"Hurdy-gurdy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mischievous young blackguards!' and began rubbing it with the cuff of his coat, his cheek still wet with tears. For even our grief is volatile; or, rather, it is two tunes that are in our ears together, the requiem of the organ, and, with it, the faint hurdy-gurdy jig of our vulgar daily life; and now and then ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... parts of conversation," and sweetly "prattling out of fashion," make very pretty music from a beautiful face and a female tongue; but from a rough manly voice and coarse features mere nonsense is as harsh and dissonant as a jig from a hurdy-gurdy. The Swearers I have spoken of in a former paper; but the Half-Swearers, who split and mince, and fritter their oaths into "gad's but," "ad's fish," and "demme," the Gothic Humbuggers, and those who nickname God's creatures, and call a man a cabbage, a crab, a queer cub, an odd fish, and ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... The Teuton tootler, being tipped, is "sloping," Patting his pocket with a smile complacent. The Gallic blower, for like treatment hoping, Grins at the Portuguese who grinds adjacent. What a charivari! Oh, I must stop it! I say, you rascal with the hurdy-gurdy, More than enough of that vile shindy; drop it! And you, my brazen, blatant, would-be VERDI, Hush that confounded horn, or go and blow it At—Jericho. My walls you will not tumble By windy shindy, and you ought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... despair of failure in a mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin. The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons—beheld for the first time by many of these fortune-seekers—lured them on step by step, until many of them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus produced was fatal to all attempts at ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... laugh and make laugh, though always with a secret kindness and tenderness, to perform the drollest little antics and capers, but always with a certain grace, and to sweet music—as you may have seen a Savoyard boy abroad, with a hurdy-gurdy and a monkey, turning over head and heels, or clattering and piroueting in a pair of wooden shoes, yet always with a look of love and appeal in his bright eyes, and a smile that asks and wins affection and protection. Happy they who have that sweet gift ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... experience— Strange union! and directs the optic glass Not unresponsive to Jemima's charms, Who wheels obdurate, in his mimic chaise Perambulant, the child. The gouty cit, Asthmatical, with elevated cane Pursues the unregarding tram, as one Who, having heard a hurdy-gurdy, girds His loins and hunts the hurdy-gurdy-man, Blaspheming. Now the clangorous bell proclaims The Times or Chronicle, and Rauca screams The latest horrid murder in the ear Of nervous dons expectant of the urn And mild domestic muffin. To the Parks ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the twelfth century. It presents first on the left a king who plays a three-stringed gamba, which he holds between his knees, like a violoncello. A woman performer handles an organistrum, a sort of large hurdy-gurdy, sometimes (as apparently in this case) requiring two players, one for the crank and another for the stops. Then comes a man with a pandean pipe, next another with a semicircular harp and then one with a portable organ. Next comes a performer ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... the shade kept the vicinity somewhat depeopled. This quarter of the town was a ragged edge; its denizens the bubbling froth of five nations; its architecture tent, /jacal/, and 'dobe; its distractions the hurdy-gurdy and the informal contribution to the sudden stranger's store of experience. Beyond this dishonourable fringe upon the old town's jowl rose a dense mass of trees, surmounting and filling a little hollow. Through this bickered a small stream that perished down the sheer and disconcerting ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry |
