|
|
|
More "Spinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was the favorite gathering place of humble New England families and it was there they were best seen and understood; there the spinning wheel hummed while the pot was boiling or the bannock baking; there stockings and boots were dried by the open fire and the latter daily greased. With what pride did I see my first pair standing there ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... national production. There is more mind directing the machinery propelled by the forces of nature, and more mind directing the machinery of the human body. The result is, that a given product is furnished by less outlay of physical force. Formerly, with the old spinning-wheel and hand-loom, we put a great deal of bone and muscle into a yard of cloth; now we put in very little. We have substituted mind for physical force, and the question is, which is the more economical? Or, in other words, is it of any consequence to the employer whether ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high wages and the cost of living—oh, take what you like," I repeated, "it's all in the Times!" Again with infinite weariness she moved her head from side to side until, like a top exhausted with spinning, it ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... should spend His eternity—which might be so much better employed—in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a great child, with tops and teetotums—is not this a serious scandal? I wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... so to speak, on our account. At the age of sixty-five grandfather set himself to till the farm on a larger scale, and to renew his lumbering operations, winters. Grandmother, too, was constrained to increase her dairy, her flocks of geese and other poultry, and to begin anew the labor of spinning and knitting. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and darting to the four corners of the room, climbed like squirrels until they reached the tunnelled roofing, where, making their way to the centre with a dexterity that was marvellous, they threw their ropes over the timbers and came spinning down to the floor, like gigantic spiders, each suspended on his own line. The four men, looped nooses in hand, took up positions behind the four Electors, all of whom were now on their feet. Wilhelm saluted the Empress, bringing the hilt of his sword to ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... afterward that he felt as though he had gone into a spinning nose dive with a Boche aviator on his tail, while Jack admitted that he felt somewhat as he did the time his gasoline pipe was severed by a Hun bullet when he was high in the air and several ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... stranger's bows. As it was, by backing astern a few yards they gave the steamer good room to pass; and it was both interesting and novel to see the great mass go plunging heavily past with the long sea-grass waving and trailing from her bottom, and the great propeller spinning rapidly round, now completely immersed, and anon lifted almost entirely out of the water. Once clear of her, the Flying Fish sank to a depth of ten fathoms, and after a ten-mile run at full speed, once more paused ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... wont in the domestic life of all Grecian states, her handmaids were around the noble virgin. Two were engaged on embroidery, one in spinning, a fourth was reading aloud to Cleonice, and that at least was a rare diversion to women, for few had the education of the fair Byzantine. Cleonice herself was half reclined upon a bench inlaid with ivory and ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... board, and spent a long evening with us. They were a free, open-hearted, boastful, conceited, good-humoured set of fellows, and a jolly night we had of it in the forecastle, while the mates and captains were enjoying themselves and spinning ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... face of the dial—usually of paper—are various numerals, and between the face and its glass covering is a small marble or wooden ball. The appliance is used in lieu of dice or coins when two or more customers are "tossing" for drinks. Each in turn sends the dial spinning round, and wins or loses according to the numeral against which the ball rests when the dial stops. As I can find no English name for the appliance, I have thought ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... is how I came,—I put Here my knee, there my foot, Up and up, from shoot to shoot— And the blessed bean-stalk thinning Like the mischief all the time, Till it took me rocking, spinning, In a dizzy, sunny circle, Making angles with the root, Far and out above the cackle Of the city I was born in, Till the little dirty city In the light so sheer and sunny Shone as dazzling bright and pretty As the money that you find In a dream of finding ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... process in production that permitted the rise of a parasitical, or leisure, class. As long as both men and women were forced to produce things in order to live, an exploiting class, that lives off the labor of others, was impossible. But as spinning, weaving, canning, soap-making, butter, bread, candle, clothes-making and a hundred other functions formerly performed by women in the home, were absorbed into the factories, the young girls often ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... the good-natured Nabob allowed himself to be dazzled by those attitudes, that clattering noise as of an empty spinning-wheel; but to-day he found himself on a level with the others. As he sat at the centre of the green table, his portfolio before him, his two elbows firmly planted upon it, reading the report drawn by de Gery, the members of the committee ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... you will often see boys playing hopscotch or spinning peg-tops. They also play shuttlecock, but they have no battledore. They kick the shuttlecock with the sides of ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous
... of square open courts and long, tunnel-like, covered and uncovered corridors which formed the immense, rambling Zaouia, or sacred school of Oued Tolga. Things happened on these roofs which would have interested a stranger, for there was spinning of sheep's wool, making of men's burnouses, fashioning of robes for women, and embroidering of saddles; but the woman who looked towards the west with the sun in her eyes was tired of the life on sun-baked roofs and in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... men reeled from a port-hole, the blood spinning far out of their wounds. Indeed, through every aperture in the walls the bullets were now humming like ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cotton manufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domestic system in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularly Yorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also its spinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth when finished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets and fairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and 1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton, transformed the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... think from the slow and clumsy spinning of this tale that I could crowd the narrative of all that I had seen and heard into a niggard three-score words or less. But this I did, writing them upon the margin of the captain's map, and noting in an added ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... divided between these reflections, and doubtful of what he should do, Bruce was looking upward to the roof of the cabin in which he lay; and his eye was attracted by a spider, which, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was endeavoring, as is the fashion of that creature, to swing itself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which it meant to stretch its web. The insect made the attempt again and again without success; at length Bruce counted that it had tried to carry ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... other, as each tried to outdo the other in readiness to serve me. To-day, Charley, who was usually the last to rise in the morning, roused even me, and brought the horses before our breakfast was ready. Brown's fondness for spinning a yarn will soon, however, induce him to put an end to this feud with his companion and countryman. In the early part of our journey, one or other of our party kept a regular night-watch, as well to guard us from any ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... his young beginning, You are not here at his aged end; Off he coaxed you from Life's mad spinning, Lest you should see his form extend Shivering, sighing, Slowly dying, And a tear on ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... town." In Chintadripet to-day there are still many spinners and weavers; and one of the sights in Chintadripet—growing gradually more rare—is the spectacle of primitively-clad urchins or grown men spinning in the streets with primitive gear and in primitive fashion; and it is interesting to recall the fact that this has been going on in Chintadripet for nearly two centuries—an industry which ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... as it went spinning downward, it seemed to him that many seconds elapsed before it struck the bottom ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... easiest part of it. I've already caught him filling a fountain-pen as if he'd been brought up on them, and humming the spinning chorus from The Flying Dutchman; not to mention the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... their longest voyages in American and European boats which they have purchased. With the method of producing those commodities of civilized nations which they prize so highly, they are still as much as ever unacquainted. They possess sheep, and excellent cotton; but no spinning-wheel, no loom, has yet been set in motion among them; they choose rather to buy their cloth and cotton of foreigners for real gold and pearls; one of our sailors sold an old shirt for five piastres. Horses ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... through whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of line and colour. He was smitten with a love of the impossible—the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... 'There! there! ha' done wi' thee,' but had no more heart to show her disapprobation; and now they came back to their usual occupations until it should please their visitor to go; then they would rake the fire and be off to bed; for neither Sylvia's spinning nor Bell's knitting was worth candle-light, and morning hours are precious ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... game played with large tops is much practised for the purpose of taking omens in the season when the jungle is cleared in order to make new ladangs. The top (bae-ang) is very heavy and is thrown by a thin rope. One man sets his spinning by drawing the rope backward in the usual way; to do this is called niong. Another wishing to try his luck, by the aid of the heavy cord hurls his top at the one that is spinning, as we would throw a stone. To do this is called maw-pak, and hence the game gets its name, maw-pak bae-ang. ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... boy's. She could not write or read, was so ignorant as to astonish ladies, and had only the peasant arts. The earliest description tells of her "common red frock carefully patched." "I could beat any woman in Rouen at spinning and stitching," she said to her judges, who, to be sure, had no special knowledge of anything beyond theology. "I'm only a poor girl, and can't ride or fight," she said when first she conceived her mission, and she had just the common instincts of the working woman. We may suppose her ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight of snowflakes ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... in anger binding Ixion to a winged wheel made of fire, and sending him spinning through the air, we are merely dealing with a Greek variant of the Egyptian myth in which Re despatched Horus as a winged disk to slay his enemies. In the Hellenic version the sky-god is angry with the father of the centaurs for his ill-treatment of his father-in-law and his behaviour ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... table-boards and "cloathes," trestles, beds; bedding and bed-clothing, cradles, "buffets," cupboards and "cabinets," chests and chests of drawers, boxes of several kinds and "trunks," andirons, "iron dogs," "cob-irons," fire-tongs and "slices" (shovels), cushions, rugs, and "blanckets," spinning wheels, hand-looms, etc., etc. Among household utensils were "spits," "bake-kettles," pots and kettles (iron, brass, and copper), frying-pans, "mortars" and pestles (iron, brass, and "belle-mettle"), sconces, lamps (oil "bettys"), candlesticks, snuffers, buckets, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... morning I must divert myself." And he began to spin his golden penny in the sun, sometimes spinning it very dexterously from his elbow and never letting it fall. But the girls wouldn't look, or if they did, it was through stray bits of their hair; when they could not be ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... romantic and mystic love between man and woman. Through them the symbols of the mandarin duck and drake, the one-winged birds, the tree whose boughs are interwoven, are revealed. They are the earthly counterparts of the heavenly lovers, the Cow-herd and the Spinning-maid in the constellations of Lyra and Aquila. To them Chinese poetry owes some of its finest inspirations, and at least two of its greatest singers, Tu Fu and ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... spread rapidly, and a new era of manufactures was opening. The South—more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class—caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... horse. And then at once the will sprang up awake, And, like a necromantic sage, forbade What came unbidden to depart at will. So on that form he rested his sad thoughts, Till he began to wonder what her lot; How she had fared in spinning history Into a psyche-cradle, where to die; And then emerge—what butterfly? pure white, With silver dust of feathers on its wings? Or that dull red, seared with its ebon spots? And then he thought: "I know some women fail, And cease to be so very beautiful. And I have heard men rave of certain ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... the tablet presented in memory of the women of 1776 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. It represents one woman busy with spinning while another is making bullets at a fireplace. These noble and brave women deserve much credit for helping to win our independence, for while their husbands and sons fought they gathered in the crops, melted into bullets their ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... an elaborate prologue. The three Norns sit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their thread of destiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of his eye, and of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to make a heft for his spear, also how the tree withered after suffering that violence. They have also some ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... other's hand—but in time only to deflect the shot; too late to prevent it being fired. There was a flash in mid-air, the roar of the report went racketing through the silent house, and the revolver, spinning from the other's hands, struck against the wall ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... embroidered upon cloths spun if not actually woven by the housewife and her handmaidens. In the barrows containing remains of people of the Stone Age, and the peoples of the early Bronze Age, among the few ornaments and personal adornments buried with them were spinning whorls—the curiosities which remain to us of the earliest ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... to some high place to find the sunrise, and to send echoing eastwards the exultant greetings of his jubilant horn. And lo! the sunrise coming up from the echoes, and the plains new-lit by the day, and the leagues spinning by like water flung from a top, and that gay companion, the loudly laughing wind, and men and the fears of men and their little cities; and, after that, great rivers and waste spaces and huge new hills, and then new lands beyond them, and more cities of men, and always the old companion, ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... and banks, and rushes headlong down, carrying everything before it in a resistless whirl of devastation, tearing great trees up by the roots, crashing through villages and towns and factories, girding the world with a liquid tempest that sends the works of man spinning down upon its dreadful course, till it plunges into the abyss, a frantic chaos of indiscriminate destruction, storm, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... of each man, whether estatesman or farmer, formerly had a twofold support; first, the produce of his lands and flocks; and, secondly, the profit drawn from the employment of the women and children, as manufacturers; spinning their own wool in their own houses (work chiefly done in the winter season), and carrying it to market for sale. Hence, however numerous the children, the income of the family kept pace with its increase. But, by the invention and universal application ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... sun and moon Seem biding in a roadstead,—objects which, As plain fact proves, are really borne along. Between two mountains far away aloft From midst the whirl of waters open lies A gaping exit for the fleet, and yet They seem conjoined in a single isle. When boys themselves have stopped their spinning round, The halls still seem to whirl and posts to reel, Until they now must almost think the roofs Threaten to ruin down upon their heads. And now, when nature begins to lift on high The sun's red splendour ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... henceforth into a spinning-wheel! Torture your dog, that he may tell when last He lapped the blood his master shed...not me! My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, 65 And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall To see, in this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 given to "spinning tops." His good abilities, however, and his ready intelligence had carried him successfully through the curriculum of his early career. He was a good draughtsman, an excellent rider—having thoroughly mastered the successor to the famous "Uncle ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... where they were deposited for the service of the state. The foreign trade of the empire was regulated by this minister, who directed likewise all the linen and woollen manufactures, in which the successive operations of spinning, weaving, and dyeing were executed, chiefly by women of a servile condition, for the use of the palace and army. Twenty-six of these institutions are enumerated in the West, where the arts had been more recently ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... plenty time to ourselves. Most of the time we spent singing and praying 'cause master was sich a good Christian and most of us had 'fessed religion. Evenings we would spin on the old spinning wheel, quilt make clothes, talk, tell jokes, and a few had learned to weave a little bit from Missus. We would have candy pulls, from cooked molasses, and sing in the moonlight by the tune of an old banjo picker. Chillen was mostly seen, not heard, different from youngens ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States, From Interviews with Former Slaves - Virginia Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... truth about the death of Jesus, and nothing needs to be added to show how great an event in the dealings of God with men it must have been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological word-spinning only serves to obscure its true significance. Show to the world the real Jesus; tell men how it came about that He had to die, and they cannot help ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... dropped her sword, and beat upon the door with her little bare hands, weeping and screaming in a perfect ecstasy of rage, and showering curses and imprecations on her brother. The army joined in the torrent of abuse, and a very pretty set of phrases were sent spinning through the clean night air. At length, Tungku Aminah, finding that she only bruised her hands, again took up her sword, and, as soon as she could make herself heard, renewed her challenge to her ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... dancing in the quadrilles and Lancers is of a rather stately and ceremonious sort. In waltz or galop the English always dance the same step, the deux temps, and the aim of the dancing couple is to go as much like a spinning-top as possible. They make occasional efforts to introduce puzzling novelties like the trois temps, the Boston dip, etc., but, I am glad to say, without any success. The result is, that once having learned to dance in England, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was naturally enough the lion of the day. A thick head, bold, but bald, the consequence perhaps not of his dissipation; but of his worry in by gone days. His merit consists in the possession of the chartist slang; hence his cleverness in spinning, a yarn never to the purpose, but blathered with long phrases and bubbling with cant. He took up the cause of the diggers, not so much for the evaporation of his gaseous heroism, as eternally to hammer on the ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... rapid substitution of machinery for hand-labour in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized. It is reckoned that fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... not a pretty, face under a broad brim, and these females were remarkably ill- favoured; their complexions hardened, wrinkled, and bronzed, from the effects of hard toil, and the extremes of heat and cold. I heard the hum of spinning-wheels from many of the houses, for these industrious women spin their household linen, and the gray homespun in which the men are clothed. The furniture is antique, and made of oak, and looks as if it had been handed down from generation to generation. The men, largely ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... discovered in the weight, he was still more elated at heart; and on his way back, he first and foremost delivered Ni Erh's message to his wife, and then returned to his own home, where he found his mother seated all alone on a stove-couch spinning thread. As soon as she saw him enter, she inquired where he had been the whole day long, in reply to which Chia Yn, fearing lest his parent should be angry, forthwith made no allusion to what transpired with Pu Shih-jen, but simply explained that he had been in the western ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... goats; they told us that their parents lived not far off in the valley Omyle [Arabic]. We went there, and found two small tents, where three or four women and as many little children were occupied in spinning, and in collecting herbs to feed the lambs and kids, which were frisking about them. Ayd knew the women, who belonged to his own tribe of Mezeine. Their husbands were fishermen, and were then at the sea-shore. They brought us some milk, and I bought a kid ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... the population the winter used to be a busy time, for it was during these four or five months that the spinning and weaving had to be done, but now the big factories, with their cheap methods of production, are rapidly killing the home industries, and the young girls are not learning to work at the jenny and the loom as ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Cap'n Mike with admiration. When it came to spinning a convincing yarn right off the cuff, so to speak, Cap'n Mike was a master. Rick hid a smile. What had the old man said about ham actors a little ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... accelerator, sent us spinning round the curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... one black and most unfriendly day Grootver had caught her as she passed between The kitchen and the garden. She had run In fear of him, his evil leering eye, And when he came she, bolted in her room, Refused to show, though gave no reason why. The spinning of her future had begun, On quiet nights she heard the whirring ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... on a broken stone, in a strange, wild dress, and engaged in spinning a thread drawn from wool of three different colours. She was at the same time half singing and half muttering a kind of charm, which seemed to have reference to the child which had been born the night before; and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... There is a beautiful shadow there, and I heard the streamlet say that he would sing a little to you; he is not very big, he cannot sing very loud. By-and-by, I know, the sun will make us as dry as dry, and darker, and then the reapers will come while the spiders are spinning their silk again—this time it will come floating in the blue air, for the air seems blue ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... author of the "Treatise on the American Law of Real Property," and his merits as a writer have thus become so well known as to render any new commendation superfluous. His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying, unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have seen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in a two-room house made of native lumber. The houses were all small. A four or five room house was considered a mansion. We made our own clothes, had spinning wheels and raised and combed our own cotton, clipped the wool from our sheep's backs, combed and spun it into cotton and wool clothes. We never knew what boughten clothes were. I learned to make shoes when I was just a boy and I made the shoes for the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kansas Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... quaint conceit. All subjects that bring up home associations are pictorially told in what, as to the rule, is the best of engraving. The old water-wheel is there, making music in the village glen; the limpid stream winding near the farmhouse; the spinning-wheel, "merrily, noisily, cheerily whirring;" the baby of the home saying her evening prayer, and John asleep beneath the summer boughs. Everything that clusters about the fireside, breathes in farewells, sings in marriage and throbs in love, finds embodiment. The ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... release was easy. Very hastily she freed herself. She made one step from the tree, and her head was spinning. Her last conscious movement was towards him. She reeled, and dropped. Her hand fell upon his thigh. It was soft and wet, and gave way under her pressure; he cried out at her touch, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... its beautiful eyes to the boy, and wagged its tail gently on the ground; then it sighed, as if understanding all that was said. Noemi stopped spinning, leaned her head on her hand, and looked ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... and undisturbed, was spinning out his sleep. Mrs. Greening brought coffee and refreshments for the young widow from her own kitchen across the road, and the sun rose and drove the mists out of the hollows, as a shepherd drives his flocks out ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... my lad!" cried Grant, giving his oar a pull that sent the head of the boat spinning round in the opposite direction. Then the sturdy Norseman and the stalwart Scot gave a pull together with all their might, and sent the boat like an arrow into the creek, where, in a few seconds, her keel ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... the elegant revellers. Softly and slowly, led by their host, they glided along like spirits of air; but each time that the Duke passed the musicians, the music became livelier, and the motion more brisk, till at length you might have mistaken them for a college of spinning dervishes. One by one, an exhausted couple retreated from the lists. Some threw themselves on a sofa, some monopolised an easy chair; but in twenty minutes the whirl had ceased. At length Peacock Piggott gave a groan, which denoted returning energy, and raised a ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... upon deck. A number of these were now gathered in a knot on the forecastle, and while they were sitting cross-legged, picking old rope, and preparing it in suitable form for caulking the ship's seams, one of their number was spinning a yarn, the hero of which was evidently him who now filled the post of commander on board their vessel. The object of their remarks, meanwhile, stood once more quietly leaning over the monkey-rail on the weather ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... is an island twenty miles off the south of a South American republic. It is a port of that republic; and it sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea, toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant tropics where all things "ripen, cease and ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... your own hands,' hissed the wicked old man, rubbing his hands. 'Oh!' he cried, spinning round on his wooden leg, 'it's a lovely idea. Wait till we meet "Mr Right", just wait,' and he dropped into his chair quite overcome by the state of excitement he ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... seventy-eight thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine, and the manufactures consist principally of yarns, linen, with canvas and cotton bagging, great quantities of which are exported to France and North and South America. There are about sixty spinning mills and factories in the town and neighborhood, besides several iron founderies and manufactories of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... crowd one another out—the more one writes, the more one recalls. These random jottings, however, will call up many more to the reader's memory. Such is my hope—that, having started you in a reminiscent frame of mind you will now carry on "spinning ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... were taken up, and again six. Then came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger and finer, until it was ready for spinning. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... billows break in thunder on Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of Scotland was vocal—melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... care of their baby boy alone and unaided. Grief for this irretrievable loss drove the young widower away for a while from his accustomed field of work among the Tyneside coal-pits; he accepted an invitation to go to Montrose in Scotland, to overlook the working of a large engine in some important spinning-works. He remained in this situation for one year only; but during that time he managed to give clear evidence of his native mechanical insight by curing a defect in the pumps which supplied water to his engine, and which had hitherto defied the best endeavours of the local engineers. ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... he has heard about the waltzing from Eugene, who desires to put it in its true light. It occurs one evening when he and Miss Dayre have been spinning and floating and whirling through drawing-room and hall, while Violet plays with fingers that seem bewitched and shake out showers of delicious melody. They have paused to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... faculties. He then beheld the Virgin herself bodily present,—her who is fairest now in heaven, as she was on earth; and while his eyes were being painted with her beauty,[42] there fell on a sudden a seraphic light from heaven, which, spinning into a circle as it came, formed a diadem round her head, still spinning, and warbling as it spun. The sweetest melody that ever drew the soul to it on earth would have seemed like the splitting of a thunder-cloud, compared with the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... girl. Coming to Hoel Farm for the first time was for her like visiting an estate that was, in very truth, royal; and besides, she had come on an important "grown-up" errand. She was taking her mother's place and visiting Hoel as a spinning woman. ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... was given a slight pull, and away they went, coursing like a locomotive over the prairies, the wheels spinning round at a tremendous rate, while the extraordinary speed caused the wind thus created almost to lift the caps from their heads, and a slight swell in the prairie sent the wagon up with a bound that threatened ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... pixy-led. In going home, full of strong drink, across the hill above the cavern called the "Pixies' Hole," on a moonlit night, he heard sweet {511} music, and was led into the whirling dance by the "good folk," who kept on spinning him without mercy, till he fell ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... about half my time in Ayrshire with my "darling Jean," and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientifical questions; to be as ashamed of undue haste and partisan prejudice in the one case as in the other; and to believe that the machinery of society is at least as delicate as that of a spinning-jenny, and as little likely to be improved by the meddling of those who have not taken the trouble to master the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... occupied in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life, but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between small barons, which kept their women constant ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... was very sensible, the mere spinning of the magnet in the air, whilst one of the galvanometer wires touched the extremity, and the other the equatorial parts, was sufficient to evolve a current of ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... fork of lightning had transfixed him—a sharp white fire darting from head and feet and arms to his heart, and whirling there in a spinning ball. He spoke quietly: ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... He thanked me at intervals for some little service rendered, and nearly all the time his eyes were fixed upon the clock. He was reckoning with his own life. He did not want to die in the day, but in the night. He was deliberately spinning out his life till the night nurse came on duty. I suppose that in his superficial, happy-go-lucky ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... remind one of the "Napoleon of the Suffrage Movement" was a large escritoire covered with documents in the usual state of confusion—Miss Anthony never could keep her papers in order. In search of any particular document she roots out every drawer and pigeon hole, although her mother's little spinning wheel stands right beside her desk, a constant reminder of all the domestic virtues of the good housewife, with whom "order" is of the utmost importance and "heaven's first law." The house was exquisitely clean and orderly, the food appetizing, the conversation pleasant and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the colored particles in an old-fashioned kaleidoscope. Cubes, pyramids and cones of variegated hues. Swift-rushing spheres and long slim cylinders of brilliant blue-white; gleaming disks of polished jet, spinning.... ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... a fearful state of excitement and confusion that morning, but at last everything was ready, barring one or two trifles. Then I suddenly heard a wild yell, and, spinning round, I saw a team tearing off without a driver. The next driver rushed forward to help, with the result that his dogs made off after the others. The two sledges were on ahead, and the two drivers after them in full gallop; but the odds were too unequal ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... MARCH YE IX. We were sat this morrow all in the little chamber at work, and I somewhat marvelled what was ado with Mother, for smiles kept ever and anon flitting across her face, as though she were mighty diverted with the flax she was spinning: and I guessed her thoughts should be occupying somewhat that was of mirthful sort. At ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... there for a little while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less honoured, least of all conscious of any claim to honour; casting and craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet truth of time; spinning of wheel, and {167} slackening of rope, and swinging of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or pan; but dark-browed and silent, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... track, and now relieved as he beholds him after a pause of deliberation wind into the wrong,—even so, O pleasant reader! doth the sage novelist conduct thee through the labyrinth of his tale, amusing himself with thy self-deceits, and spinning forth, in prolix pleasure, the quiet yarn of his entertainment from the involutions which occasion thy fretting eagerness and perplexity. But as when, thanks to the host's good-nature or fatigue, the mystery is once unravelled, and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that her son would not follow his father's business, shut up the shop, sold off the implements of trade, and with the money she received for them, and what she could get by spinning cotton, thought to maintain herself and her son. Alla ad Deen, who was now no longer restrained by the fear of a father, and who cared so little for his mother, that whenever she chid him, he would abuse her, gave himself ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... the two little Sisters, years ago, no heavy sorrow. At Solituede, but for the general cloud of anxiety and grief about their loved and gifted Brother and his exile, their lives were of the peaceablest description: diligence in household business, sewing, spinning, contented punctuality in all things; in leisure hours eager reading (or at times, on Christophine's part, drawing and painting, in which she attained considerable excellence), and, as choicest recreation, walks amid ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... sunlight, but he soon saw that there were two oaken beds, closed up after the manner of the Welsh: in fact, the domitories of Ellis Pritchard and the man who served under him, both on sea and on land. There was the large wheel used for spinning wool, left standing on the middle of the floor, as if in use only a few minutes before; and around the ample chimney hung flitches of bacon, dried kids'-flesh, and fish, that was in process of ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... piece of card was let down upon it, the cephalothorax, with the legs of the spider, was upon one side of a partition, while on the other was the abdomen, bearing upon its posterior extremity the spinning organs. The head and horns of a cow to be milked are secured in a similar manner. By placing in a row, or one behind another, several spiders thus secured, a compound thread was simultaneously obtained from them, and wound upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... return journey seemed far worse than the outward one had done. She did not venture to look down, but kept her eyes on the wall. Half-way she was suddenly seized with a horrible paroxysm of dizziness. For a moment or two she lay flat, too frightened to move, while her giddy head seemed to be spinning round. With a supreme effort she mastered the sensation, and crawled on, inch by inch, till she once again reached safety. With rather tottering knees she came down the winding staircase, and through the small door to the chancel steps. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... evening, determined not to lose a moment of time, with well used spinning-wheel set up, she began to spin away as if she had been long settled, while the children played around her, glad once more to find themselves alone, and free from the gaze of strangers. She waited till they were asleep, and then set to work, to manufacture ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... 'Adam Bede' has given us a poet's picture of the leisure of last century, which has "gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. "Old Leisure" lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... prohibition to export machinery, except so far as regards the linen manufacture, and the spinning of the yarns employed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... she drove outward toward the spinning Jovian moons. For a short while she could be seen from the EMV Observatory on Callisto, but very soon she faded into ...
— Turnover Point • Alfred Coppel
... Earth on her axis may be likened to the spinning motion of a top, and is the cause of the alternation of day and night. This rotatory motion is sustained with such exact precision that, during the past 2,000 years, it has been impossible to detect ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... philosopher felt the thrill of dawn and knew that the day of great mechanical inventions was at hand. He had read the meaning of the puffing of the young steam engine of James Watt and he had heard of a marvelous series of British inventions for spinning and weaving. He saw that his own countrymen were astir, trying to substitute the power of steam for the strength of muscles and the fitful wind. John Fitch on the Delaware and James Rumsey on the Potomac were already ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... press, which prints words instead of letters. Phaenologue was thought of, but Logograph sounds better. My father will allow me to manufacture an essay on the Logograph, he furnishing the solid materials and I spinning them. I am now looking over, for this purpose, Wilkins's Real Character, or an Essay towards a Universal Philosophical Language. It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... to make a globe to illustrate the zones, etc., and grand divisions of the world. Though then but twelve years of age I aided him in chopping down a native linden tree, from which a block was cut and taken to a man (Crain) who made spinning-wheels, which was by him turned, globe-shaped, about a foot in diameter, and hung in a frame. My father marked on it the lines of latitude and longitude and laid off the grand divisions, islands, oceans, seas, etc., ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... from their animosity to each other, as each tried to outdo the other in readiness to serve me. To-day, Charley, who was usually the last to rise in the morning, roused even me, and brought the horses before our breakfast was ready. Brown's fondness for spinning a yarn will soon, however, induce him to put an end to this feud with his companion and countryman. In the early part of our journey, one or other of our party kept a regular night-watch, as well to guard us from any night attack of the natives, as to ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... brown, sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and sent him spinning about. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... little party were across the Mississippi. The Indian canoe, so injured that it was useless until repaired, was pushed back into the turbid current and went spinning down the river, sometimes bumping against the bank and then dancing further from shore, until striking broadside against a nodding "sawyer," it overturned, and thereafter resembled an ordinary log, on its way ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... only at the cost of an amount of loss and ruin to particular portions of the community such as would be wrought by a blight or pestilence. The march of invention was white with the bleaching bones of innumerable hecatombs of victims. The spinning jenny replaced the spinning wheel, and famine stalked through English villages. The railroad supplanted the stagecoach, and a thousand hill towns died while as many sprang up in the valleys, and the farmers ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... in the S. German mythology, of the spinning-wheel principally, and of the household as dependent on it, in behalf of which and its economical management she is often harsh to idle spinners; at her festival thrift ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... rags should keep, I'd read up sundry books on sheep and wool and how it grows. Beneath my old bald, freckled roof, I'd store some facts on warp and woof and other things like those. I'd try to know a spinning-jack from patent churn or wagon rack, a loom from hog-tight fence; and if a man came in to buy, and asked some leading question, I ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... porthole, and stared out. There was little to be seen; but by the sight of a lake of soft light that slid past at some incalculable depth a dozen miles away, he perceived that they had left the sea far behind and were spinning over the land of France. He looked out long, revolving thoughts and conjectures, striving to find some glimmer of memory by which he might adjust these new experiences; but there was none. He was like a child, with ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... Constable Swanton that gave the alarm. Mr. Nute's team was spinning away down the road, the wagon-wheels throwing slush with a sort of fireworks effect. Cap'n Sproul, like most sailors, was not a skilful driver, but he was an energetic ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... him so great cherte:** *though **affection I swore that all my walking out by night Was for to espy wenches that he dight:* *adorned Under that colour had I many a mirth. For all such wit is given us at birth; Deceit, weeping, and spinning, God doth give To women kindly, while that they may live. *naturally And thus of one thing I may vaunte me, At th' end I had the better in each degree, By sleight, or force, or by some manner thing, As by continual murmur or ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... flat trays. Numbers of women sat in the fronts of the houses weaving cotton cloth fifteen inches wide, and cotton yarn, mostly imported from England, was being dyed in all the villages—the dye used being a native indigo, the Polygonum tinctorium. Old women were spinning, and young and old usually pursued their avocations with wise-looking babies tucked into the backs of their dresses, and peering cunningly over their shoulders. Even little girls of seven and eight were playing at children's games ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... to breakfast at a village very pleasantly situated, called Vinara, six leagues from the river of Santiago, and remarkable for the appearance of industry which it presented. No one here seemed to live in idleness; the women, even while gazing at our carriage, were spinning away at the same time. I observed too, that here the cochineal plant spread a broader leaf, and flourished with greater luxuriance in the gardens and hedge-rows of the cottages around, than at any place I had before visited. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... bottle. He looked stupidly at the bottle, set it upright too late to save much of the alcohol, and then stared fixedly at the boy. "See what you made me do, you little bastard?" he growled, and fetched the boy a clout on his bleeding head that sent him spinning against the wall of the hut. The boy got up slowly and silently—there seemed to be something wrong with his left arm—and glowered at ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... whippoorwill. The night hawk does not have the weird and woful cry of that more dismal bird, but gives instead a harsh, whistling note while on the wing, followed by a vibrating, booming, whirring sound that Nuttall likens to "the rapid turning of a spinning wheel, or a strong blowing into the bung-hole of an empty hogshead." This peculiar sound is responsible for the name nightjar, frequently given to this curious bird. It is said to be made as the bird drops suddenly through the air, creating a sort of stringed ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Ukraine in a very ungracious manner. Our animal would take a kick from no other animal calmly, and so, without waiting to weigh consequences, it gave RUDESHEIMER'S Rosinante a severe "chuck" in the ribs with its hind feet. In an instant horse and rider were spinning around like a top. A space was immediately cleared, and the crowd awaited in breathless silence the fate of the Knight. His swayings were fearful, until PUNCHINELLO, anticipating an apoplectic fit from such a terrific revolution, dashed in, and seizing the frightened ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... what Westcote calls "lanificium," "the skill and knowledge of making cloth, under which genus are contained the species of spinning, knitting, weaving, tucking, pressing, dying, carding, combing and such-like," we have records from the twelfth century; though until the reign of Edward IV only friezes and plain coarse cloth were made. In Edward's ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... I got out and let him step stiffly into the boat, which I obligingly sent spinning from the lorcha with one long, strong kick. Then I was alone on the deck, which suddenly looked immense, stretched on all sides, limitless as loneliness itself. A heavy torpor fell from the skies and amid this general silence, this immobility, the cabin door ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... caught his eye was his broken canoe. Naturally it was but a short distance below him, though it had gained a little while he was struggling so hard to make land. It was turned on its side, spinning sometimes one way and then whirling the other, according to the whim of the current; then sea-sawing up and down, until all at once it shot upward like a huge sturgeon, which sometimes flings its whole length ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... conservative in politics, the women intensely so in all domestic traditions. They made their own sweet waters and unguents and pomades, long after the nearest chemist supplied a far better and cheaper article. Their spinning-wheels hummed by the kitchen-fire, and their shuttles glided deftly in the weaving-room, many a year after Manchester cottons were cheap and plentiful. But they were pleasant, kindly women, who did wonderful needlework, and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... without learning something of him, he went to the hut. 19. He put his head in at the window, which was open. There a pleasant sight met his eyes. 20. Charles was at the table, ruling a copybook Joe was reading to him, while his mother was spinning in the corner. 21. Charles was a little confused. He feared his father might not be pleased; but he had no need to be uneasy, for his father was delighted. 22. The next day, his father took him ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... up and up the mass of metal with its human freight went. Now it was spinning like a top, again it shot toward the earth's crust like an arrow from the ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... Solomon Binkus went often to the meetings of the Sons of Liberty. One purpose of this organization was to induce people to manufacture their own necessities and thus avoid buying the products of Great Britain. Factories were busy making looms and spinning-wheels; skilled men and women taught the arts of spinning, weaving and tailoring. The slogan "Home Made or ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... clear, meanwhile, of the tangles and snares in Albany, he was unconsciously being enmeshed in the web that was spinning at Medora. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboring river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... quiet pretty parsonage Madame Agassiz became much attached. Her tranquil life is well described in a letter written many years afterward by one of her daughters. "Here mama returned to her spinning-wheel with new ardor. It was a work she much liked, and in which she was very skillful. In former times at grandpapa's every woman in the house, whether mistress or maid, had her wheel, and the young ladies were accustomed to spin and make up their ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Jack's arm pettishly, but glanced over her shoulder with such an inviting smile that Fletcher followed, feeling very much like a top, in danger of tumbling down the instant he stopped spinning. As she came out Kitty's face cleared, and, assuming her sprightliest air, she spread her plumage and prepared to descend with effect, for a party of uninvited peris stood at the gate of this Paradise casting longing glances at the forbidden splendors within. Slowly, that all ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... the time came for Jack to run home. The smack was well clear of the fleets and spinning along nicely to southward on a dark night, and Jack was at the wheel. His nerve was just a little touched, and he muttered, "This is a devil of a night. I wish ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... afternoon of the second day out, tea was served under the awning, and Captain Flanagan condescended to leave his bridge for half an hour. Through a previous hint dropped by the admiral they lured the captain into spinning yarns; and well-salted hair-breadth escapes they were. He understood that the admiral's guests always expected these flights, and he was in nowise niggard. An ordinary sailor would have been dead these twenty years, under any one ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... eightieth birthday. On this occasion the Utah Silk Commission presented to her a handsome black silk dress pattern, which possessed an especial value from the fact that the raising of the silk worms, the spinning of the thread and all the work connected with its manufacture except the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... planter, the neighbor, telling the negroes where they would get off at if they didn't pick cotton fast enough, or breaking colts, or going to the churn and drinking a quart of buttermilk, and getting the stomach ache, and calling upstairs to Martha, who was at the spinning wheel, or knitting woolen socks, and asking her to fix up a brandy smash to cure his griping pains. I thought of the father of his country taking a severe cold, and not being able to run into a drug store for a bottle of cough sirup, or a quinine pill, having Martha ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... thing. If one may be so near Titian's autograph and the illuminated Divine Comedy, why not this treasure too? January reveals a rich man at his table, dining alone, with his servitors and dogs about him; February's scene is white with snow—a small farm with the wife at the spinning-wheel, seen through the door, and various indications of cold, without; March shows the revival of field labours; April, a love scene among lords and ladies; May, a courtly festival; June, haymaking outside a fascinating city; July, sheep-shearing and reaping; August, the departure for the chase; ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... dark, and my boats were badly manned. I gave the order to close together and retire, offering ammunition as an incentive, and all came to me but one boat, which seemed so paralysed with fright, it kept spinning round and round like ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Linoleum Classics, but what the people need is the good, homely, honest stuff—something that'll stick to their ribs—make them laugh and tremble and feel sick to think of the littleness of this popcorn ball spinning in space without ever even getting a hot-box! And something that'll spur 'em on to keep the hearth well swept and the wood pile split into kindling and the dishes washed and dried and put away. Any one who can get ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... the proud queen of the Am[)a]zons. Being rejected by Bellodant "the Bold," she revenged herself by degrading all the men who fell into her power by dressing them like women, giving them woman's work to do, such as spinning, carding, sewing, etc., and feeding them on bread and water to effeminate them (canto 4). When she overthrew Sir Artegal in single combat, she imposed on him the condition of dressing in "woman's weeds," with a white apron, and to spend his time in spinning ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work—a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... If peace brought down the price of tea and pepper, And if the NITMUGS were grown ONY cheaper;— Were there nae SPEERINGS of our Mungo Park— Ye'll be the gentleman that wants the sark? If ye wad buy a web o' auld wife's spinning I'll warrant ye ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... seemed to leap out. One tore the pistol out of Dugald's hand and knocked it spinning. The other cracked, open-palmed, against the other man's face, hard enough to split flesh and start the blood trickling down Dugald's cheek. The force of the combined blows sent Dugald staggering. He fell back, crashing into a bush, and hung against it. Stark fear shone in his eyes. He screamed: ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... have been satisfactory to Roland. He had conceived a loathing for his property which not even its steadily increasing sales could mitigate. He was around at Messrs. Harrison's office as soon as a swift taxi could take him there. The lawyers were for spinning the thing out with guarded remarks and cautious preambles, but Roland's methods of ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... far back as 1800 they had begun the manufacture of cotton cloth, and in 1820 there was scarcely a family in that part of the nation living east of the Mississippi but what understood the use of the card and spinning-wheel. Every family had its farm under cultivation. The territory was laid off into districts, with a council-house, a judge, and a marshal in each district. A national committee and council were the supreme authority in the nation. Schools ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... it—the Honourable Hilary perceived this vaguely. It was the smile in which a parent privately indulges when a child kicks his toy locomotive because its mechanism is broken. It was the smile of one who, unforgetful of the scheme of the firmament and the spinning planets, will not be moved to anger by him who sees but the four ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... journey apart between the southern and the central bay, Indian workers cultivated immense fields of grain, choice vineyards, olive orchards and orange groves; great herds of horses, cattle, and sheep were cared for, and the women became adept at weaving and spinning. Nor were the Spanish Governors idle. They encouraged the immigration of settlers both from the mother country and Mexico by a most liberal policy, assisting the newcomer to build a home, acquire stock, and establish himself in a country ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... to turn the people from the excessive planting of tobacco, the Assembly passed a series of acts designed to encourage local industrial establishments. It was especially desired that Virginia should make her own cloth, for the cost of the English fabrics was excessive.[389] To stimulate the art of spinning and weaving the Assembly offered rewards for the best pieces of linen and woollen goods produced in the country. A bounty was placed on the manufacture of silk.[390] In 1666, the establishment of cloth works ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... generally to be found spinning at her muckle wheel, retiring and advancing to the music of its cheerful hum, the while her spun thread was rapidly coiled up on the spindle. The others, as they busied themselves in their household duties, or brightened up the delf and pewter, and set it out on the shelf to ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... at his young beginning, You are not here at his aged end; Off he coaxed you from Life's mad spinning, Lest you should see his form extend Shivering, sighing, Slowly dying, And a tear ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... locomotive engine or a ship. He could convert little grain into flour when provided only with a pestle and mortar, but he may do much when provided with a mill. His wife could convert little cotton into cloth when provided only with a spinning-wheel and hand-loom, but her labour becomes highly productive when aided by the spinning-jenny and the power-loom. The more her labours and those of her husband are thus aided the larger will be the quantity of grain produced, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... just as the same contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient Greece, India, Egypt and Anahuac. In a sense, certain low savages HAVE the "conception of God, as we understand what we mean by the word". But that sense, when savages come to spinning fables about origins, is apt to be overlaid and perplexed by the frivolity of their ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... grandmother, the old Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his household. All these the Marchioness must visit, and attend to her devotions ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... lingered there when she found her sister in their chamber, sitting at the spinning wheel. She had not left her suffering mother until her eyes closed in slumber, and was now waiting for Eva, to hear whether the entertainment had proved less disagreeable than she feared, and—as she had sent her maid to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a lawyer, his grandfather a merchant; he knows not what was his great-grandfather! There, the shoe is untied! If I came every day to your father's house, and if your mother gave me to drink of her elder-flower wine, and if I might sit on the sunny doorstep and watch you at your spinning, I ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... return to the description of the game, the player, having uttered his vaunt in true knightly fashion, with a dexterous whirl now sends his kilu spinning on its course. If his play is successful and the kilu strikes the target on the other [Page 240] side at which he aims, the audience, who have kept silence till now, break forth in applause, and his tally-keeper proclaims his ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean dropped to one ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... uncultured—and for why? Shades of the illustrious Gabarrus and Jovellanos, why? Why, to enable some half dozen fabricantes of Barcelona to keep less than half-a-dozen steam-engines at work, which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... written on the 14th July, 1789, the day of the taking of the Bastille. So "that evening sun of July" sent its beams on Gibbon mourning the dead friend, as well as on "reapers amid peaceful woods and fields, on old women spinning in cottages, on ships far out on the silent main, on balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... I am not spinning theoretical gossamer webs. I am speaking from experience—the experience of patients and confiding friends. I could relate many interesting cases. And I may, in a more appropriate volume. Here one or ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Moroka was spinning with the momentum of the sudden attack he'd made on his new chief. Now there was a gun in his own hand and he was darting for the ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... instance of a man's being pixy-led. In going home, full of strong drink, across the hill above the cavern called the "Pixies' Hole," on a moonlit night, he heard sweet {511} music, and was led into the whirling dance by the "good folk," who kept on spinning him without mercy, till he fell down "in ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... night after Ermentrude had sunk to sleep. She strained her eyes with home-sick longings to detect lights where she thought Ulm might be; and, as she thought of her uncle and aunt, the poodle and the cat round the stove, the maids spinning and the prentices knitting as her uncle read aloud some grave good book, most probably the legend of the saint of the day, and contrasted it with the rude gruff sounds of revelry that found their way ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... particularly sensible. The consequence was that, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool, and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on among the ladies themselves. And, by the by, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... in your own hands,' hissed the wicked old man, rubbing his hands. 'Oh!' he cried, spinning round on his wooden leg, 'it's a lovely idea. Wait till we meet "Mr Right", just wait,' and he dropped into his chair quite overcome by the state of excitement he had worked ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... gaining on him!" a warrior shouted. At this juncture two of the canines had almost nabbed their furry prey by the back. But he was too cunning for them. He dropped instantly and sent both dogs over his head, rolling and spinning, then made another flight at right angles to the first. This gave the Eskimo a chance to cut the triangle. He gained fifty yards, but being heavily handicapped, two unladen dogs passed him. The same trick was repeated by the Jack, and this time he saved himself from instant ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... sake of shadows and fantasies of his own terror, or vanity, or desire. We tiny, vain feeblenesses, we fussy ephemera; we sting each other, hate each other, hiss at each other, for the sake of the monster gods of our own delirium. As we are whirled upon our spinning, glowing planet through the unfathomable spaces, where myriads of suns, like golden bees, gleam through the awful mystery of "the vast void night," what are the phantom gods to us? They are no more than the waterspouts on the ocean, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... word, except his usual "Ay," Ramblin' Peter jumped up and ran to where his commander's steed was picketed. In doing so he had to pass an open space, and a ball striking his cap sent it spinning into the air; but Peter, like Black, was not easily affected by trifles. Next moment he was on the back of Will's horse—a great long-legged chestnut—and flying towards the main body ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the worst. So, my friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he has lately been to Cambridge, a place he ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... earliest days of space exploration ... there had been miners prospecting in the Asteroids. Out there, beyond the orbit of Mars and inside the orbit of Jupiter, were a hundred thousand ... maybe a hundred million, for all anybody knew ... chunks of rock, metal and debris, spinning in silent orbit around the sun. Some few of the Asteroids were big enough to be called planets ... Ceres, five hundred miles in diameter; Juno, Vesta, Pallas, half a dozen more. A few hundred others, ranging in size ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... and monopoly grants be printed, for they are not usually found in the statutes of the realm. In 1605 stage players are forbidden from swearing on the stage. In 1606 is an elaborate act for the regulation of the spinning, weaving, dyeing, and width of woollen cloth, and the same year is an act for "repressinge the odious and loathsome synne of Drunckennes," imposing a penalty or fine and the stocks. In 1609 an act of Edward IV is revived, forbidding ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... his trust in her, and deserving the honour now conferred upon her. The coachman let his horses go, and Harley Street was left behind. Such a bright day it was. Even the cold seemed a gay and festive thing, spinning the circulation like a gold coin till it glittered, decorating the poorest cheeks with the brightest rose as if in honour of a festival. To Cuckoo London, as seen from a private carriage, was a wonder and a dream of novelty, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the juice of the leaves suited to them, and afterward at the appointed time to invest themselves with a covering and enter as it were into a womb, and thus hatch offspring of their own kind. Some are first turned into nymphs and chrysalides, spinning threads about themselves; and this travail being over they come forth clad with a different body, furnished with wings with which they fly in the air as in their heaven, and celebrate marriages and lay eggs and ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... its way up-stream, changed into the fabled bark of a man by the name of Jason, and at the bow of this Argo sat Johnnie Blake, fish-pole over the side, feet dangling, line trailing, and a silvery trout spinning at the hook. A third boat, smaller still, and driven forward by oars, bore a sad, level-lying, white-clad figure—Elaine, dead through the plotting of cruel servants, and now rowed by the hoary dumb toward a peaceful mooring at the foot ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... though this mayden tendre were of age, Yet in the brest of hire virginitee Ther was enclosed sad and ripe corage: And in gret reverence and charitee Hire olde poure fader fostred she: A few sheep spinning on the feld she kept, She wolde not ben idel ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... giving lateral shoots; the leaves will be large and luxuriant, but the pods will be few." He next proceeds to the pruning of the plants to make them bear copiously—gathering the pods—preparing and spinning the wool—weaving the cloth.—This abridged account I have given to shew, that they are not deficient in ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... flax thread in skeins, but Mammy loved to tell of spinning it back in the days when she was young, and the best spinner on the old plantation. She still spun shoe-thread for her friend the cobbler, who, however, furnished her the raw flax, which he had grown, rotted and hechtelled, in his bit of bottom land. There were still spinning ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... were at once recognized and seated—the two boys still continuing their play about the room. "Tad" was spinning his top; and Lincoln, as we entered, had just finished adjusting the string for him so as to give the top the greatest degree of force. He remarked that he was having a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... These lands grip the bullet as it passes through the bore and rotate it to the right about the longer axis. This rotation serves to prevent tumbling and keeps the bullet accurately on its course. This spinning of the bullet also causes it to drift slightly to the right as it passes through the air. The same effect is produced by throwing a baseball with ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... with its long, hairy fingers and its single massive ring, was like the limb of some prehistoric creature. Philip's brain and his feet, however, were alike nimble. He sprang a little on one side, and though that first blow caught him just on the edge of the shoulder and sent him spinning round and round, he saved himself by clutching at the desk. Fortunately, it was his left arm that hung helpless by his side. His fingers groped feverishly in the cavernous folds of his overcoat pocket. Power, who had dashed against the wall, smashing ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The spinning of linen yarn is carried on in Scotland nearly in the same way as the knitting of stockings, by servants, who are chiefly hired for other purposes. They earn but a very scanty subsistence, who endeavour to get their livelihood by either of those trades. In most ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... forsook him, burying herself in her distant room, guilty and heart-broken, fearing above all things on earth, the first repellent glance he would bestow upon her. Once, while he slept, she peered through his door, going back to her room and her spinning with tears blinding ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... miles above Earth's surface the great space platform sped from daylight into darkness. Once every two hours it circled the earth completely, spinning along through space like a mighty ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... devoted advances to Longears, who, descending from his dignity, rolled with them in the sunshine. These now approached, and the young girls patted their heads, and Mr. Ralph gave them some paternal advice, and the good housewife, spinning in her cane-bottom chair with straight tall back, smiled pleasantly, ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... I looked again from my tall cliff I saw that great fleet rolling as in a giant's hand. At times they were pitched against the sky and staggered aloft, spinning gustily there like wind-blown leaves. Then they were hurled from these dizzy tops to the flat, moaning gulf, to the glassy, inky horror that swirled and whirled between ten waves. At times a wave leaped howling under a ship, and with a buffet dashed it into air, and chased it upwards with ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... askest if we are out of danger. I answer that we are out of mind, and let that suffice for an answer. At this moment, from the portico under which I write, I see our calm bay, and on it Ursus in a boat, letting down a net in the clear water. My wife is spinning red wool near me, and 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 ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Keyes were aghast; they pat me on the back; I hope they will go on doing so if things go horribly wrong. Midnight decisions take it out of one. Turned in and slept for three solid hours like a top till I was set spinning once ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... what they thought of me, probably that I was crazy. For a good minute, a long sixty seconds, I simply stood and stared. The duke's blue uniform, his wife's black-gowned figure, and the white, radiant blur that was Miss Falconer revolved about me in spinning, starry circles. I gasped, put out a hand, fortunately encountered Dunny's shoulder, and, leaning heavily on that perplexed person, at last got back my ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... opera-pit, handsome dog that you are, each spendthrift rake in 'Fop's Alley,' who now waits but the scratch of your pen to endorse billets doux with the charm that can chain to himself for a month some nymph of the Ballet, spinning round in a whirlwind of tulle, would shrink from the touch of your condescending forefinger with more dread of its contact than a bailiff's tap in the thick of Pall Mall could inspire; if, reduced to the company ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pity on me; while I have been spinning this long yarn, you have been smoking and imbibing; I am very willing to join you in both; but to-night I am tired out. The next time we meet, I shall be delighted to tell you what particulars I learned on my return to New Orleans, relative to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Mimosa scandens and Guilandina bonduc grows at Kew, to try fresh seeds. R. Brown tells me he believes four W. Indian seeds have been washed on shores of Europe. I was assured at Keeling Island that seeds were not rarely washed on shore: so float they must and shall! What a long yarn I have been spinning. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crisped and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the sun, such irradiation is there from the gold of the crisped leaves. Jack Frost is as clever a wizard as the dwarf Rumpelstiltzkin, who taught the miller's daughter the trick of spinning straw into gold. This young ash, robed all in yellow—what can the sun add to its splendor? And those farther tree-tops, that show against the sky like a tapestry, the slenderer branches and twigs, unstirred by wind, having the similitude of threads ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... ready, and a sufficient number of spinning-wheels, looms, and other utensils made use of in the most common manufactures being provided; together with a sufficient stock of raw materials, I proceeded to carry my plan into execution in the manner which will be related ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... down. I found Deborah speaking to a native, who was gesticulating very emphatically, and pointing up the river. The roar was deafening, and the sight terrific. Where there were two shallow streams a week ago, with a house and good-sized piece of ground above their confluence, there was now one spinning, rushing, chafing, foaming river, twice as wide as the Clyde at Glasgow, the land was submerged, and, if I remember correctly, the house only stood above the flood. And, most fearful to look upon, the ocean, in three ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... good dinner, and when it was over the two elder girls went to their spinning, for in the kitchen stood the big and little wheels, and baskets of wool-rolls, ready to be twisted into yarn for the winter's knitting, and each day brought its stint of work to the daughters, who hoped to be ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... taking into account the depredations of the goldfinches, it would be an admirable speculation, and would confer immeasurable benefits on the owners of waste lands. I mean to take out a patent when I have succeeded in the spinning.' ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the beginning of the end. Percy tottered up, blood spurting from his nose, his head spinning. He saw Jabe preparing for another rush and knew it would be the last one. He stiffened himself ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... peppers hanging from the ceiling of the loom-house. Great beams ran through, called "warping bars," where the various warp threads were measured and cut for the loom. There were scutchens for dressing flax, carding combs, spinning wheels, and the great wooden loom with shafts reaching almost to ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... about the place; it was growing, getting bigger; a wonder and a marvel how their stock was grown. And Inger brought more; clothes, and little trifles of her own, a looking-glass and a string of pretty glass beads, a spinning-wheel, and carding-combs. Why, if she went on that gait the hut would soon be filled from floor to roof and no room for more! Isak was astonished in his turn at all this wealth of goods, but being a silent man and slow to speak, he said nothing, only shambled out to the door-slab ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... not the nature of these Turks and pagans, Long Allen," replied Henry Woodstall. "I tell thee, man, that this flagon of Cyprus will set his brains a-spinning, just in the opposite direction that they went whirling in the dancing, and so bring him, as it were, to himself again. Choke? He will no more choke on it than Ben's black bitch on ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... made by the process of working the fibres by hand into a string or thread. The use of a simple spindle, composed of a stone like a large button, with a stick run through a hole in the centre, facilitated the making of thread and the construction of rude looms. It was but a step from these to the spinning-wheels and looms of the Middle Ages. When the Spaniards discovered the Pueblo Indians, they were wearing garments of their own weaving from cotton and wood fibres. Strong cords attached to the limbs of trees ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... ball-turret and swung the twin 15-mm.'s around, cutting loose. Quong brought the car in fast, at about shoulder-height on the mob. Between them, they left a swath of mangled, killed, wounded, and stunned natives. Then, spinning the car around, Quong set it down hard on a clump of rioters as close as possible to the struggling group around the two Terrans. Von Schlichten threw back the canopy and jumped out of the car, O'Leary and ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... means of an instrument, called a comb, with several rows of pointed teeth; this, though not much used now, is still occasionally employed, except in large factories. This combing is repeated two or three times, till it is sufficiently smooth and even for spinning. Spinning or converting wool, or cotton, silk, &c. into thread, was anciently performed by the distaff and spindle: these we find mentioned in sacred history, and they have been used in all ages, and in all countries yet discovered. The natives ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... concerned usually play a passive role.... Love is not one of the requisites, it is an unknown phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of their marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is a good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while she is spinning, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his gun, but Bud was expecting that. Dirk was not quite quick enough, and his hand therefore came forward with a jerk when he saw that he was "covered." Bud leaned, pulled Dirk's six-shooter from its holster and sent it spinning into a clump of bushes. He snatched a wicked-looking knife from Dirk's boot where he had once seen Dirk slip it sheathed when he dressed in the bunk-house, and sent ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... doesn't keep steady—swings from side to side. You have seen a top, how stiff and erect it is when it is spinning fast, and how it wobbles when it is spinning slow, just before it falls. Well, I think something of the kind is going on with Venus. The earth may be compared to a top that is whirling fast, and Venus to one that has slowed down. She is less able than the ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... have the right point of view with regard to the present, possibly on account of the mansard-roof which has overshadowed them. They do not know that today an old-maid aunt is as much of an anomaly as a spinning-wheel, that she has ceased to exist, that she is prehistoric, that even grandmothers have almost disappeared from off the face of the earth. In short, they do not know that I am not an old-maid aunt except under this ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... a day of it. In Trafalgar Square at eleven o'clock the next morning, they stepped into a taxi-cab—the same little vehicle that Taylor, from the dining-room window, had seen spinning round the curve of the drive. The hood was put down; the warm sunshine, just touched with a light sting from the regions of cold air through which it had passed, beat upon their faces. To such a day, from the grey fogs and lightless hours of winter, one comes, finding life ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... lion, a cape buffalo, and a frenzied elephant are the four terrors of the African hunters. All other forms of danger are slight compared with these, and I was full to the guards with a vast and fearful respect for the rhino. I fancied myself spinning around like a pinwheel with the horn of a rhino as a pivot, and the thought had little to commend itself to a lover of longevity—such as ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... seemed, for Noddy was spinning around the course at fearful speed, his car looking like a ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... the English purse is deep, and the Englishman has long years of money-spinning freedom from discipline behind him. Still, here is this brutal fact of the invasion. Here we are actually condemned to nine years of life inside a circle of German encampments on English soil, with a hundred millions a year of ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... been taught to spin silk; for her father had a garden of mulberry-trees, and a quantity of silk worms. She was of so much use in spinning, that her mother did not like to spare her: but the little maid promised, that if she might go to school, she would spin faster than ever when she came home. How happy she was when she obtained leave to go! See her when the sun has just risen, about six o'clock, tripping to ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... day, during five days in the week, and half of Saturday, except when the labours of husbandry were urgent, he was occupied in teaching. His seat was within the rails of the altar; the communion table was his desk; and, like Shenstone's schoolmistress, the master employed himself at the spinning-wheel, while the children were repeating their lessons by his side. Every evening, after school hours, if not more profitably engaged, he continued the same kind of labour, exchanging, for the benefit of exercise, the small wheel, at which he had sate, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... nothing of the kind—not at all! not at all! Now I'm free—free— free—hurrah! I'm free! Now I shall make no more violins—no more violins—hurrah! no more violins!" This he sang to a horrible mirthful tune, again spinning round on one foot. Perfectly aghast, I was making the best of my way to the door, when he held me fast, saying quite calmly, "Stay, my student friend, pray don't think from this outbreak of grief, which is torturing me as if with ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... after breathless moments of suspense, the boat turned, and came spinning in on the top of a breaker, with the useless oars sticking out like the legs of some huge insect. For a few seconds it was impossible to distinguish anything. The moment the boat touched ground, the waves ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... poetry, and who had made a business of his art, ought to have handled his material more intelligently, even in the twelfth century. The emphasis is not always laid with discrimination, nor is his yarn always kept free of tangles in the spinning. ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... on his face, dragging Margy with him. Margy's corn went spinning about her and the geese fairly scrambled over the two crying children to get at the corn. Perhaps this helped Mun Bun and his sister some, although they did not think so at the moment. At least, while his family scrambled for the grains of corn the gander could not get at the ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... mouldering in the ground, In yonder house she's spinning now, And lo! this moment may be found A driving home ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... no question as to that point, for just as he spoke a sudden and powerful gust of wind swept Quashy's straw hat off and sent it spinning gaily along the path. Vaulting from his mule with a wild shout, the negro gave chase on foot, with an amount of anxiety that seemed not justified by the occasion. But as the poet truly puts it, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... it is customary to choose women for milking the cows and for making cheese. In like manner, they go to the gardens near to the outskirts of the city both for collecting the plants and for cultivating them. In fact, all sedentary and stationary pursuits are practised by the women, such as weaving, spinning, sewing, cutting the hair, shaving, dispensing medicines, and making all kinds of garments. They are, however, excluded from working in wood and the manufacture of arms. If a woman is fit to paint, she ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... over, and art upon the causeway, certain aged women, spinning, will cry to thee to lend thy hand to their work; and beware again that thou take no part therein; for this also is the snare of Venus, whereby she would cause thee to cast away one at least of those cakes thou bearest in thy hands. And think not that a ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... tenderness for his weariness and solitude. She cast a spell of sleep upon him, with eternal youth, white and untroubled as moonlight. And there, night after night, she watched his sheep for him, like any peasant maid who wanders slowly through the pastures after the flocks, spinning white flax from her distaff as she goes, alone and ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... did not extend beyond a limited number of characters, and that all she committed to memory were the examples of these few worthy female characters of dynasties of yore; while she attached special importance to spinning and female handiwork. To this reason is to be assigned the name selected for her, of Li Wan (Li, the weaver), and the style ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... returning to work in the factory at six in the morning. Livingstone was not brighter than other boys, nor precocious in anything save determination. He was very fond of reading, and devised the plan of fastening a book on his spinning-jenny in the factory so that he could catch a sentence now and then while tending the machines. In this way he familiarized himself with ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... called us every name he could lay his tongue to. I have seen him, after Mrs Boffin has given him her mind respecting the claims of the nat'ral affections, catch off Mrs Boffin's bonnet (she wore, in general, a black straw, perched as a matter of convenience on the top of her head), and send it spinning across the yard. I have indeed. And once, when he did this in a manner that amounted to personal, I should have given him a rattler for himself, if Mrs Boffin hadn't thrown herself betwixt us, and received flush on the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Dancy seized startled old Judge Barbee by the middle from behind and flung him aside so roughly that the old man spun round twice, clutching at nothing, and then sat down very hard, yards away from where he started spinning. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... lilies Jesus did not mean to teach that we should not pray. He once said, "Men ought always to pray." We must pray much. If we do not pray, Satan will have us toiling and spinning. Keeping close to Jesus with a strong faith and a firm trust is the only way to rest, and we can not do this without much prayer. "Cease thy toiling and care." Learn a lesson from the lilies. Rest in the Lord, and he will make you an object of Christian beauty that will ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a blur and not distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a hundred balls in the air. The spinning great oval reached up twenty feet in the air and was a shining and glinting and wonderful sight. Then he folded his arms and told the balls to go on spinning without his help—and they did it. After a couple ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... head of center, who was now faithfully chasing it across outfield. Greg came in and hit the plate amid a cyclone of Army enthusiasm. The band was playing in sheer joy. Dick kicked second bag, then darted back as he saw the ball drop into the hands of the Lehigh catcher, who promptly sent it spinning straight into ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... its entire exhaustion as the inclination to suicide. And as with the persistence in life, so is it also with its action and movement. This is not something freely chosen; but while everyone would really gladly rest, want and ennui are the whips that keep the top spinning. Therefore everything is in continual strain and forced movement, and the course of the world goes on, to use an expression of Aristotle's (De coelo ii. 13), [Greek: "ou physei, alla bia"] (motu, non naturali sed ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers. If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take these two facts as the product of a small, detached area, although this island lies at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. Corsica and Sardinia, lying off the main routes of travel in this basin, are ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
