"Threads" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... design, a coloured drawing is hung up above the workers; but usually there is nothing for them to go by, except that a superintendent—an older boy—sings out the stitches in a monotonous cadence. A row of coloured balls of the various coloured threads employed in the design hang from the loom just within reach of ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... and railways in France converge as surely to the capital as the threads of a spider's web lead to its centre, and in pursuing his route through the bye-ways of Normandy the traveller will be much in the position of the fly that has stepped upon its meshes—every road and railway leading ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... across the eyepiece of an important telescope, and opticians preserve a particular race of spiders, that their webs may be taken for that purpose. The spider lines are strained across the best instruments at Greenwich and elsewhere; and when the spinners of these beautifully fine threads disturbed the accuracy of the tube in the western wing of the old Observatory, it was said to be but fair retaliation for the robberies ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and also for determining the sign, or whether the charge is positive or negative. The simplest form consists of a thread doubled at its centre and hung therefrom. On being charged, or on being connected to a charged body the threads diverge. A pair of pith balls may be suspended in a similar way, or a couple of strips of gold leaf within a flask (the gold leaf electroscope). To use an electroscope to determine the sign of the charge it is first slightly ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... fruit. Then, running to the cooking-pot, she fetched soup in two bowls. "And after that," she promised, "there will be partridges. Mr. Strongtharm shot them for me, for I was too busy. They are turning by the fire on a jack my mother taught me to make out of threads that untwist and twist again. . . . Shall I sit here, at my ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... has now been woven, the piece is finished, and it is only necessary that the loose threads should be collected, so that there may be no unravelling. In such chronicles as this, something no doubt might be left to the imagination without serious injury to the story; but the reader, I think, feels a ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... anchorage and was some six miles closer to Santiago, was made the base. From Siboney there stretched for eight or ten miles a rolling country covered with heavy jungle brush and crossed by mere threads of roads. There was indeed a railroad, but this followed a roundabout route by the coast. Through this novel and extremely uncomfortable country, infected with mosquitoes, the troops pressed, eager ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... my head-dress again with the flowing tinsel threads, and, some one sending for a brush, I completed this exhibition by showing them how I curled my hair around my fingers and made this coiffure. I inclose the article about this supper which came out in the Figaro (copied into a New ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... not dead," he cried, as the yellow flame wavered for a moment at the seaman's motionless mouth. But hardly had the words escaped, when, to the silent horror of all, two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips; and in a moment, the cadaverous face was crawled over by ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... had completed my business at the National Industrial, I went back to my office and gathered together the threads of my web of defense. Then I wrote and sent out to all my newspapers and all my agents a broadside against the management of the Textile Trust—it would be published in the morning, in good time for the opening of the Stock Exchange. Before the first quotation of Textile could be made, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... of the way. When the husbandmen, at whose farmhouses they sought hospitality, needed their assistance in the harvest field, they gave it willingly; and Queen Telephassa (who had done no work in her palace, save to braid silk threads with golden ones) came behind them to bind the sheaves. If payment was offered, they shook their heads, and only ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... the trees proper began about fifteen feet from the ground, the space below being occupied by a great net-work of exposed roots, some of them a foot or two in thickness, and others varying in size all the way down to mere threads. The freshets which had washed the earth away from the roots, had piled a great mass of drift-wood against one side of them. Sam made a careful examination of the place, and then all went to work. ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... sides of the mountains on the opposite shore. Although the outline of the mountains was distinct upon the bright blue sky, and the dark shades upon their sides denoted deep gorges, I could not distinguish other features than the two great falls, which looked like threads of silver on the dark face of the mountains. No base had been visible, even from an elevation of 1,500 feet above the water level, on my first view of the lake, but the chain of lofty mountains on the west appeared to rise suddenly from the water. This ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Anne could tell the most delightful stories. And she was always inventing charming new ways to play. Instead of keeping her paper dolls limp and loose, like the other girls, she pasted them on stiff cardboard, pulled them about with threads, and had a moving-picture show to illustrate a story that she made up. The admission price was five pins, those not ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... he sat blithely at meat, enjoying the solitary place, there entered the garden two young damsels of maybe fifteen years of age, with hair like threads of gold, all ringleted and hanging loose, whereon was a light chaplet of pervinck-blossoms. Their faces bespoke them rather angels than otherwhat, so delicately fair they were, and they were clad each upon her skin in a garment ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... he overbalanced, all but fell. The screws had been set in punch holes so large that the threads scarce took hold at all. Joel stumbled out—saw Varde on the cushioned bench which ran across the stern. The mate was reading, a book from Joel's narrow shelf. At sight of Joel, he was for ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... explanations. There were the tapping machines operated by women, which put threads on bolts and nuts. Their steel gears were shining with oil. She could follow the entire process. She nodded her head ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... mouth, and blue bonnet cast carelessly on the head: it was almost a single family, bound together by a network of intermarriages, so intricate as to render it impossible for any one who did not belong to the community to follow the threads or read the design ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... saw a whole wall draped with his marvellous black tapestry, without price because inimitable and too delicate to pass from hand to hand among merchants. I looked at the wonderful complexity of its infinite threads, my finger sank into it for more than an inch without feeling the touch; so black it was and so carefully wrought, sombrely covering the whole of the wall, that it might have been worked to commemorate the deaths of all that ever lived there, as indeed it was. I looked through ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... separated from each other by lofty stationary barriers; in democracies they are divided by a number of small and almost invisible threads, which are constantly broken or moved from place to place. Thus, whatever may be the progress of equality, in democratic nations a great number of small private communities will always be formed within the general pale of political society; but none of them will bear any ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice: how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... now to rely on cordite, which, however, only acts as a spill. You get a rifle cartridge (there are plenty to be got, the infantry seem to drop them about by hundreds), wrench out the bullet and wad, and find the cordite in long slender threads like vermicelli. You dip this in another man's lighted pipe, when it flares up, and ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... March appearances again became menacing. Thousands of threads like glass, formed of fluid lava, fell like rain upon the island. The crater was again boiling with lava which overflowed the back of the volcano. The torrent flowed along the surface of the hardened tufa, and destroyed the few meagre skeletons of trees which had withstood ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... we overheard matters which opened my mind to the way affairs of state are managed, and I grew to learn upon what slender threads of love, of malice, of jealousy and of hate the destinies of nations must often hang. From our situation we could not help but hear all that passed between Madame and her caller. The maid withdrew, in the slow hurry of a truant on his way to school, but ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... a vacuum dryer. This is kept hot, and whatever moisture is in the rubber is either evaporated or sucked out by a vacuum pump. It now passes through another machine much like the washer, and is formed into sheets. The square threads from which elastic webbing is made may be cut from these sheets, though sometimes the sheet is wound on an iron drum, vulcanized by being put into hot water, lightly varnished with shellac to stiffen it, then wound on a wooden ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... pieces of the Lord Bacon are already extant, and in many hands, it is necessary that the foreign reader be given to understand of what threads the texture of that book consists, and how much of truth there is in that which that shameless person does, in his preface to the reader, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... taking his eyes from the newspaper before him. He was seated by the window, musing the morning news, his curved pipe hanging idle from his mouth, from which incipient clouds of smoke lazily issued and as lazily climbed upward and vanished through the open casement into threads of nothingness. ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... summer weather. They are snow-fed from the high ranges, and each nor'-wester restores many a glacier or avalanche to its original form, and sends it flowing down the steep sides of yonder distant beautiful mountains to join the creeks, which, like a tangled skein of silver threads, ensure a good water supply to the New Zealand sheep-farmer. In the holes, under steep overhanging banks, the eels love to lurk, hiding from the sun's rays in cool depths, and coming out at night to feed. There are no fish whatever in the rivers, and I fear that ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... still from the same side: they lie between him and the open sea: to avoid them he must move in-shore. Getting now a nearer view, he descries some new features of the danger. These lines are crossed and knitted in a manner all unlike the sea-weed threads that streamed so long and straight and loose in the tide-way. A secret foreboding of some unknown doom arises: the alarmed captive, having now no further room to retire, darts wildly sea-ward, and is caught in the inevitable meshes of ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... sorry sight. The white linen altar-cloth, the cloth which the Senora Moreno had with her own hands made into one solid front of beautiful lace of the Mexican fashion, by drawing out part of the threads and sewing the remainder into intricate patterns, the cloth which had always been on the altar, when mass was said, since Margarita's and Ramona's earliest recollections,—there it lay, torn, stained, as if it had been dragged through muddy ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... sluggard,' breaking into a laugh. "If I were Fate, I'd just take you by the shoulders and shake you till you woke up. Then I'd go on shaking to keep you awake. You shouldn't be wasted on mere nonentity if I held the threads." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... escaping feet and a scramble for hats and cloaks. It was a masterpiece; but with the last touch, see, the colours are flying in a hundred directions, and the very canvas itself is off in a thousand threads of hurried disintegration! ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... between the double line of guards who stood immovable as statues, we came to some curtains hung at the end of a long, narrow hall which, although I know little of such things, were, I noted, made of rich stuff embroidered in colours and with golden threads. Before these curtains Billali motioned us ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... all the rosy and all the weathered faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower - girl and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it in a fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there in the evening? She says she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it wouldn't do to bring work into the parlor. Didn't you know that? Don't you know there mustn't be such a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor? What if some threads should drop on the carpet? Aunt Zeruah would have to open all the fortifications next day, and search Jerusalem with candles to find them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at half-cock, you know; and if I turn it up, and bring in my newspapers and spread about ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Barot, Meunier, Duthibaut, and Menuau met Trinquant at the village of Pindadane, in a house belonging to the latter, in order to consult about the dangers which threatened them. Mignon had, however, already begun to weave the threads of a new intrigue, which he explained in full to the others; they lent a favourable ear, and his plan was adopted. We shall see it unfold itself by degrees, for it is the basis of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... almost where they had fought, there crashed down a third avalanche from the edge of the mountain. Not a shiver ran through O'Grady's great body. Steadily and unflinchingly—step—step—step—he went ahead, while the last threads of his moccasins smoked and burned. Jan could no longer see half a dozen yards in advance. A wall of black smoke rose in their faces, and ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... was to arrange a stately ceremonial in India, some alteration in the dress of officers, or anything that made uniforms necessary. The girls' workroom, even at ordinary times, presented an aspect of enormous wealth, with everywhere a display of gold—loose threads of it on the tables, collected threads being sewn on foundations, epaulettes in course of making, heavy dependent nuggets hung upon scarves. Gold floated in the air, and when the sun came through the windows it all looked as though one could play the conjurer, ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... mountain tea and swamp chocolate-root; these two last-named articles nearly resembled those brought from foreign countries. They raised flax, and with it made their clothing for both men and women. For coats and outer garments they doubled and redoubled the threads, the cloth resembling our present canvas. Linen was found to be cold for stockings and socks, and their inventive talent was brought into use. They cut hair from the bear-skins and mixed it with tow, and thus Bruin furnished them meat, cotton, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... close an interdependence as the personages of a regularly constructed drama. The effect of the reiterated story, told in some new fashion by each new teller of it, has been compared with that of a great fugue, blending, with the threads of its crossing and recrossing voices, a single web of harmony. The "theme" is Pompilia; around her the whole action circles. As, in Pippa Passes, the mere passing of an innocent child, her unconscious influence on those on whom her ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... leaves defaced. But Willie cared neither for leaves, nor roses, nor yet for Miss Eudora, and drawing the stool to his mother's side, he sat kicking his little heels into a worn place of the carpet, which no child had kicked since the doctor's days of babyhood. The tender threads were fast giving way to the vigorous strokes, when two doors opposite each other opened simultaneously, and both Mrs. ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... low window-seat of her bedroom, pretending to draw the threads of a cambric handkerchief. But her fingers twitched, and her eyes looked oftener down the hill than upon the delicate work which required such attention. She wore a black gown flowered with yellow roses, and a slender ivory cross at her throat. Her ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... white, and the hair dark as night. And they say it will go on growing until the Last Day, when the horse will falter, and her hair will gather in; and the horse will fall, and the hair will twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... threads of the past which the stricken man had gathered up, he had omitted the bill of sale; the flash of memory had only lit up prominent ideas, and he sank into forgetfulness again with ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... baskets that look like the one the flower girl carries and are filled with very small artificial forget-me-nots and rose-buds; airy butterflies of white and pale yellow silk, to be fastened to fine threads above the table in the dining-room, where they flutter realistically over ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is being for ever determined as the moments pass in ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle's death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or other of them guides us to the truth. We may waste time in following the wrong one, but sooner or later we must come ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... Then other threads of white began just outside the landing grid. They rushed after the first. The original rockets seemed to dodge. Others came up. There was an intricate pattern formed by the smoke trails of rockets rising and other rockets following, and some trails dodging ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... struggling in the curds and whey, told on. How he helped the gardener by eating up the flies; how day and night he toiled and spun, making and weaving carpets and counterpanes from silken threads that he himself spun out of nothing. "It was my masterpiece I was to finish to-night," he said again at ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... Freedom doth not consist In musing with our faces toward the Past While petty cares and crawling interests twist Their spider threads about us, which at last Grow strong as iron chains and cramp and bind In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind. Freedom is recreated year by year, In hearts wide open on the Godward side, In souls calm-cadenced as the whirling sphere, In minds that sway the future like a tide. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... funeral. Did I write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me writing to Martha? Hope it's not chucked in the dead letter office. Be the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That's the first sign when the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night hovering ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of them; the stitches are not very close together, nor is the thread very fine, but the work is very neat and regular, and the needles are of their own manufacture. The bongos are very often striped, and sometimes made even in check patterns; this is done by their dyeing some of the threads of the warp, or of both warp and woof, with various simple colors; the dyes are all made of decoctions of different kinds of wood, except for black, when a kind of iron ore is used. The bongos are employed as money in this put ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... principally for the purpose of enabling him to read easily. He should learn to look upon each piece of music as a beautiful tapestry in which the main consideration is the principal design of the work as a whole and not the invisible marking threads which the manufacturer is obliged to put in the loom in order to have a structure upon which ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... more, but she proceeded to tie a small pebble to the end of one of the long threads which she had brought out with her. Then she tied the other end of the thread to the branch of the tree, which was over her head. The pebble then hung down before them, so that both Rollo and herself could plainly ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... there. When I lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the air after dwelling on his brightness. The rose-mallow flaunts along Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wonderful phenomena of maternal love. One of the first articles published by a naturalist on these phenomena, La Psychologie d'une Araignee (The Psychology of a Spider) might serve as the motive of a drama. The spider, as is well known, makes a bag of threads, which she generally attaches to the backs of leaves, and in it she deposits and preserves her eggs; she gets into it herself together with the eggs, to protect the treasure of the species. If the bag should be broken at any point, the spider promptly repairs it. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... They indicate that the Patwas of the Central Provinces are generally descended from immigrants from northern India. The Patwa usually purchases silk and colours it himself. He makes silk strings for pyjamas and coats, armlets and other articles. Among these are the silk threads called rakhis, used on the Rakshabandhan festival, [435] when the Brahmans go round in the morning tying them on to the wrists of all Hindus as a protection against evil spirits. For this the Brahman receives a present ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke already extended far away to the east and west—to the Byfleet pine woods eastward, and to Woking ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... from Yokohama to Vancouver (Washington territory), the old threads were once more put ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... whirl the spindle and to spade the soil, The Sun's bright march with pious finger trace, And his pale sister with her changing face; Show how their bounties clothe the labor'd plain, The green maize shooting from its golden grain, How the white cotton tree's expanding lobes File into threads, and swell to fleecy robes; While the tamed Llama aids the wondrous plan, And lends his garment to ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... began to scratch his left eye. Dukovski looked at him attentively, noted his confusion, and started. He noticed that the director had dark blue trousers, which he had not observed before. The trousers reminded him of the dark blue threads found on the burdock. Chubikoff in his ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... the town was flourishing, for the use of manufactories or to flood the moats of the rampart. The "Riviere forcee" forms an artificial arm of a natural river, the Tournemine, which unites with several other streams beyond the suburb of Rome. These little threads of running water and the two rivers irrigate a tract of wide-spreading meadow-land, enclosed on all sides by little yellowish or white terraces dotted with black speckles; for such is the aspect of the vineyards of Issoudun during seven months of the year. The vine-growers cut the plants down ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... clear there rang on my ear a song mighty simple an' old; Heart-hungry an' high it thrilled to the sky, all about "silver threads in the gold". 'Twas tender to tears, an' it brung back the years, the mem'ries that hallow an' yearn; 'Twas home-love an' joy, 'twas the thought of my boy . . . an' right there I ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... stone building echoed with some voice that called some one a long way away. Peter was in the street. He stood outside the great offices of The Morning World and looked across the valley at the great dome that squatted above the moving threads of living figures. He was absurdly upset by this unfortunate interview. What could he have expected? Of what use was it that he should fling his insignificance against that kind of wall? Moreover he must try many times before his chance would be given him. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the sparrow on the housetop, and hath He not in His graciousness pointed towards His lowly servitor? The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently—yea, verily, in desultory fashion—and brought slight disorder among the threads. And then the Lord withdrew His finger, and there were fibres and delicate root-like filaments adhering to the finger, and they were the nerve-threads of the filaments. And there was a gaping hole after the finger, which was God's finger, and a wound in my ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... of Muybridge sets in. He had a black horse trot or gallop or walk before a white wall, passing twenty-four cameras. On the path of the horse were twenty-four threads which the horse broke one after another and each one released the spring which opened the shutter of an instrument. The movement of the horse was thus analyzed into twenty-four pictures of successive phases; and for the first time ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... the Baltimore. The three to five eggs are grayish white, blotched, clouded, spotted or streaked with brownish and purple. Size 1.00 x .70. Data.—Brownsville, Texas, April 6, 1897. 5 eggs. Nest of threads from palmetto leaves, hanging from limb of mesquite, 10 feet above ground in the open ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... innocent, that they were always employed in his service, but I was transported at having the trifles in my possession, and imagined I stole the art with its productions. Besides what I have mentioned, his boxes contained threads of gold and silver, a number of small jewels, valuable medals, and money; yet, though I seldom had five sous in my pocket, I do not recollect ever having cast a wishful look at them; on the contrary, I beheld these valuables rather with terror than ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... she hath forsaken thee—thy Lady Athene. Many a time didst thou sacrifice to her the thighs of kine and sheep, but didst thou ever give so much as a pair of dove to me? Hath she left thee, as the Dawn forsook Tithonus, because there are now threads of silver in the darkness of thy hair? Is the wise goddess fickle as a nymph of the woodland or the wells? Doth she love a man only for the bloom of his youth? Nay, I know not; but this I know, that on thee, Odysseus, old age will soon be hastening—old ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... fields of corn, filled with silken rustling, and vineyards with long rows of trimmed maple-trees standing each one like an emerald goblet wreathed with vines, and flower-gardens as bright as if the earth had been embroidered with threads of blue and scarlet and gold, and olive-orchards frosted over with delicate and fragrant blossoms. Red-roofed cottages were scattered everywhere through the sea of greenery, and in the centre, like a white ship surrounded ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed him because they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after, she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for refusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of rage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose to her raging thirst for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train like a sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer! Oh, if I had ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... in holes, either in old walls, or in the ground. The industry that many spiders display in the construction of their dwelling or the snares designed to catch their prey, is very remarkable: the nests of the mygales, for example, is very curious. It would be interesting to have a collection of threads spun by exotic spiders, and the preservation of these delicate tissues is easy enough, if they are spread out on a leaf of paper dipped in gum-water. It is perhaps superfluous to add that those specimens would have little value, unless each one is accompanied by the spider ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... carved old wooden chest. Though the furniture was scanty and made the tent seem even more spacious than it really was, the whole room had an air of barbaric splendour. The somber hangings gleaming with thick silver threads seemed to Diana like a studied theatrical effect, a setting against which the Arab's own white robes should contrast more vividly; she remembered the black and silver waistcloth she had seen swathed round him, with ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... now proceed to fibrine. This is an insipid and inodorous substance, having somewhat the appearance of fine white threads adhering together; it is the essential constituent of muscles or flesh, in which it is mixed with and softened by gelatine. It is insoluble both in water and alcohol, but sulphuric acid converts it into a substance very ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... deep, and though there were obstructions, old stakes and drowned brushwood, Cleave and Dundee crossed. The air was full of booming sound, but there was no motion in the wood into which they rose from the water. All its floor was marshy, water in pools and threads, a slight growth of cane, and above, the tall and solemn trees. Cleave saw that there was open meadow beyond. Dismounting, he went noiselessly to the edge of the swamp. An open space, covered with some low growth; beyond it ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... which he published later in a book called "Century of Inventions." These observations were a sort of text-book on the power of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt afterward perfected. A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Stone Lodge; and she stood there yet, when he was gone and all was quiet. It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time, that greatest and longest- established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... from our altitudes, and speak of lower things; for the time and space forbid much longer intrusion on your courtesy. A few ravelling threads of this our desultory tale have yet to be gathered up, as tidily as may be. Suffer, then, such mingling of my thoughts: the web I weave has many threads, woven with divers colours. Human nature is nothing if not inconsistent; and I have no more notion of irreverence in turning from ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and wholesome expression I had ever seen in either youth or age. Over his broad bronzed forehead and white hair he wore a low-crowned, wide-brimmed black felt hat, somewhat rusted now, and with the band grease-crusted, and the binding frayed at intervals, and sagging from the threads that held it on. An old-styled frock coat of black, dull brown in streaks, and quite shiny about the collar and lapels. A waistcoat of no describable material or pattern, and a clean white shirt and collar of one piece, with a black string-tie and double bow, which would have been entirely concealed ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... thy hand through my hair, lore; One little year ago, In a curtain bright and rare, love, It fell golden o'er my brow. But the gold has passed away, love, And the drooping curls are thin, And cold threads of wintry gray, love, Glitter their folds within: How should this be, in one short year? It is not age—can it ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... initial-work on all bed and table linen in Germany is called. Some of that shown me in the sewing-room I now visited was exquisite, but was outdone, if possible, by the darning. Over a small cushion, encased in white cotton cloth, a coarse fabric of stiff threads is pinned, after a square has been cut out from it. This hole the pupil is to replace by darning, composed of white and colored threads. In this instance blue and white threads were woven about the pin-heads inserted at ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... social facts, the student is naturally liable to make too much of them, in proportion to other facts. Let us agree, for argument's sake, that the expansion of England is the most important of the threads that it is the historian's business to disengage from the rest of the great strand of our history in the eighteenth century. That is no reason why we should ignore the importance of the constitutional ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... of wood, the dimensions being shown in Fig. 70. A 5/16 hole should be made for S B, the thread of which will stick through about 1/4 in. so that the winder-nut, W N, can be turned onto it. W N should be on but 2 or 3 threads of S B. This will leave part of it for the thread of the bolt magnet, and when this and S B meet in center of W N they will bind against each other and hold the bolt tight. The winder can be nailed or screwed at S to the edge of a table ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... Mrs Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon. Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in the big chair by the ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... trees, stealing beneath whispering pines, White Aster threads different parts of the solitude, where she encounters deer and other timid game, seeking some trace of her father. She is so intent on this quest that she does not mark two dark forms which gradually creep nearer to her. These are robbers, who finally ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... goodness, went likewise to thank the parrot. "Beautiful bird," said he, "'tis thou that hast saved my life and made me first minister. The queen's spaniel and the king's horse did me a great deal of mischief; but thou hast done me much good. Upon such slender threads as these do the fates of mortals hang! But," added he, "this happiness perhaps ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... day the train slid down the shining threads of track like a long string of rectangular green and brown and yellow beads. The caboose was filled with cattlemen and their assistants, who smoked, talked politics, told stories, and slept at all hours of the day, whenever a spare segment of bench offered. Those who ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... Cotton, Thread and Worsted Mens and Womens Hose, a great Variety of Ribbons, Necklaces and Earings, black and white Silk Mitts, Kid and Lamb Gloves and Mitts, French ditto, Cotton, Cambrick and Scotch Threads, with a great Variety of Millenary Goods, too many to enumerate. —> The said Todd and Purcell having spare Room in said House, can accommodate young Ladies with Board and Lodging ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... downfall. And we are told that this wicked siren whose dreadful fate Elijah foretold, was cousin to Dido, she who Virgil tells us "wept in silence" for the faithless AEneas. With what a strange thrill do we find these threads of association between history sacred and profane, and both mingled with ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... or Membranous parts of the Organs of Tast, and what [Errata: yet] may be fit to work otherwise upon divers other Bodies than meer Water can, and consequently to Disclose it self to be of a Nature farr enough from Elementary. In Silke dyed Red or of any other Colour, whilst many Contiguous Threads makes up a skein, the Colour of the Silke is conspicuous; but if only a very few of them be lookt upon, the Colour will appear much fainter then before. But if You take out one simple Thread, you shall not easily be able to discern any Colour at all; So subtile an Object having not the Force to ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... an upper robe which reached down to his feet and underneath it was a vesture of hyacinthine blue, girded about with a golden band, upon which were three precious stones, two sapphires on the sides, and a carbuncle in the middle; his stockings were of bright shining linen, with threads of silver interwoven, and his shoes were of velvet: such was the representative form of conjugial love with the husband. With the wife it was this; I saw her face, and I did not see it; I saw it as essential beauty, and I did not see it because this ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... it; and now, neither in pride nor in shame, but in defiance of her unbelieving husband, she was bearing away from her house the bolt of linsey-woolsey newly home from the weaver, which was to have been cut into the winter's clothing of her children. She had spun the threads herself and dyed them, and they had become as if they were of her own flesh and blood. She carried the bolt wrapped about with her shawl, bearing it tenderly in her arms, as if it were indeed her ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... to her eyes. With cruel satisfaction, not unmixed with admiration, she had seen her power successful and the awe-struck wonder and veneration creep into his face. In the silence and peace of the temple she had plunged reckless hands into the woven threads of his life. Amidst the shriek of war, face to face with death, she sought to save him. It was another woman who stood opposite the yielding, cracking door, past whose head a half-spent bullet spat its way, burying itself in the wall behind her,—another ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... often arid aspects of Spain. Spain, too, is romantic—but after its own fashion. Goya revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic, modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers. As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... posy that was finished off better, soft and nice, with pretty little stripes painted on 'em, and all the little things like threads in the middle, sech as the open posies has, standing up, with little knots on their tops, oh, so pretty,—you never did! Makes you think real hard, that does; leastways, makes me. What's they that way for? ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... against the stars, Decks where death is wallowing green, Snare the breath among their spars, Hear the flickering threads between, Quick, through all the storms that blind them, Quick with words that rush ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... made of a piece of wood, and a thong of leather tying the ends together into a curve. He used to take the cotton, and pile it in a heap; then he took the carding-bow, and twang-twang-twanged it among the heap of cotton, so that the fibres or threads of it became disentangled. Then he rolled it up into oblong balls, and sold it to other people, who made ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... too, that silver and gold were as common as the stones that he saw lying in the streets, as he rode through Jerusalem in his open chariot, clothed in white, threads of glittering gold mixed with ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... off his hat, so as to let the moist spring breeze play round his temples and in the thin locks where the silvery threads had lately grown more perceptible, and gazed upon the dewy grass, the tiny woodbine leaf, the silver "pussycats" on the withy, and the tasselled catkin of the hazel, with the eyes of a man to whom such sights were a refreshment—a sort of ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the sculptor, anxious not to violate the integrity of his own conscience, "take heed; for you love one another, and yet your bond is twined with such black threads that you must never look upon it as identical with the ties that unite other loving souls. It is for mutual support; it is for one another's final good; it is for effort, for sacrifice, but not for earthly happiness. If such be your motive, believe me, friends, it were better to relinquish ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I suppose, if they were treating you to a few chapters in the history of this singular man, would weave the threads together in a different manner from mine. They would begin, very likely, by telling where the chap was born, who were his father and mother, how many brothers and sisters he had, what their names were, whether he had any uncles and aunts, and if he had, what kind of uncles and ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... of good cheer; a bubbling source Of jest and tale; a monarch of the gun; A dreader tyrant of the darting trout Than that bright bird whose azure lightning threads The brooklet's bowery windings; the red fox Did well to seek the boulder-strewn hill-side, When Westren cheered her dappled foes; the otter Had cause to rue the dawn when Westren's form Loomed through the streaming bracken, to waylay Her late return from plunder, the rough ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... I never will. One teacher already has advised me about my diet. She says vegetables are best for me. I ate a peck of string beans this noon for lunch—strings and all—and I expect you can pick basting threads out of me ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... clay lands in this cracked state, it passes off too quickly, without adequate filtration. Into the fissures of the undrained soil the roots only penetrate to be perished by the cold and wet of the succeeding winter; but in the drained soil the roots follow the threads of vegetable mold which have been washed into the cracks, and get an abiding tenure. Earth worms follow either the roots or the mold. Permanent schisms are established in the clay, and its whole character ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... passed into Madame Grandoni's, she let her eyes wander slowly from group to group. They were of course observing her. Standing in the little circle of lamplight, with the hood of an Eastern burnous, shot with silver threads, falling back from her beautiful head, one hand gathering together its voluminous, shimmering folds, and the other playing with the silken top-knot on the uplifted head of her poodle, she was a figure of radiant picturesqueness. She seemed to be a sort of extemporized tableau ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... traverse our little literature and benefit no one greatly; for the poet is only benefited by the man who approaches him with affection and from his own standpoint; the other he does not understand, and the public will, likely enough, pass with you through this unravelling of the thousand threads, and believe they are growing; but no man or woman who is sound and good lays down a criticism of this nature ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... those vignettes of Marseilles which obviously were used as the background of The Arrow of Gold. This record is one of those quiet friendly books that flatter the devotee by a sense of peculiar intimacy with his hero. It is also engagingly characteristic. Mr. CONRAD here unravels the fine threads of his personal history and philosophy with the same artful reserve and exquisite elaboration with which he evolves the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... possible knowledge, the problem of physical science would be already half solved. But the question to which the scientific explorer has often to address himself is, not merely whether he is able to solve this or that problem; but whether he can so far unravel the tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal, as to weave them into a definite problem at all ... If his eye seem dim, he must look steadfastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreathe themselves into definite forms. If his ear seem dull, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... would be for her to put in an appearance and add to the already deafening hurly-burly, quietly secreted herself in a lilac-bush, and listened to what was going on. She began to laugh as the aeronaut unwound his imaginative threads; then she grew angry with him for his recklessness; then she laughed again at the astounding coolness of the man, and the skilful manner in which he avoided all difficulties in his path. Finally, at the end of what seemed to her an eternity ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... In the simplest form of reproduction, one cell cutting itself in two to make two new ones, known as mitosis, the change begins in the nucleus, or kernel. This kernel splits itself up into a series of threads or loops, known as the chromosomes, half of which go into each of the daughter cells. When, however, sex is born and a male germ-cell unites with a female germ-cell to form a new organism, each cell proceeds, as the first ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... that I wouldn't for the world take any liberties with his little future—it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy. I should only be highly interested in ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... pair of peculiar goat-skin bellows, provided with wooden nozzles tipped with iron. A catgut bowstring drills for boring holes, and screw-drills for cutting threads, hammers, and an anvil. A rude but ingenious forge is constructed out of a few handfuls of stiff mud, and, building a charcoal fire, they spend the evening in sharpening and tempering drills for ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... was unlimited. If her worst enemy were in pain or sorrow, she would succor him: ready perhaps to take up the threads of her resentment again, as soon as his sufferings were alleviated; but a very Samaritan of good offices as long as he needed them. Caesar, so well understood this trait in her, that in their matrimonial disputes, which, it must be confessed, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... individuals. In the few cases where forgery wasn't adequate, my mysterious X had apparently hired himself to do the job. X himself had the permanent job of Assistant Engineering Designer. One by one the untangled threads ran to this office. He also had a secretary whose "illnesses" coincided with her employment ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... she wrote her brother: "This new and sorrowful reminder of the brittleness of life's threads should soften all our expressions to each other in our home circles and open our lips to speak only words of tenderness and approbation. We are so wont to utter criticisms and to keep silence about the things ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... women, when suddenly, as by the opening of a door, one realizes the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which the details are beginning to be arranged. That hour in which a woman must consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single one that shall cord her to a mate ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... most competent minister, Sully. But the useful reign of Henry IV. was cut short by the dagger of an assassin, Ravaillac (1610). For fifteen years confusion prevailed in France, and a contest of factions, until Richelieu took up the threads of policy which had ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... scenes of the forest are interwoven like threads of purple and crimson with the pleasant homespun of colonial story; and, ere the reader has ceased to smile over the antics, adventures and sports of the odd specimens of early Yankee character that fill the foreground, he is charmed into silence by the poetic ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Duaterra's head wife employed in weaving. The mat on which she was engaged was one of an open texture, and "she performed her work," says the author, "with wooden pegs stuck in the ground at equal distances from each other, to which having tied the threads that formed the woof, she took up six threads with the two composing the warp, knotting them carefully together." "It was astonishing," he says, "with what dexterity and quickness she handled the threads, and how well executed was her performance." He was assured that another ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik |
