. She's gone cold on me again! Gimme a cigarette, ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... it means anything that can swim," replied Jupp, quite in his element when talking of the sea, and always ready to spin a yarn or tell what he knew. "It might be made of spare spars, or boards, or anything that can float. When I was in the Neptune off Terra del Faygo I've seed the natives there coming off to us seated on a couple of branches of a tree ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... the opinion of fair ladies who dwell in ceiled houses in our older Eastern States and cities, who like lilies, neither toil nor spin, whose fair hands would gather close their silken apparel at the thought of touching the homelier garments of many a heroine of Kansas—whatever they may say in reference to this question, we, the women of the Spartan State, declare, we want ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... summer smocks on! Be clad no more in russet! All the flow'rs are fashion-plates and fabrics for your wear— Gold and silver gossamer, Webs, from every blossomer, Fragrant and so delicate (with neither seam nor gusset), Filmily you spin them, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... a running position upon one foot, with the other far behind me, in Atalanta's race; sometimes suspended by cords from the ceiling, with arms and legs in horribly uncomfortable positions, till everything seems to spin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Fido. They also rejoiced to see each other. The boys returned from a visit at Lesina's and carried with them all kinds of gifts. A water-gun, by which you could squirt the water to the top of the highest trees; singing tops which could spin almost a quarter of an hour. From Palko's mother they got a whole box full of prunes filled with nuts, which Ondrejko thought were better than figs ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... accident and sudden death. Contrast this ill-boding hand with the quick, skilful, quiet hand of a nurse whom I remember with affection because she took the best care of my teacher. I have clasped the hands of some rich people that spin not and toil not, and yet are not beautiful. Beneath their soft, smooth roundness what a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... not, as a public, spin themselves any reasons or excuses for their hearty approval of Canada's engagement in the war. Her or their contributions of men and money to its fields of slaughter and waste appeared and appear to them natural, proper, inevitable. They applauded seriously ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... neatly in gold and silver, and make knifes, hatchets, reaping hooks, spades and shares to cut iron, &c. &c. Their potters make neat tobacco pipes, and pots to boil their food. Some authors say that weaving is their principal trade; this is done by the women and girls, who spin and weave very fine cotton cloth, which they dye blue or black.[A] F. Moor says, the Jalofs particularly make great quantities of the cotton cloth; their pieces are generally twenty-seven yards long, and about nine ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... one twentieth of an inch long and nearly as wide, they increased in length as they grew, but for many weeks lived in common on an irregular web, feeding together on the crushed flies or bugs thrown to them. But when one fourth of an inch in length, they showed a disposition to separate, and to spin each for herself a regular web, out of which all intruders were kept. And now it was found that all these webs were inclined at nearly the same angle, and were never exactly vertical; that, like the spider in the first web she made in the Botanical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... pleasures, where, with tree o'ergrown, Ran stream, or bubbling fountain's wave did spin, On bark or rock, if yielding were the stone, The knife was straight at work, or ready pin. And there, without, in thousand places lone, And in as many places graved, within, Medoro and Angelica were traced, In ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... swear to you that you shall henceforth never more be the spider that dwells in that web! For you are a garden-spider, an abominable, dumpy, old garden-spider, for whom a web, such as Hodge is, is much too fine and much too elegant. Be quiet, therefore, old spider, and spin your net elsewhere! You shall not live in my net, but Tib—for, yes, I do know Tib. She is a lovely, charming child of fourteen, as quick and nimble as a kid, with lips red as the coral which you wear on your fat pudding of a neck, with eyes which shine yet brighter ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... wild wings that ever would be flying! Oh, my heart's a meadow-lark that ever would be free! Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying; Well it is the little wheel must ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... what he said was no objectionable as to the matter; but he drawled in his manner to such a pitch, that I thought he would have broken out into an even-down song, as I sometimes think of yourself when you spin out the last word in reading out the line in a warm summer afternoon. In the hymn by himself, he did better; he was, however, sometimes like to lose the tune, but the people gave him great encouragement when he got back ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... "Just a spin will do you good, sweet thing," said Matthew, as I settled down close enough to his shoulder to talk and not interrupt the powerful engine. "I want you to myself for a small moment away from your live stock, human ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tumaranpoque women, if they have children, serve half of the month in spinning and weaving cotton, which their masters supply; and during the other half of the month they work for themselves. The tumataban women spin only one hank of cotton each month for their masters, who furnish to them the cotton in the boll. Only the ayueys receive food and clothing from their masters; to the others the masters give nothing. When these slaves die the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... and maybe no. It's no muckle that that comes till. I wadna spin sae weel gin it warna that the Almichty pat some sicht into the pints o' my fingers, 'cause there was nane left i' my een. An' gin ye mak ither thrippence a week oot o' that, ye'll be turnin' the wather ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... parade at the moment, knew very well that it was an officer's cape, and that Randall McLean had carefully wrapped it about Nellie Bayard lest the keen wind from the west, blowing freely over the ridges, should chill the young girl after her long spin across the prairie and ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... very often. But I look about at other people, and then realize how my mother's slaved for twenty years and how my father's been tied down, and I've come to the conclusion that while there may have been a time when a woman could keep a house, tend a garden, sew and spin and raise twelve children, things are different now; life is more complicated. You owe your husband something, you owe yourself something. I want to get on, to study and travel, to be a companion to my husband. I don't want to be ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... called the croupier, and instantly the little ball began to spin. All eyes followed it. Round and round it went—Aileen as keen an observer as any. Her face was flushed, her ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was Mrs. Vanderpool—she toiled not, neither did she spin, and yet! If all these folk were like poor, stupid, docile Jennie it would be simpler, but what earthly sense was there in trying do to anything with a girl like Zora, so stupid in some matters, so startlingly bright in others, and so stubborn ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... regular Merry-Go-Round," said the Spinning Wheel. "I just make believe I'm one up here in the attic. Time was when I used to spin yarn for the grandmother of Mr. Dunn. But now all yarn is spun in factories by machinery, and spinning wheels are out of fashion. So I am up here in the dust, and it makes the time pass more quickly to pretend I ...
— The Story of a Stuffed Elephant • Laura Lee Hope
... of Debby, I'm sure," said Uncle Squeaky. "We'll be very fine in our downy beds. I will ask Lady Spider to spin us some silk draperies for the windows, Granny. She will do anything we ask. The woodland folk all love Dr. Whiskers. And no wonder. Never a bit of reward has he taken for all the wonderful cures he has made. We'll have a jolly ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... given by men of my class being a lecture. I am a bit of an amateur conjurer, and I thoroughly believe were I to appear on the platform on a bicycle or on an acrobat's globe, and keep three balls in the air with one hand and spin a plate on a stick with the other, and at the same time retail some stories, the notice in the Press on the following morning would begin: "Mr. Harry Furniss gave an instructive lecture last night on subjects ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... nothing better to do with the rest of the afternoon, Nevill thought, than to take a spin in the motor, which they did, the chauffeur at the wheel, as Nevill confessed himself of too lazy a turn of mind to care for driving his own car. While Stephen waited outside, he called at Djenan el Hadj (an old Arab house at a little distance from the town, buried deep in a beautiful garden), ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... spinning-wheel's forbid In vain in all the country-side the spindles sharp are hid; For in a lonely turret high, and up a winding stair, There lives an ancient woman who still turns her wheel with care. The Princess found her out one day, and tried to learn to spin; Alas! the spindle pricked her hand—the ...
— The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book - Containing The Sleeping Beauty; Bluebeard; The Baby's Own Alaphabet • Anonymous
... An eighth braced figure stooping to a wheel, Body to body in the stifling gloom, The sob and gasp of breath against an air Empty and damp and fetid as a tomb. With them I seemed to reel Beneath the spin and heel When combers took them fair, Bruising their bodies, Lifting black water where Their feet ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... Corvatsch was still six thousand feet above her head. All at once, Helen felt subdued. The fancy seized her that the carriage was rumbling over the roof of the world. In a word, she was yielding to the exhilaration of high altitudes, and her brain was ready to spin ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... a pair of strong hooks at the posterior end of its soft defenceless abdomen. Their food appears for the most part to be of a vegetable nature. Some species, however, are alleged to be carnivorous, and a North American form of the genus Hydropsyche is said to spin around the mouth of its burrow a silken net for the capture of small animal organisms living in the water. Before passing into the pupal stage, the larva partially closes the orifice of the tube with silk or pieces of stone loosely spun together and pervious to water. Through this temporary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... imitation. The bird does not have to be taught to build its nest or to fly, nor the beaver to build its dam or its house, nor the otter or the seal to swim, nor the young of mammals to suckle, nor the spider to spin its web, nor the grub to weave its cocoon. Nature does not trust these things to chance; they are too vital. The things that an animal acquires by imitation are of secondary importance in its life. As soon as the calf, or the lamb, or the colt can get ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... When these have fed their accustomed time, and are about to change into the pupa state, they, by an instinct given them, attack the vital part of the caterpillar (a most wonderful economy in nature, that this process should be delayed until they have no more occasion for food.) They then spin themselves minute cases within the body of the caterpillar; and instead of a butterfly coming forth (which, if a female, would have probably laid six hundred eggs, thus producing as many caterpillars, whose food would be the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... on the lake is first-rate, Alves, and I skated up the shore to see if I could get you for a spin." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... about the ocean. In fact, there are some things you don't know, and, if they wanted to, some of the old sailors could spin you yarns that would make your hair ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... You're working for me. Listen. I've got a yarn to spin. The man that took the money—or one of them—was short, and slim, and clean-shaved, and he didn't wear a puncher hat. You weren't scared of him because he was a coward. You tried to get him to play square and he talked to ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... for shelter amongst the dangerous islands off Cape Sable, and was lost in the fog. Rumor had it that she ran on the rocks off that perilous coast, and sank with all on board. As time went by, and there was no more sign of the corsair, the rumor was accepted as proven. Men began to spin yarns in the forecastle about Mogul Mackenzie, with an interest that was tinged with its former fear. Skippers were beginning to feel at ease again on the grim waters, when suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... may be the opinion of fair ladies who dwell in ceiled houses in our older Eastern States and cities, who like lilies, neither toil nor spin, whose fair hands would gather close their silken apparel at the thought of touching the homelier garments of many a heroine of Kansas—whatever they may say in reference to this question, we, the women of the Spartan State, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... supposed to wander about the houses of the peasants on her holy day, and to be offended if she finds certain kinds of work going on, they are (or at least they used to be) frequently suspended on Fridays. It is a sin, says a time-honored tradition, for a woman to sew, or spin, or weave, or buck linen on a Friday, and similarly for a man to plait bast shoes, twine cord, and the like. Spinning and weaving are especially obnoxious to "Mother Friday," for the dust and refuse thus produced ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... way in which man learned how to make pottery, how to weave and spin, and how to conquer ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... "Let him spin what yarn he pleases, I care not. All I ask is to put eyes on the lad again. It seems, when I think of it in cold blood, that it can scarce be true, Tayoga. You're sure you made no ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... tops with which the Chinese amuse themselves are as large as barrels. It takes three men to spin one, and it gives off a sound that may be heard several hundred ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... time the Devas, or gods, and their opponents, the Asuras, made a truce, and joined together in churning the ocean to procure amrita, the drink of immortality. They took Mount Mandara for a churning-stick, and, wrapping the great serpent Sesha round it for a rope, they made the mountain spin round to and fro, the Devas pulling at the serpent's tail, and the Asuras at its head." [56] In this myth the churning-stick, with its flying serpent-cords, is the lightning, and the armrita, or drink of immortality, is simply the rain-water, which in Aryan folk-lore possesses the same ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... the logical superior person in him, 'you don't mean to argue that a spin of the ball is affected by the spins that have preceded it? You don't mean to argue that, because red wins four times, or forty times, running, black is any the more likely to win at the next spin?' 'You shut up!' retorted the human side of him crossly. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... miniature tracks, which connected all the rooms on the ground floor of the house and considerably interfered with the parlourmaid's duties. It was known to the family as the Great Auckland Railway. Another favourite hobby of the young engineer was to lie on his back and watch the spider spin her web, comparing the results with a railway map of Great Britain. It was seldom that he went to bed without having learnt at least a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... In a pinky paper all folded neat; And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery jar; And each of them said, "How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we are rash or wrong. While round in our sieve we spin." Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live: Their heads are green, and their hands are blue: And they went to sea ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... main road is, it happens, an old Stane Street, along which Roman legions marched to clean up the councils and clerks of the British tribal system two thousand years ago, and no doubt an historian could spin delightful consequences; this does not alter the fact that these quaint complications in English affairs mean in the aggregate enormous obstruction and waste of human energy. It does not alter the much graver fact, the fact that darkens all my outlook upon the future, that we have never yet produced ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... it," her companion reminded. "He would be very angry if he came home and found that you had left Glen West. Why not take a spin on the lake this evening? You once were very fond ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... art of romance, and how to spin it to the last drop without getting to the dregs, have already peopled this new land of theirs with colour, but I doubt me if it will last, which is their affair, not mine, or yours. King Louis himself is indulgent ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... the same brightness that made Dorothy's so attractive, except that years had tarnished that of Mrs. White, while her niece had seen only sunshine in life to polish the golden warp that beauty loves to spin. There were many features in both that marked relationship, and it was always declared that Dorothy was a Dale both ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... therein is; who keepeth truth for ever; who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong; who feedeth the hungry; a God who feeds the birds of the air, though they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and who clothes the grass of the field, which toils not, neither doth it spin; and who will much much more clothe and feed you, to whom he has given reason, understanding, and the power of learning his laws, the rules by which this world of his is made and works, and of turning them to your own profit in rational and ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... burdened with spare time. It certainly did not seem as if things were fairly divided, he thought. And then he thought no more just then, for one of the queer spells in his head came on. He had experienced them at intervals during the last three days. Something seemed to break loose in his head and spin wildly round and round, while houses and people and trees danced and wobbled all about him. Chester vaguely wondered if this could be what Aunt Harriet had been wont to call a "judgement." But then, he had done nothing very ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... your pigs, and be giving your young time to improbable sculpture and stagnant water, when there is such a fine adventure awaiting you, and when the Norns are foretelling such high things about you as they spin the thread of ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... sat at his ease and looked until he was tired of looking, and then he gave the order for a home-bound spin. Right here was where chanced stepped in and diverted him from his appointed paths. For the car, now turned cityward, had rolled but a few rods when a smell of overheated metals assailed the air, and ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... rebel lines, thinking that the Yankees were coming, blazed away at random. The Yankee pickets, thinking that the rebels were advancing, became uneasy and fired in return. Paul could hear the bullets spin through the air and strike into the trees. His first thought was to get back to his comrades as soon as possible; then he reflected that it would be dangerous to attempt it just then. The firing woke up all the sleepers in the two armies. The drums were beating the long roll, the bugles ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Miss Laura and I were in the wagon. Then Mr. Wood jumped in, took up the reins, and off we went. How the two black horses did spin along! I sat on the seat beside Mr. Wood, and sniffed in the delicious air, and the lovely smell of flowers and grass. How glad I was to be in the country! What long races I should have in the green fields. ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... great institution in Finland, and as the hills in the South are not steep enough for a really good spin, the Finlanders put up a Klkbacke or Skrinnbacke, in imitation of their Russian friends, and enjoy rattling spins, and moments of intense excitement, gliding down these dangerous routes. They are really switchbacks ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... I sit to spin; My Love passed by, and he didn't come in; He passes by me, both day and night, And carries off my poor ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... revealed in the insulting mandate of the empress Sophia, "that he should leave to men the exercise of arms, and return to his proper station among the maidens of the palace, where a distaff should be again placed in the hand of the eunuch." "I will spin her such a thread as she shall not easily unravel!" is said to have been the reply which indignation and conscious virtue extorted from the hero. Instead of attending, a slave and a victim, at the gate of the Byzantine palace, he retired to Naples, from whence (if ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... wouldn't be so bad. Among other things, he thought it would be a good idea not to motor in the direction of Grandby Tavern. And he also thought it was not worth while resenting the fact that his wife and daughter took something over an hour to prepare for the little spin. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... uncommon pleasant man—for there was nothin' a'most he didn't know—except when he got his dander up, and then he did spin out his yarns ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... make an Englishman awkward sits gracefully on the Italian. He knows how to "do nothing" with dignity. Be assured, if Hercules had been of Anglo-Saxon blood, Omphale would never have set him down to spin; but being what he was, I could swear he went ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... knights of old, they toil not neither do they spin. They make nothing, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. They merely gamble with the savings of others, and find the business infinitely profitable. Yet they, too, must cultivate the language of sentiment. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... wouldn't be anywhere if you didn't go, of course," and Tom laughed. "But I'd like to take you for a little spin in this machine, Rad. I want you to get used to them. Sometime I may need you to help me. Come, now. Suppose you get up on this seat here, and I promise not to go too high until you get used to it. Come on, it will do you good, and ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... Smith returned was the London of Shakespeare. We should be thankful for one glimpse of him in this interesting town. Did he frequent the theatre? Did he perhaps see Shakespeare himself at the Globe? Did he loaf in the coffee-houses, and spin the fine thread of his adventures to the idlers and gallants who resorted to them? If he dropped in at any theatre of an afternoon he was quite likely to hear some allusion to Virginia, for the plays of the hour were full of chaff, not always of the choicest, about the attractions of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead.... Only two days later came a letter in which not a syllable was written but 'We have heard ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... nurse now; and see how that will work. We have a week's more business here; and, by bad luck, a dead fortnight, all along of Dublin falling through unexpectedly. He is as artful as Old Nick; he will spin out that broken head of his and make it last all the three weeks; and she will nurse him, and he will be weak, and grateful, and cry, and beg her pardon six times a day, and she is only a woman, after all: and they are man and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... ostriches, adults as well as chicks, have a strange habit known as 'waltzing.' After running for a few hundred yards they will also stop, and, with raised wings, spin around rapidly for some time after until quite giddy, when a broken leg occasionally occurs.... Vicious cocks 'roll' when challenging to fight or when wooing the hen. The cock will suddenly bump down on to his knees (the ankle-joint), open his wings, and then swing ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the Summer stay? In distant sunny places, 'Midst palms and dusky faces, Where they spin the cocoa thread, Where the generous trees drop bread, Where the lemon-groves give alms, And Nature works her daily charms, Among the rice-fields, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... Polly's voice was triumphant. "If I don't make Marc Scott apologize to me——" Then, calming herself, she continued: "I'm going to spin you a yarn, Mr. Penhallow, and then you've ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... meet old Garner, you must meet him on the square, For he is the biggest cow-thief that ever tramped out there. But if you want to hear him roar and spin a lively tale, Just ask him about the time we all went ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... first loop Schwab went sick, and after that he had no wish except to die. Whether the Thunder Bird rode head down or tail down he neither knew nor cared. Nor did Johnny. As he yelled he looped and he dived, he did tail spins and every other spin that occurred to him. For the time being he was "riding straight up and fanning her ears," and his aerial bronk was pulling off stunts he would never ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Dan'l. "'For,' sez he, 'Mr. Borem,' sez he, 'you're a quaint morril character. You've got protracted humor,' sez he. 'You've bin an hour tellin' that yarn o' yours! Ef ye could spin it out to fill two chapters of a book—yer fortune's made! For you'll show that a successful hoss trade involves the highest nash'nul characteristics. That what common folk calls "selfishness," ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... squirrels, but there are no special children's games. The father makes bows and arrows for the boys, and instructs them in hunting and agricultural work. As the girls grow up, the mother teaches them how to spin yarn and weave blankets, "for," she tells them, "otherwise they will become men." She also warns them not to have children too rapidly in succession, for there is no one to carry them for her. Women cannot eat the tenderloin ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the family. The journeyman shoemaker dropped in and fitted out the family with boots. The great city industries were then unknown. The farmer's wife in those days was perhaps the most expert master of trades ever known. She could spin and weave, make a carpet or a rug, dye yarns and clothes, and make a straw hat or a birch broom. Butter, cheese, and maple sugar were products of her skill, as well as bread, soap, canned fruits, and home-made wine. In those days the farm was a miniature factory or combination ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... woman brooding over her ripe fruit. A buzzing like the sound of an organ; the hive all alive with the hum of the bees.... Such somber, golden music, like an autumn honeycomb, slowly gives forth the rhythm which shall mark its path: the round of the planets is made plain: it begins to spin.... ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... with their playhouse stuff? The player in mimic piety may storm, Deplore the Comb, and bid her heroes arm: The arbitrary mob, in paltry rage, May curse the belles and chintzes of the age: Yet still the artist worm her silk shall share, And spin her thread of life in service of the fair. The cotton plant, whom satire cannot blast, Shall bloom the favourite of these realms, and last; Like yours, ye fair, her fame from censure grows, Prevails in charms, and glares above her foes: Your injured plant shall meet a loud ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... pipes the mechanic all of a sudden. "That's a hot one, ain't it?" he grins at Sampson. "Sure, old top, we'll give you a spin!" he says, jabbin' the floor board with his feet. "That's if this boiler will roll. Some of you guys will have to give the motor a little spin, if you want to go away from here. She's gone cold on me again! ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... to this, we find in the conversation of most men that their thoughts are cut up as small as chaff, making it impossible for them to spin out the thread of their discourse to any length. If this world were peopled by really thinking beings, noise of every kind would not be so universally tolerated, as indeed the most horrible and aimless form of it is.[12] If Nature had intended ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... generally kept us upon the quarter-deck with him, and many were the cozy confabs we used to hold, many the choice cigars we used to smoke upon that handy loafing-place, the booby-hatch, many the pleasant yarns we used to spin while pacing up and down the deck, or leaning against the rail of the companion. As I have said, Mr. Stewart was a delightful watch-mate—and Bill Langley and I used to love him dearly, and none the worse that he made ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... uncertainly over there between two of the aeros of the Zar. The concentration of beams of vibrations was too much for the sturdy craft. It was red hot and its occupants burned alive where they sat. Suddenly it slipped into a spin and went slithering down into the city, leaving a gaping opening where it fell. This sobered him somewhat, but he went into the battle ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... stolidly told any one who asked him. "Cold, unhealthy place." He seemed to enter upon his duties with the casual interest of the amateur, and, in a way, exactly embodied the attitude of his country towards Europe, of which the many wheels within wheels may spin and whir or halt and grind without in any degree affecting the great republic. America can afford to content herself with the knowledge of what has happened or is happening. Countries nearer to the field of action must know what is ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... high eddying flame, and like moths consumed. In the burning of the world-Phoenix, destruction and creation proceed together; and as the ashes of the old are blown about do new forces mysteriously spin themselves, and melodious death-songs are ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... o'clock, and Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall have not come. It is Lestock's last day, and he and Fanny and Lucy are so busy and so happy putting the transit instrument to rights, and setting black spotted and yellow backed spinning spiders at work to spin for the meridian lines. I have just succeeded in catching the right sort by descending to the infernal regions, and setting kitchenmaid and housemaid at work. I was glad Mr. and Mrs. Hall did not arrive just at the crisis of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... thi own livin when young, An when tha grew up tha'd to spin; An if labor like that wornt wrong, Tha con hardly call wayvin ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... determined to make the process of informing her a very long one: he would spin it out, and so secure many a sweet interview with her: and, who knows? he might fascinate her as she had him, and ripen gratitude into love, as ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... single cow That charges for her milk, And though they are not paid a sou, The silkworms still spin silk. ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... blue and white cockades, Put on their shields, unsheathe their blades, And conquest fell begin; And let the word be Scotland's heir: And when their swords can do nae mair, Lang bowstrings o' their yellow hair Let Hieland lasses spin, laddie. Charlie's bonnet's down, laddie, Kilt yer plaid and scour the heather; Charlie's bonnet's down, laddie, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... detested the law and he loved letters, and before he was twenty he had helped to edit a paper, had written essays, a story, and a play,—none of which, fortunately for him, survive,—and had gone to London, ostensibly to read in a lawyer's office, and really to spin his web of fiction whenever opportunity offered. Chance connected the fortunes of young Ainsworth with periodical literature, where most of his early work appeared. His first important tale was 'Rookwood,' published in 1834. This ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lying, it is so peculiar that it would be hard to explain. The American who appreciates the phrase 'to sit down and swap lies' would not be taken in by a Romany chal, nor would an old salt who can spin yarns. They enjoy hugely being lied unto, as do all Arabs or Hindus. Like many naughty children, they like successful efforts of the imagination. The old dyes, or mothers, are 'awful beggars,' as much by habit as anything; ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... of curiosity; though a million times had it been done in the past ages, set the compass before us, having it from the Great Museum. But, as ever in that age, it did spin if we but stirred the needle, and would stop nowheres with surety, for the flow of the Earth-Current from the "Crack" beneath the Pyramid had a power to affect it away from the North, and to set it wandering. And this may seem very strange to ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... protraction of time, prolongation of time, extension of time; delay &c. (lateness) 133. V. last, endure, stand, remain, abide, continue, brave a thousand years. tarry &c. (be late) 133; drag on, drag its slow length along, drag a lengthening chain; protract, prolong; spin out, eke out, draw out, lengthen out; temporize; gain time, make time, talk against time. outlast, outlive; survive; live to fight again. Adj. durable; lasting &c. v.; of long duration, of long-standing; permanent, endless, chronic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... bit fed up with 'in-laws,'" returned Nan a trifle wearily. "I'll go out and walk it off. Or, better still, lend me your bike, Kitty, and I'll just do a spin to Tintagel. By the time I've climbed up to King Arthur's Castle, I'll feel different. It always makes me feel good to get to ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... my chief musician, Weave quiet songs within, That my soul in the circles of a great glamour May float and spin. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... true "leisure class" (for even the tramps are sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible within the "precincts" of the county jail) and we are justly proud of them. They toil not, neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not a dog. Instead of making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it would be more consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World spirit, now so dominant in ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... American popular successes ("On the Banks of the Wabash," "Just Tell Them That You Saw Me," and various others), as a third owner of one of the most successful popular music publishing houses in the city and as an actor and playwright of some small repute, he was wont to spin like a moth in the white light of Broadway. By reason of a little luck and some talent he had come so far, done so much for himself. In his day he had been by turn a novitiate in a Western seminary which trained aspirants for the Catholic priesthood; a singer ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have only the buonamano from hiring these mules, and we must spin and cook. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... some sweet oblivious antidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse for the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall again array it? Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy fabric of a romance, and I handsomely make a present of it to the first comer. If the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to make the reader feel that with the universal longing ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sow not, neither do you reap; and God feedeth you, and giveth you the streams and fountains for your drink; the mountains and the valleys for your refuge and the high trees whereon to make your nests; and because ye know not how to spin or sew, God clotheth you, you and your children; wherefore your Creator loveth you much, seeing that He hath bestowed on you so many benefits; and therefore, my little sisters, beware of the sin of ingratitude, and study always to give praises unto God." Whenas St. Francis ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... spinning from morning till night, to keep herself and her granddaughter, while Snowflower gathered sticks for the fire, looked after the hens and the cat, and did whatever else her grandmother bade her. There was nobody in that part of the country could spin such fine yarn as Dame Frostyface, but she spun very slowly. Her wheel was as old as herself, and far more worn-out. Indeed, the wonder was that it did not fall to pieces. So what the dame earned was very little, and their living was scanty. ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... man-o'-war's-man, "you must spin us the yarn of all your cruising since you've been here. We've seen somethin' o' the elephant since we've been cast ashore, and that's not long. I don't wonder at you sayin' you 'ave been aboard ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... about the grounds another hour or so, the party from Fairfield was ready to go, and they all found it restful to lean back in the comfortable car and spin ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... cotton industry, no mention being made of weavers of silk. The spinning of Eri silk thread, and weaving it into cloths is, however, a fairly considerable industry amongst the Khyrwang and Nongtung villages of the Jaintia Hills. The Nongtungs and Khyrwangs rear their own Eri worms, and spin the silk from the cocoons. The late Mr. Stack, in his admirable note on silk in Assam, says, "Throughout the whole range of the southern hills, from the Mikir country, Eri thread is in great request for weaving those striped cloths, in which the mountaineers delight," but ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... strenuous efforts of ambitious executives to "make good," he had leisure for living. He and Letty were fond of visiting the various American and European watering-places. He gambled a little, for he found that there was considerable diversion in risking interesting sums on the spin of a wheel or the fortuitous roll of a ball; and he took more and more to drinking, not in the sense that a drunkard takes to it, but as a high liver, socially, and with all his friends. He was inclined to drink the rich drinks ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... enough to be sheared," she explained, "I shall help to do that myself. Then my mother will help me to card its nice black wool, and we will spin it into long threads. I shall then weave a thick cloth, which will make me a ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... seemed familiar with the mechanism, turned a lever, whereupon the disc commenced to spin like a pie plate on a dance floor. Faster and faster it spun, silently gathering speed each second while a low humming sound filled the chamber. Gradually the outline of the whirling disk commenced to brighten, tinting ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... occasion—knowing with whom he had to deal—could allow ordinary prudence to go by the board. There are men, and excellent men too, from whose minds the cares of life never banish themselves, who never seem to remember that provision is made for the young ravens. They toil and spin always, thinking sternly of the worst and rarely hoping for the best. They are ever making provision for rainy days, as though there were to be no more sunshine. So anxious are they for their children ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... of irreparable calamity, so gloom of spirit is a very contagious thing, very difficult to dissimulate. Perhaps the best practical thing for a naturally melancholy person to try and do, is to treat his own low spirits, as Charles Lamb did, ironically and humorously; and if he must spin conversation incessantly, as Dr. Johnson said, out of his own bowels, to make sure that it is the best thread possible, and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the novelist calls local color, often containing in the name alone a comprehensive suggestiveness as great as that of an Homeric epithet. Thus our familiar Cat and Mouse appears in modern Greece as Lamb and Wolf; and the French version of Spin the Platter is My Lady's Toilet, concerned with laces, jewels, and other ballroom accessories instead of our prosaic numbering of players. These changes that a game takes on in different environments are of the very essence of folklore, and some amusing examples are to be found ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... you be there at eight tomorrow morning? If it's fine, take your bicycle, as if you were going for a spin before breakfast. Miss Bride never goes out before breakfast, and no one else is likely to ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the matter deeply, but I am as yet far from a solution. Why is a mouse that spins? And if so, what does it spin? Patently the query is incomplete. And what possible bearing can comparative altitude as contrasted with the comparative infrequency of a species have upon the peculiarities of ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... lovely," said Nan, as they all started out for a little spin, to try it. "I've had so much trouble of late with taxicabs, that it's a genuine comfort to have my own car at my beck and call. It's a lovely car, Fred, and Patty and I shall just ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... dangers ahead, giving direction, and the watchful steersman acting sympathetically with his long oar or sweep, so that should the bowman with his pole thrust the head of the boat violently to the right the steersman sweeps its stern sharply to the left, thus causing the craft to spin round and shoot aside from the danger, whatever it may be. Of course the general flow and turmoil of a rapid indicates pretty clearly to skilled eyes where the deepest water lies; nevertheless, in spite of knowledge, skill, and experience, ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... remembered that in their pasturage no trees or "rubbing posts" are to be found, and in the absence of these they are compelled to resort to wallowing. They fling themselves upon their sides, and using their hunch and shoulder as a pivot, spin round and round for hours at a time. In this rotatory motion they aid themselves by using the legs freely. The earth becomes hollowed out and worn into a circular basin, often of considerable depth, and this is ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... toy-shop in the store next Cuyler's, just for the holidays, I suppose. Bob got a Teddy bear, and I bought this box of fascinating little Japanese tops for my baby sister. They're all like different kinds of fruit and you spin them like pennies, without a string. ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... common sense, being rather weakened by a long course of romance writing, did not come to the rescue. As usual Beth lay on the sofa and Laurie sat in a low chair close by, amusing her with all sorts of gossip, for she depended on her weekly 'spin', and he never disappointed her. But that evening Jo fancied that Beth's eyes rested on the lively, dark face beside her with peculiar pleasure, and that she listened with intense interest to an account of some exciting cricket match, though the phrases, 'caught off a tice', 'stumped off his ground', ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... pleased to see us, are you not?" they said. "We have heard of the fame of your spinning-evenings, and have come from a far country to take part in them. You shall see how we can spin." ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... very little about the ocean. In fact, there are some things you don't know, and, if they wanted to, some of the old sailors could spin you yarns that would make your ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... released from having the intolerable burdens imposed by the rule of Spain. The consciousness of the Spaniards, that the shadow of the United States lowered over the misgovernment of Cuba, and that there was a thunder-cloud in the north that must burst—with more than the force of the hurricanes that spin on their dizzy way of destruction from the Caribbean Sea—aroused the fury of passion, of jealous hatred and thirst for revenge, in anticipation of the inevitable, that caused the catastrophe of the blowing up of the Maine, and kindled with the flame ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... and most sincerely do I hope it will not be in vain. I cannot endure the idea of her giving away her own wheel, and have told her no more than the truth, in saying that I could never use it with comfort. I had a great mind to add that, if she persisted in giving it, I would spin nothing with it but a rope to hang myself, but I was afraid of making it appear a less serious matter of ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... hope of escape seemed by retreating. Speke ordered his fleet to keep together, promising ammunition to his men if they would fight. The people in one boat, however, were so frightened that they allowed her to spin round and round in the current. The Wanyoro were stealing on them, as they could hear, though nothing could be seen. One of the boats kept in-shore, close to the reeds, when suddenly she was caught by grappling-hooks. The men cried out: "Help, Bana! ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... after it was too dark for work in the field, the men were frequently employed in burning brush and in other labors until late at night. The women after toiling in the field by day, were compelled to card, spin, and weave cotton for their clothing, in the evening. Even on Sundays there was little or no respite from toil. Those who had not been able to work out all their tasks during the week were allowed by the overseer ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sometimes blocked by gigantic snowdrifts! This, of course, is ridiculous; what really happens is that the rails become so greasy from the crushed bodies of the locusts that the wheels can secure no grip on the metals and spin round to no purpose. ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... ... required her master to teach her, not only how to sew and 'such things as were fitt for women to know,' but also how to read and apparently also how to write." ... "In 1691 a girl was bound out to Captain William Crafford ... under indentures which required him to teach her how to spin, sew ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... sorry that they could not go together, but said that perhaps when Mr. Farrington was ready he and his friends would come over again for another spin. ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... and flatten again to the semblance of circles. The Poles slowly nod once every many thousand years, there is a libration to the moon; and in all this vast harmonious process of come and go the units of it twirl and spin, and, as they spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their central star: that star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of heaven move each in times of its own as well, and their movement is one thing altogether. Whoever should ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Washington as "Bath" is still a scene of fashionable revel: the over-dressed children romp, the old maids flirt, the youthful romancers spin in each other's arms to music from the band, and dowagers carefully drink at the well from the old-fashioned mug decorated with Poor Richard's maxims; but the festivities have a decorous and domestic look that would meet the pity of one of the regular ante-rebellion bloods. After the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... threads as white as snow, Which handled with a happy touch change colour as they go, Not common wool, but golden wire; the Sisters wondering gaze, As age by age the pretty thread runs down the golden days. World without end they spin away, the happy fleeces pull; What joy they take to fill their hands with that delightful wool! Indeed, the task performs itself: no toil the spinners know: Down drops the soft and silken thread as round the spindles go; Fewer than these are Tithon's years, ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... air, Flying this way or that from shore to shore; Nor other labor did this holy pair, 20 Clothed and supported from the lavish store Which crowds lanigerous brought with daily care; They toiled not, neither did they spin; their bias Was tow'rd the harder ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... mortal hands. On questioning the Mambari they were answered that English manufactures came out of the sea, and beads were gathered on its shore. To Africans our cotton mills are fairy dreams. "How can the irons spin, weave, and print so beautifully?" Our country is like what Taprobane was to our ancestors—a strange realm of light, whence came the diamond, muslin, and peacocks; an attempt at explanation of our manufactures usually elicits the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... shut. Two bodies may, however, be alike in weight and outward appearance and yet behave differently when otherwise mechanically tested, and, consequently, when they are handled. For example, take two eggs, one raw and the other hard boiled, and spin them on the table; press the finger for a moment upon either of them whilst it is still spinning: if it be the hard-boiled egg it will stop as dead as a stone: if it be the raw egg, after a little apparent hesitation, it will begin again to rotate. The motion of its shell had alone ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Mrs. Vanderpool—she toiled not, neither did she spin, and yet! If all these folk were like poor, stupid, docile Jennie it would be simpler, but what earthly sense was there in trying do to anything with a girl like Zora, so stupid in some matters, so startlingly bright in others, and so stubborn ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and began a spin that terminated only when the biggest Plymouth Rock in Duncan's coop saluted a new day, and long lines of light reddened the east. As he rode he sang, while he sang he worshiped, but the god he tried to glorify ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... why we can't give you a ticket and let you proclaim yourself an adult. You can't carry the weight. But this isn't all. Your muscles and your bones aren't yet in equilibrium. I could find a man of age thirty who weighed one-oh-three and stood four-eleven. He could pick you up and spin you like a top on his forefinger just because his bones match his muscles nicely, and his nervous system and brain have had experience in driving the ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... fainter, and the moon's silver brightened, the passengers became quieter. The Piper went below and listened to the Ancient Mariner spin a yarn, and let the birds along the shore furnish music. The babies fell asleep in the arms of Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, lovers drifted away in pairs to retired nooks. In a quiet corner J. P. Thornton and Lawyer Ed sat and laid once more their final plans for a trip to the Holy Land, certain ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... nearer to each other, the princes began to spin the web of their treason; and for this purpose a messenger was sent by them to Tarik, informing him how Roderic, who had been a mere menial and servant to their father, had, after his death, usurped the throne; that the princes ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... was laid As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin; And was arrayed or rather disarrayed, All in a veil of silk and silver thin, That hid no whit her alabaster skin, But rather shewed more white, if more might be: More subtle web Arachne cannot spin; Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see Of scorched dew, do not in the air ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is in spin, but not in weave; My second in part, but not in leave; My third is in rain, but not in storm; My fourth in chilly, but not in warm; My fifth in hen, but not in coop; My whole is ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... comes to life just as the oak is coming into leaf, and feeds upon the leaves. It attacks no other tree; the beech, chesnut, &c., stand in full verdure surrounded by the brown and leafless oaks. They envelop the tree in a web they spin about the end of May; they enclose themselves in a leaf curled up, and remain in a chrysalis state until the middle of June or July, when they change into a pale greenish small moth that flies about the trees in myriads, and lay their eggs in the bark ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... most like rats than anything. I have for necessity, in the wilderness, eaten of them. Their flesh is very white and well-tasted, but their ugly tails put me out of conceit with that fare. They climb trees as the racoons do. Their fur is not esteemed or used, save that the Indians spin it ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... Taffy learnt for the first time what could be done with a few ropes and pulleys. The seamen seemed to spin ropes out of themselves like spiders. By three o'clock the beam was hoisted and fixed; and they broke off their work to attend their shipmates' funeral. After the funeral they fell to again, though more silently, and before nightfall the beam shone with a new coat ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she could properly focus what she saw, everything began to whirl and to spin around her, to dance a wild and idiotic saraband, which caused her to laugh, and to laugh, until her throat felt choked and her eyes hot; after ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... draw the latch, Sit by the fire and spin; Take a cup, and drink it up, Then call your ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... been a trouble to you. You sew for me, cook for me, make the garden for me, spin and weave for me, and worry about me. Uncle has to work for ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... distance. But from the Liteiny—just over the bridge—came a confused jumble of shouts, cries, and then the sharp, unmistakable rattle of a machine-gun. It was funny to see the casual life in front of one suddenly pause at that sound. The doll-like skaters seemed to spin for a moment and then freeze; one figure began to run across the ice. A small boy came racing down our street shouting. Several men ran out from doorways and stood looking up into the sky, as though they thought the noise had come from there. The sun was ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... pictures, specifically, or of the general principles of literature and painting; of people, of sunsets, of Italy, of the high seas, of the Paris streets—of what, in fine, you pleased. Or he would spin you yarns, sober, farcical, veridical, or invented. And, with transitions infinitely rapid, he would be serious, jocose—solemn, ribald—earnest, flippant—logical, whimsical, turn and turn about. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... No sigh? No smile? Is all forgot? Then spin my shroud out of that golden skein Thou callst thy tresses! I shall stay thee not— My struggles were ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... I fancy it covers a far wider range, and embraces a much ampler truth. Yes, I doubt if any man ever yet sought without finding. When I was a boy I lost my peg-top. It was a somewhat expensive one, owing partly to the fact that it would really spin. I noticed this peculiarity about it whilst it was still the property of its previous possessor. I had several tops; indeed, my pockets bulged out with my ample store, but none of them would spin. After pointing out to the owner of the coveted top the frightful unsightliness ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... and the stirring life of a farmer's daughter in a new country, fell to her lot. To spin the garments she wore, to make cheese and butter, were parts of her education, while to lend a hand at out-door labor, perhaps helped her to acquire that vigor of body and brain for which ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... addressing to him a few curt words in a decidedly ungracious tone of voice; whereupon the headman, taking the precaution first to conciliate his Majesty by prostrating himself and rubbing his nose in the dust in token of abject submission, rose to his feet and proceeded to spin a long yarn, of which I was evidently the subject, since he repeatedly pointed to me. He must have included in his narrative the incident of the snake-bite, for at one point he seized my right hand and, turning the palm upward, pointed out the spot where the two ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... I got a piece of the chair that floated by, found the end cracked and sharp, and tried to spin towards Grundy, but I couldn't see him. I heard Eve's voice yell over the other shouts. I spotted the plate coming for me, but I was still in midair. It came on steadily, edge on, and I felt it break against my ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... many of them, as suffering drivers will testify. Casey Ryan, known wherever men of the open travel and spin their yarns, famous for his recklessly efficient driving of lurching stagecoaches in the old days, and for his soft heart and his happy-go-lucky ways; famous too as the man who invented ungodly predicaments from which ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the episode of Marna's wistful tears when she heard the music, and her amazing volte-face at remembering the baby's feeding-time. She would have loved to spin out the story to him—she could have deepened the colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn't willing to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all, that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm he held it in a clasp ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the lamps, we're just in time—spin down the hill, my boy—let me get in as they're at supper, and 'faith they'll want it, after coming off a coach such a night as this, to say nothing of some of them being aldermen in expectancy perhaps, and of ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... has observed, not those of which he has dreamt; and he delivers his facts in the fewest possible words, and in the plainest possible way. He does not cultivate flowers of rhetoric; he does not unduly spin out his narrative. It is plain that he is especially bent on making his meaning clear, and he ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... much fraternizing will stimulate the awakening of the proletariat of Europe." In other words, Kamenev was in the position of a desperate gambler who stakes his life and his all upon one throw of the dice or one spin of the wheel. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... borrowed the pan, and when she returned said to her husband: "Here is the pan, but you must carry it back." So they cooked the fritters, and after they had eaten, the husband said: "Now let us go to work, both of us, and the one who speaks first shall carry back the pan." Then she began to spin and he to draw his thread,—for he was a shoemaker,—and all the time keeping silence, except that when he drew his thread he said: "Leulero, leulero;" and she, spinning, answered: "Picici, picici, picicio." And they said not ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... camaraderie. There was even a touch of bravado in the attitude of these people toward each other,—as of courage kept up by scoffing. Even Death, on his sombre visits, was regarded with a strange derision by those who continued to spin. They had cheated him not once but many times, and they ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... weights, which were hung to the wheel-work by strong cords. The cords were wound round some of the wheels, and as they slowly descended by their weight, they made the wheels go round. There was a contrivance inside the clock to make the wheels go slowly and regularly, and not spin round too fast, as they would have done if the weights had been left to themselves. This is the way that ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... into the low nook under the slanting roof but found nothing more exciting than a spider. "Huh, it's no fun hunting for robbers. Guess I'll spin ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... Paul Nicholas, Ralph's little pepper-pot of a room-mate, had never ridden a horse in his life, and the running he would come in for at the hands of his fellow midshipmen if they suspected that fact might have made almost any other lad hesitate before taking his initial spin in the company of experts. Not so little Jean Paul with his broad shoulders, the brace of an Admiral and his five-feet-six-inches; a veritable little bantam-cock, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... provides the earth which we furrow; she grows and ripens the seeds that we sow and gather. She furnishes, with the help of human labour, the wool that we spin and the food that we eat. And it ought never to be forgotten, that however rich or poor we may be, all that we eat, all that we are clothed with, all that shelters us, from the palace to the cottage, is ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... on darkness and night! She sat down to spin by the cheery fire-light, While before it, so cozy and warm, Slept the kitten,—a snowy white ball of content— And her wheel, with its humming activity, lent To the hour, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Relief Committee, which, except the proceeds of a little employment now and then, was all that the family of nine had to depend upon for food, firing, clothes, and rent. He said that he was forced to make every little spin out as far as it would; but it kept him bare and busy, and held his nose "everlastingly deawn to th' grindlestone." But he didn't know that it was any use complaining about a thing that neither master nor man could help. ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... taken from the tomb of Thot-nefer at Thebes, who was a royal scribe in the middle of the 18th Dynasty, circa 1425 B.C. In his tomb his house is shown. He himself sits in the hall, while inside some servants spin and weave, make bread, store the grain, etc. The roof of the chambers is supported on pillars, and between two of these the looms are set up which are here depicted. They are not attached however, ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... balls of cotton all ready to spin into thread. Will you spin one half of them into thread for me, if I give ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... after a deal of negotiation he consented to take me to Los Pasages. Thanks to Republican vigilance, but principally it may have been to the nature of the ground, the road thither was clear. We started at six o'clock in the evening, and after a lively spin through sylvan scenery drew up in less than an hour at the outskirts of a village on the edge of a quiet pool, which we had bordered for nigh a mile. No papers had been asked for, on leaving, at the bridge over the Urumea, where a post of ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... happy reconciliation between Monk and the Government. But Monk's Commissioners had been too hasty, or had been outwitted; and Clarges, who arrived in London that day, had come too late to stop them and spin out the time. A pledge of both parties against Charles Stuart or any single-person Government was in the forefront of the Treaty; and the rest of the Articles simply admitted Monk and the officers of the Scottish Army to a share in the Government as then ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... The Kid was lighter and more supple than I; and got out of it some easier than I. I had picked out a rangey lank bronco; he would quit the earth and climb the sky like a flying machine; and drop down and strike the rocks with his legs stiff as a post. He would then spin like a top several hundred times play razor back and sun-fish, His head and tail would touch one instant between his legs; and the next instant over his back. I held my breath while he exercised all his tricks then he plunged ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... but hands, evidently cannot say, "I beg your pardon, miss." There were children, who always will go where they ought not to go, running against people, and taking hold of their clothes with sticky, smeared hands, asking commercial gentlemen to spin their tops, and corpulent ladies to play at hide and seek. I saw one stern-visaged gentleman tormented in this way till he looked ready to give the child its "final quietus." [Footnote: American juveniles are, generally speaking, completely destitute of that agreeable shyness which ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... them. Are not ye of much more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Be not therefore anxious, saying, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... exclaimed the justice. "The court is adjourned till after dinner. I hope the distinguished gentleman will be able to spin out his yarn ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... its usual food of ants, it lies concealed under leaves as this one had done, and darts out on any passing prey which it believes it can manage; or if not, it climbs trees and seizes the smaller birds when at roost, or takes the younger ones out of their nests. It does not spin a web, but either burrows in the ground, or seeks a cavity in a rock, or in any hollow ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... it is customary for peasant girls to keep for themselves all the yarn they spin on St. Andrew's Eve, and the Hausfrau gives them also some flax and a little money. With this they buy coffee and other refreshments for the lads who come to visit the parlours where in the long winter evenings the women sit spinning. These evenings, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... time a poor miller who had a beautiful daughter. It happened one day that he had an audience with the King, and in order to appear important he told the King that he had a daughter who could spin straw into gold. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... going to be a mile run, and not a hundred yard dash, as Jack would say. So come in, sit down, get comf'y, wait until you and your breath—are on speaking terms, and I'll listen. But first I want to tell you all that happen to me. Why didn't you come for a spin? ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... them blindness and obstinacy, or that He, solely from His purpose and mere counsel, irrespective also of sins, has foreordained them to damnation so that they cannot convert themselves and be saved. In all such and similar passages, therefore, we shall and must be sedulously on our guard, lest we spin therefrom this blasphemy, that out of His free purpose and counsel, irrespective also of sin, God has decreed to reject eternally these or ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... mountains on the Missouri shore and heavy timber on the Illinois side, and the channel was down the Missouri shore at that place, so we warn't afraid of anybody running across us. We laid there all day, and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle. I told Jim all about the time I had jabbering with that woman; and Jim said she was a smart one, and if she was to start after ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... we spin both black and white yarn, and if the windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the white ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... all, for he saw everything flat. His favourite colours were red and yellow; black and green he particularly disliked; everything ugly was called green. He could not be persuaded that a ball did not roll because it wished to do so, or that his top did not spin of its own accord. For a long time he saw no reason why animals should not behave like human beings, and was much annoyed because the cat refused to sit up at table and to eat with its paws, blaming its disobedience in not doing as it was ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... about his distinguished patient. "Tell the B.P. that P.B. sleeps like a top. This is no hum. He is up at 7 A.M., and wishes everyone 'the top of the mornin' to you,' puts on his top-boots and top-hat, and then goes out for a spin." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... what we'd get for that diamond, Tom and I—when his time is up—could live for all our lives and whoop it up besides. We could live in Paris, where great grafters live and grafting pays—where, if you've got wit and fifty thousand dollars, and happen to be a "darn sight prettier," you can just spin the world around ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... for themselves, and were constantly wanting me to perform some little job or other for them. I was thus oftener in the cabin than out of it. While I was attending on them, my great amusement was listening to the yarns which the old gentleman used to spin. They took in all he said for fact; but there used to be often a twinkle in his eye which made me doubt the truth of all ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... He'll spin you yarns from dawn to dark—and half of 'em are true! He swears in a score of languages, and maybe talks in two! And ... he'll lower a boat in a hurricane ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... our easy-going way that birds "toil not" because they "do not spin," because they have not surrounded themselves with a thousand artificial wants, as we have. But the truth is that nobody can work harder than a pair of robins, for example, with four or five hungry mouths to fill, and every mouthful to be hunted up as it is wanted. No one would guess what ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... latter, a force which attempted to take Sant' Ubaldo, immediately southeast of Arsiero, on May 31, 1916, was driven back by the Italians beyond the Posina, thus relieving the strongest pressure on the town. A little further west another Austrian force attacked the Italian positions on Monte Spin, southeast of Posina. The Italian lines held on the mountain slopes and the Austrian advance here was checked. West of Posina an Austrian assault on Monte Forni Alti was repulsed. On the Sette Comuni Plateau, where the Austrians were advancing against Asiago, they began ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... of a pair of strong hooks at the posterior end of its soft defenceless abdomen. Their food appears for the most part to be of a vegetable nature. Some species, however, are alleged to be carnivorous, and a North American form of the genus Hydropsyche is said to spin around the mouth of its burrow a silken net for the capture of small animal organisms living in the water. Before passing into the pupal stage, the larva partially closes the orifice of the tube with silk or pieces of stone loosely spun together and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... when we met our third general, and this meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
