"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... literary history of such a collection is difficult indeed, for it has drawn upon all civilizations and all literatures. But since Hammer-Purgstall and De Sacy began to unwind the skein, many additional turns have been given. The idea of the "frame" in general comes undoubtedly from India; and such stories as 'The Barber's Fifth Brother,' 'The Prince and the Afrit's Mistress,' have been ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a skein of yarn for Aunt Lois; and she went on winding in silence, putting the ball ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... They delight in playing ill-natured pranks upon us. Not content with spinning and measuring and cutting the threads of our lives to suit themselves, they must also tangle the skein, causing us to cut ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Henry James alone, who unravels for us the tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and others stood near the table, and at irregular distances, as though they never enjoyed that cozy fraternity so desirable in well- conditioned seats. Books, too, lay about in little zigzag heaps; while a bunch of keys, a pair of lady's gloves, and a skein of coloured wool lay huddled together on the centre of the sideboard. The whole arrangement, or rather disarrangement, of the room bespoke, on the part of the presiding female management, an indifference to those minor details of order and comfort a due attention to which makes home ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... prairie trail when the wheels begin to bite through the sod, and sink into ruts, a new track is made beside the old—there is plenty of room; and in turn another and another, spreading wide on each side, crossing and interweaving like a tangled skein of black cotton flung down ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Drumraitte (1237), "not to shoot but to come to a close fight." It is possible, however, that this order may have reference to the old Irish weapon, the javelin or dart. The pike, the battle-axe, the sword, and skein, or dagger, both parties had in common, though their construction was different. The favourite tactique, on both sides, seems to have been the old military expedient of outflanking an enemy, and attacking him simultaneously in front and rear. Thus, in the year 1225, in one ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... reflection. She felt she must obey the Higher Power which was thus demanding of her that she should effect the disclosure of some terrible secret, and she felt, too, as though she could not draw back out of the tangled skein into which she had run without any conscious effort of will. Suddenly making up her mind, she replied with dignity, "God will give me firmness and self-command, Bring Brusson here; I ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a good creature!" exclaimed Louis, in his energy letting fall one end of a skein of silk he was holding. He gathered it up, apologized, and resumed his defence of ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of a different order, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... wind, djannion (my soul.) Hope, for lovers, is a skein of worsted—endless. In cool blood, you do not even trust your eyes; but fall in love, and you will believe in ghosts. I think that Seltanetta would hope that you could ride to her from your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... with a special emphasis of concentration the beginning, rise, full passage, falling away, and dying of all the footfalls. By day, by night, winter and summer and winter again. Unravelling the skein of footfalls passing up and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the parallel, were we permitted; but for that it is too soon, or perhaps it is too late. Here, for Lorne and for his country, we lose the thread of destiny. The shuttles fly, weaving the will of the nations, with a skein for ever dipped again; and he goes forth to his share in the task among those by whose hand and direction the pattern and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it was ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... another touch of blue in your trimming, my dear.' Having addressed the last remark to her fair client, Miss Wren proceeded to snip at some blue fragments that lay before her, among fragments of all colours, and to thread a needle from a skein ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... it, the more was she confused by the mixture of the first and third person; the substitution of the 'i' for the 'T. I.;' and the transition from the 'I. T.' to the 'You.' The writing looked like a skein of thread in a tangle, and the note was ingeniously folded into a perfect square, with the direction squeezed up into the right-hand corner, as if it were ashamed of itself. The back of the epistle was ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... not easily discern an Interruption, within a sensible space, they may exhibit a Colour; as we see, that though a Slenderest Thrid of Dy'd Silk do's, whilst look'd on Single, seem almost quite Devoyd of Redness, (for instance) yet when numbers of these Thrids are brought together into one Skein, their Colour ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... writer can surpass Mr. Crawford in the construction of a complicated plot and the skilful unravelling of the tangled skein."—Chicago Record-Herald. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... feared the loss of employment through its means, that they pelted him with stones and had nearly killed him. He nevertheless went on inventing, and next produced a machine for weaving flowered silks, with a contrivance for giving a dressing to the thread, so as to render that of each bobbin or skein of ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the course of the fibres, and the grouping and distribution of the fascia, made the following remark: "It is the fact that the study, however patient, minute, and thorough it might be, of this nerve-skein can never enable us to know what a state of consciousness is, if we do not know it otherwise; for never across the field of the microscope is there seen to pass a memory, an emotion, or an act of volition." And, he added, "he who confines himself to peering into these material structures remains ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... gave the clue into Ambler Jevons' hands he would, I knew, quickly follow it, gathering up the threads of the tangled skein one by one, until he could openly charge her with the crime. I stood undecided how to act. Should I leave my friend to make his own investigations independently and unbiassed, or should I frankly tell him of ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... she assented, with a smile. She kept him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein of converging wires. "Suppose I go ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... could only have given some startling proofs of his energy or of his penetration! But, after all, what had he accomplished? Was the mystery solved? Was his success more than problematical? When one thread is drawn out, the skein is not untangled. This night would undoubtedly decide his future as a detective, so he swore that if he could not conquer his vanity, he would, at least, compel himself to conceal it. Hence, it was in a very modest tone that he said to his companion: "We have done all that we can do ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... and weave, but I cannot see Just how 'tis done, and it puzzles me. For you have no loom In your little room. No silken skein, no spinning-wheel, No ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... good but felt dubersome about it. But knowin' I'd clung to Duty's apron strings I felt like leavin' the event. And when Miss Meechim come in I wuz settin' calm and serene in a big chair windin' some clouded blue and white yarn, Aronette holdin' the skein. I'd brung along a lot of woollen yarn to knit Josiah some socks on the way, to ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... subject of this remark, who had taken a seat on the other side of the fire, and, smiling vacantly, was making puzzles on his fingers with a skein ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... clear what Campanella meant, except in cases where the text itself is corrupt. But it may sometimes be doubted whether Michael Angelo could himself have done more than indicate the general drift of his thought, or have disengaged his own conception from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form of Campanella's poetry, though often grotesque, is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too many of his compositions in the same state ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... 'My friend, lo, thou hast said all that a wise man might say or do, yea, and an elder than thou;—for from such a sire too thou art sprung, wherefore thou dost even speak wisely. Right easily known is that man's seed, for whom Cronion weaves the skein of luck at bridal and at birth: even as now hath he granted prosperity to Nestor for ever for all his days, that he himself should grow into a smooth old age in his halls, and his sons moreover should be wise and the best of spearsmen. But ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... is a tangled skein to unravel; but, as it happens, I really believe I can throw a little light upon the matter. You say Rona told you that somebody came into her bedroom last night, and presumably hid the pendant ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... be close enough to prevent the dye penetrating to the yarn. This means, of course, when the clouding is to be of white and another colour. If it is to be of two shades of one colour, as a light and medium blue, the skein is first dyed a light blue, and after drying is wound as I have described, and thrown again into the dye-pot, until the unwound portions become the darker blue which we ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... Sit on eggs sursidi. Site sido, situacio. Sitting (of assembly) kunsido. Situation situacio, sido. Situation (post) oficio. Six ses. Sixteen dek-ses. Sixty sesdek. Size grandeco. Size (of a book) formato. Size glueto. Skate gliti. Skates glitiloj. Skein fadenaro. Skeleton skeleto. Sketch skizi. Sketch skizo. Skewer trapikileto. Skid malakcelo. Skiff boateto. Skilful lerta. Skill lerteco. Skilled lerta. Skim sensxauxmigi. Skimmer ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... hill in that quarter a slender stream rushing impetuously joins the brook of the Rhyadr, like the rill of the northern glen. The principal object of the whole is of course the Rhyadr. What shall I liken it to? I scarcely know, unless to an immense skein of silk agitated and disturbed by tempestuous blasts, or to the long tail of a grey courser at furious speed. Through the profusion of long silvery threads or hairs, or what looked such, I could here and there see the black sides of the crag down which ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... cheek for comfort, while she confessed herself. Oh! what a fool she had been. Why, pray, had she been paying all these visits to the farm, and spending all these hours in this young fellow's company? Her quick intelligence unravelled all the doubtful skein. Yearning towards her kindred?—yes, there had been something of that. Recoil from the Bannisdale ways, an angry eagerness to scout them and fly them?—yes, that there had always been in plenty. But she dived deeper ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... copy Theseus, get dame Ariadne to give us a skein, and go into one labyrinth after another, with the certainty of getting out by winding ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... a-cold—Bjoern the justly slain of Brighteyes; yet how could she wed the man who slew her brother? From Ospakar she was divorced by death; from Eric she was divorced by the blood of Bjoern her brother! How might she unravel this tangled skein and float to weal upon this sea of death? All things went amiss! The doom was on her! She had lived to an ill purpose—her love had wrought evil! What availed it to have been born to be fair among women and to have desired that which might not be? And she herself had brought these things ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports with the girls of the village, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... two eldest sons had already chosen their wives; so they took the flax from their mother, and carried it off with them, to have it spun as she had said. But the youngest son was puzzled what to do with his skein, as he knew no girl (never having spoken to any) to whom he could give it to be spun. He wandered hither and thither, asking the girls that he met if they would undertake the task for him, but at the sight of the flax they laughed ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... There lies the mystery!" cried Elfreda, pointing toward the northern end of the campus, where considerable headway had been made in digging what appeared to be the cellar of a house. "But Sherlock will unravel the tangled skein!" ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... too tired, or too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own. There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk for her, or turning over Dore's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... that she stands for any dark corner twosin'. Nothin' like that! All the lights are on full blast, Aunty's right there prominent with her crochet, and on the other side of the table is me and Vee. And I couldn't be behavin' more innocent if I'd been roped to the chair. All I was holdin' was a skein of yarn. Uh-huh! You see, Vee got the knittin' habit last winter, turnin' out stuff for the Belgians, and now she keeps right on; though who she's goin' to wish a pink and white shawl onto in this weather ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine—whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... involved deception; there was always the sting of that fact. Miss Granger was rarely absent for ten minutes together on these occasions; it was only some lucky chance which took her from the room to fetch some Berlin wool, or a forgotten skein of floss silk for the perennial spaniels, and afforded the brother and sister an opportunity for a few hurried words. The model villagers almost faded out of Miss Granger's mind in this agreeable society. She found herself listening to talk ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... indication as to what he would have her do with the life that she had laid at his feet. For, after all, when a woman loves a man, she virtually makes him the ruler of her destiny; she leaves the responsibility of her fate in his hands. For the nonce, Maurice Kynaston held the skein of Vera's life in his grasp; it was for him to do what he pleased with it. Some day, doubtless, he would tell her what she had to do: ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... and darker! Hardly a glimmer Of light comes in at the window-pane; Or is it my eyes are growing dimmer? I cannot disentangle this skein, Nor wind it rightly upon ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... such occasions I would recommend the following method:—First, draw the fowl, reserving the gizzard and liver to be tucked under the wings; truss the fowl with skewers, and tie it to the end of a skein of worsted, which is to be fastened to a nail stuck in the chimney-piece, so that the fowl may dangle rather close to the fire, in order to roast it. Baste the fowl, while it is being roasted, with butter, or some kind of ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... a skein of silk, 'The ravelled sleave of care', usually misinterpreted, the equivocal alternative ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... intellectual serenity, had sometimes disturbed him. The love of such a man was no light thing. It had mingled with his heart's blood, with the very essence of all his being. No death, no annihilation was possible for it. It was a part of himself, woven unchangeably into his life in a glowing skein, the brilliant colors of which could never fade. He looked into the future, golden with the light of such a love, and he saw a vision of perfect happiness, of joy beyond all expression, of deep, calm content, surpassing ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drifts the fallen skein Of some tired spider, looped and blown, As fragile as a strand of rain, Across the air, and upward thrown By breaths of hayfields newly mown— So glimmering it is and fine, I doubt ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... of innumerable beams of every hue in intimate association. Every shade of red, of yellow, of blue, and of green, can be found in a sunbeam. The magician's wand, with which we strike the sunbeam and sort the tangled skein into perfect order, is the simple instrument known as the glass prism. We have represented this instrument in its simplest form in the adjoining figure (Fig. 17). It is a piece of pure and homogeneous glass in the shape of a wedge. When a ray of light from the sun or from any source falls upon ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... called off by Miss Smith desiring me to hold a skein of thread: while she was winding it, she talked to me from time to time, asking whether I had ever been at school before, whether I could mark, stitch, knit, &c.; till she dismissed me, I could not pursue my observations on Miss Scatcherd's movements. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to attach to Cecil Rhodes for wishing to present the Boer side of the case. It would, indeed, have been wiser on the part of Mr. Hofmeyr and other Bond leaders to have forgotten the past and given a friendly hand to the one man capable of unravelling the tangled skein of affairs. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... hold the gate long skein When 'tis tangled and askew; Never wanting to compain[A]— This ...
— Funny Little Socks - Being the Fourth Book • Sarah. L. Barrow
... sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in one hand and an awl in the other. This was the beginning of my practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork. From a skein of finely twisted threads of silvery sinews my mother pulled out a single one. With an awl she pierced the buckskin, and skillfully threaded it with the white sinew. Picking up the tiny beads one by one, she strung them with the point of her thread, always twisting ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... people, to "Miss Coventry, Dangerfield Hall"? How my fingers trembled as I untied the thread and unfolded the paper; after all, it was nothing but a packet of worsteds! To be sure, I hadn't ordered any worsteds, but there might possibly be a note to explain; so I shook every skein carefully, and turned the covering inside out, that the document, if there should be one, might not escape my vigilance. How could my presentiments deceive me? Of course there was a note—after all, where was the harm? Captain Lovell had most politely ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... single word. I do all justice to your intentions, sir; but, upon my soul, I cannot help wishing you had conducted yourself with more frankness and less mystery; and I am truly afraid your love of dexterity has been too much for your ingenuity, and that you have suffered matters to run into such a skein of confusion, as you yourself ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... cliff, like bubbles in Gruyere cheese, have been occupied consecutively to the present day. Opposite to Les Eyzies, hanging like a net or skein of black thread to the face of the precipice, is a hotel, part gallery, part cave—l'Auberge du Paradis; and a notice in large capitals invites the visitor to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... with a big lump in her throat. She had not meant to rebel openly, but she had lost her temper, and the words had flashed out. Beatrice's threat alarmed her. Through all the tangled skein of Gwen's character there ran, like a thread of pure gold, the intense passionate love for her father, and the desire to preserve his good opinion. She could not bear to see the grieved look that came into his eyes when he was forced to reprove her. What ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... whereas a black sail was always carried by the ship that bore these victims to their death, he would, if he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, as he hoped to do, hoist a white one when coming home. When he reached Crete, he won the heart of Minos' daughter Ariadne, who gave him a skein of thread: by unwinding this as he went he would leave a clue behind him, by which he could find his way out of the labyrinth, after killing the monster. When this was done, by his great skill and strength, he took ship again, and Ariadne came with him; but he grew tired ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and still the rapture Woven through the tangled skein, And the joys we still shall capture At the turning of ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... composed of a square frame with two vertical uprights and a horizontal bar. In its anterior portion was a cylinder, furnished with cables, which held back a great beam bearing a spoon for the reception of projectiles; its base was caught in a skein of twisted thread, and when the ropes were let go it sprang up and struck against the bar, which, checking it with a ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... on,—the hollow scheming Hypocrites, or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... every day, Dies to gray. There are knots in every skein. Hours of work and hours of play Fade away Into one immense Inane. Shadow and substance, chaff and grain, Are as vain As the foam or as the spray. Life goes crooning, faint and fain, One refrain: 'If ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... the spinner!" Straight uprose from her wheel the beautiful Puritan maiden, 885 Pleased with the praise of her thrift from him whose praise was the sweetest, Drew from the reel on the table a snowy skein of her spinning, Thus making answer, meanwhile, to the flattering phrases of Alden: "Come, you must not be idle; if I am a pattern for housewives, Show yourself equally worthy of being the model of husbands. 890 Hold this skein on your hands, while I wind it, ready for ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... yards more would finish, and now I shall have to go down to the village and buy a whole skein, just for that." ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... could almost hear the clatter round the tea-table, the witless jests of the youngsters, the careless laughter of the women, the trivial, merry nonsense that was weaving another hour of happiness into the golden skein of happy hours. Contemptible, of course! Vanity of vanities! But how infinitely precious is even such vanity as this to those ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... religious experiences, he has his axioms, his common-sense formulas, his irreproachable coolness, and, at times, a noisy show of distrust, under which it is easy to see an eager groping after the ends of that great tangled skein of thought within, which is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... be cut into short threads, never more than half the length of the skein. If a long needleful is used, it is not only apt to pull the work, but is very wasteful, as the end of it is liable to become frayed or knotted before it is nearly worked up. If it is necessary to use it double (and for coarse work, such as screen panels on sailcloth, ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... collected into one of her small white hands, those splendid threads whose naturally ardent brightness was doubled in the sunshine. When the pretty lady's-maid pulled a comb of ivory into the midst of the undulating and golden waves of that enormously magnificent skein of silk, one might have said that a thousand sparks of fire darted forth and coruscated away from it in all directions. The sunshine, too, reflected not less golden and fiery rays from numerous clusters of spiral ringlets, which, divided ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... of Baron Snorch filled so large a page in the history of European diplomacy that the publication of his recent memoirs was awaited with profound interest by half the chancelleries of Europe. (Even the other half were half excited over them.) The tangled skein in which the politics of Europe are enveloped was perhaps never better illustrated than in this fascinating volume. Even at the risk of repeating what is already familiar, I offer the following for what it is ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... development of the situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor's first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other's vicinity. After hurrying over the house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... found himself in a veritable thicket of these delicate branches, high above his head, and so interlaced that he could make headway only by slowly and patiently disentangling them, as one would disentangle a skein of silk. It was a fantastic sort of dilemma, and not unpleasing. Except that the Father was in haste to reach his journey's end, he would have enjoyed threading his way through the golden meshes. Suddenly he heard faint notes of singing. He paused,—listened. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the mean street with the so-called woodcarver and his wife? She was a widow, true, but widows of rank do not usually lodge in such humble places for pleasure. Then again, what was the mystery attaching to Irene? Would the tangled skein ever be unravelled? Time ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... little side-bag for pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... on the edges of the tub or vat. These sticks are best made of hickory, but ash or beech or any hard wood that can be worked smooth and which does not swell much when treated with water may be used. The usual method of working is to hang the skein on the stick, spreading it out as much as possible, then immerse the yarn in the liquor, lift it up and down two or three times to fully wet out the yarn, then turn the yarn over on the stick and repeat the dipping processes, then allow to steep in the ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... rang the bell and was admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him. An open piano, a sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant rustle of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion of refined domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the homeless and nomadic Bly. He was still enjoying, in half embarrassment, that vague and indescribable atmosphere of a refined ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of his table in his room in Paris, with its piled sheets of ruled paper, and he felt he wanted nothing in the world except to work. It would not matter what happened to him if he could only have time to weave into designs the tangled skein of music that seethed through him as the blood seethed ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... advanced, but rather slowly; in some cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said Cleopatra, smiling her slow smile. "Has the golden skein of stars got tangled, my astronomer? or dost thou plan some new feat of magic? Say what is it that thou dost so poorly grace our feast? Nay, now, did I not know, having made inquiry, that things so low as we poor women ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... does it so imperceptibly that I don't think I shall mind much. She is the sort of woman who knows how to rule well. In fact, I rather like it, for she winds one round her finger as softly and prettily as a skein of silk, and makes you feel as if she was doing you a ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... falling ill. By all the rules of British sentiment, this ought to have brought about a headlong reconciliation at the tumbled bedside. It did nothing of the sort; it merely wove fresh perplexities into the tangled skein of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... vast hopes, but weak in deeds, I lift my heart and pray, That where the tangled skein of creeds Excludes ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... none of that strange heart-shaking ecstasy that had transfigured other deaths like his; he had none of the ready wit that Campion had showed. He saw nothing but the clear October sky above him, cut by the roofs fringed with heads (a skein of birds passed slowly over it as he raised his eyes); and, beneath, that irreckonable pavement of heads, motionless now as a cornfield in a still evening, one glimpse of the river—the river, he remembered even at this instant, ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... No smile? Is all forgot? Then spin my shroud out of that golden skein Thou callst thy tresses! I shall stay thee not— My struggles were ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... cords of silk the whirling spoles reveal, If smiling Fortune turn the giddy wheel; But if sweet Love with baby-fingers twines, 130 And wets with dewy lips the lengthening lines, Skein after skein celestial tints unfold, And all the silken tissue ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... the tiling with all manner of orange and rusty-coloured lichens; yet the whole place was admirably spick and span, free of litter. Many cats, as Dickie noted, meditated in sunny corners, or prowled in the open with truly official composure. Over all stretched a square of bluest sky, crossed by a skein of homeward-wending rooks. While above the roofs, on either side the archway, the high-lying lands of the park showed up, broken, here and there, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... new leader, whom he christened King of Clubs on the spot. Dolly made the stranger one of them at once by talking bad German, as an offset to his bad English, called him Professor in spite of all denials, and unconsciously symbolized his future bondage by giving him a tangled skein to hold for the furtherance of her mother's ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... surprised her. After she had written it, it had seemed remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"—as Theophile Gautier would have called it—besides devoid of human interest. But Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer had succeeded surprisingly well. What boreal epic had he read ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of that, Hal, an thou lovest me," said Pleydell. "But we must have some news from the land of Egypt, if possible. Oh, if I had but hold of the slightest thread of this complicated skein, you should see how I would unravel it!—I would work the truth out of your Bohemian, as the French call them, better than a Monitoire, or a Plainte de Tournelle; I know how ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me," Hadria continued, "and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the seine was being contracted and drawn into the boat, where it was laid up like some gigantic brown skein, the men who were gathering it in shaking out the sea-weed and small fish that had enmeshed themselves and had forced their unfortunate heads in beyond ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... in this country for specifying the size of silk is based on the weight in drams (avoirdupois) of a skein containing 1000 yards. A skein, thus weighing 5 drams, is technically called 5-dram silk. The number of yards of 1-dram silk to a pound must accordingly be 256000. The formulas for figuring the amount of silk required for a piece ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... her Precious Toy, And I 'll rejoice to see her joy: Her bauble 's only one degree Less frail, less fugitive than we, For time, ere long, will snap the skein, And scatter ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... awoke, she related all the particulars of her ill-omened vision to her husband; and the latter, after a short pause, informed her and his friend that a terrible calamity was about to befall them. He then drew from his travelling wallet a skein of thread. This he divided into three parts, one for each, and told his companions that in case of grievous bodily injury, the bit of thread wound round the wounded part would instantly make it whole. After which he taught them the Mantra,[FN158] or mystical word by which ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... binoculars obediently and scanned the west and north. His eyes traversed skein after skein of the brilliant colorful patternings, but he was unable to find a very closely netted region. He was about to announce his discovery to Caradoc when his lense focussed on another grim menace almost ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... one passionate inclination to rebel, her courage fails her, and she gives in, and taking the tangled skein of wool (that reminds her in a vague, sorrowful fashion of her own hapless love story) between her slender ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... specks are in continual movement. The young Spiders never cease shifting their position on the web. Many let themselves drop, hanging by a length of thread, which the faller's weight draws from the spinnerets. Then quickly they climb up again by the same thread, which they wind gradually into a skein and lengthen by successive falls. Others confine themselves to running about the web and also give me the impression of working at a ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... and silver white propriety. There was the old lady who did nothing but knit. She had arrived in a fly, knitting. She was knitting now, between the courses. When she caught sight of the Lucys she smiled at them over her knitting. They had found her, before dinner, with her feet entangled in a skein of worsted. Jane had ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... which had woven this smooth and finished texture out of the ravelled skein was naturally the first impression that I felt, on handing the manuscript back to Ezra Jennings. He modestly interrupted the first few words in which my sense of surprise expressed itself, by asking me if the conclusion which he had drawn ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Germany possesses a special talent for adding new complications to a difficult situation, so as to render it impossible of solution. He has now so completely tangled up the parliamentary skein, that in a little while it will be impossible for Parliament to govern. Can one conceive of a majority of the Chamber rallying around the Catholic centre, or the socialists, for the same reason, increasing in number at the bye-elections? In such ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her woman's brain, were tangled like a skein ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... wish you could have seen the eggs and the great dishes of meat. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any, and had no night-sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... brow crowned in Jehovah's despite—the story of the mighty prophet Elisha, fettered to earth by wrath and scorn till, at his own command, the music swelled, and his enfranchised spirit rose on its viewless wings to behold the veiled Future already woven from the tangled skein of the troubled Present—the thousand-fold story of music's magic and mystery, stretches back into the forgotten Past, and onward into the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... it did. This new wire (only one-eight of an inch thick—thinner, that is, than the first wire, on which Mr. Farrington had crossed) was two hundred miles long, and it had to perform the journey many hundred times before the first 'skein' was complete. Thus you will see that a single 'skein' stretched from shore to shore, consisting of nearly three hundred separate threads. These were bound tightly together at frequent intervals, and when a bunch of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... is complicated by the fact that half of it was at the time alleged to have been placed in Paris, but it appears, as far as one can disentangle fact from the twisted skein of the report, that the Paris placing must have resulted much as did the first effort made in London, and that practically the whole of the bonds there issued came back into the hands of ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... something about Friar's Oak, and about the life that we led there. Now that my memory goes back to the old place it would gladly linger, for every thread which I draw from the skein of the past brings out half a dozen others that were entangled with it. I was in two minds when I began whether I had enough in me to make a book of, and now I know that I could write one about Friar's Oak alone, and the folk whom I knew ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for a welcome for unwished-for babies, standing beside tiny graves, receiving pathetic confidences from wretched fathers and helpless mothers, without facing every problem of this workaday world; they cannot all be solved, even by the wisest of us; we can only seize the end of the skein nearest to our hand, and patiently endeavor to straighten ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... fulfilling its pre-ordered fate—no wandering from its orbit—no variation in its seasons—and yet imagine that the Arch-ordainer will hold back the tides He has sent from their unseen source, at our miserable bidding? Shall we think that our prayers can avert a doom woven with the skein of events? To change a particle of our fate, might change the destiny of millions! Shall the link forsake the chain, and yet the chain be unbroken? Away, then, with our vague repinings, and our blind demands. All must walk onward to their goal, be he the wisest who looks not one step behind. The ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... snipping a skein of silk with my scissors. "I offered them to please myself: I felt she did me ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... than any one else. Hanging to her neck by a skein of plaited horse-hair was the polished shell of a minute turtle—smaller ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... officer, with colored engravings arranged around its frame; notably, the "Choice of the Betrothed," the "Taking of Kurstrin," and the "Burial of the Cat by the Mice." Near the window sat an old woman in a mantilla, her head wrapped in a handkerchief. She was winding a skein of thread held on the separated hands of a little old man, blind of one eye, who ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... my mind And rolls into a ball of golden silk— A little skein Of tangled glory; And when I want to get it out again To weave the pattern of a verse or story, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... he spoke at Jacob: "Perished you are now, Shacob. You have unraveled the tangled skein of eternal life. Pray I do you will find rest with the restless of big London. Annie and Jane fach, sorrowful you are; wet are your tears. Go you and drink a nice cup of tea in the cafe. Most eloquent I shall be in a minute ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... humanity has this Spaniard! A man, not a professor of academic methods. He has no school, and he is a school in himself. That the more serene, poetic aspects and readings of life have escaped him is merely to say that he is not constituted a contemplative philosopher. The sinister skein to be seen in some of his canvases does not argue the existence of a spiritual bias but is the recognition of evil in life. It is not very pleasant, nor is it reassuring, but it is part of the artist, rooted deep in his Spanish soul ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... have reduced me to silence because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take this skein of wool. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... world, broken into a hundred sharp mountain ridges which seemed to cut the sky, because between the high peaks and the tangled skein of far-away villages surged foaming seas of cloud, which appeared to separate high, bright peaks from shadowed vales, by incredible distances. As far as the eye could travel with utmost straining, away to the dark, imposing background ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... he first washed in a solution of potash, and then with water, and after drying dipped them in the acids. The acid mixture used consisted of 3 parts by weight of sulphuric to 1 part of nitric acid, and were prepared some time before use. The cotton was dipped one skein at a time, stirred for a few minutes, pressed out, steeped, and excess of acid removed by washing with water, then with dilute potash, and finally with water. Von Lenk's process was used in England at Faversham (Messrs Hall's Works), but ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... which resulted pleased the citizen-fancy; the notion of "evolution succeeded to that of revolution"; one said civilization, progress, culture, instead of liberty. "Louis Philippe realized the citizen ideal.... The problem was solved, the skein untangled. God might rest.... The supernatural was not believed, but it was explained and respected. One did not accept Christ as divine, but a human Christ was exalted to the stars; religion was spoken of with earnestness, and the ministers of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... mound of gray yarn, uncut skein after uncut skein of it, rose off the brocade divan, more of them piled in systematic pyramids on three chairs. She dropped at sight of it to the floor beside the couch, burying her face in its fluff, grasping it in handfuls, writhing into it. Surges of merciful sobs ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... prayers were not to be answered. Had he known at the moment how deeply the two of them were to be enmeshed in the skein of Europe's destiny he would have risen and faced the anger of his host, or, risking detection, incontinently fled. But Marishka's hand clasped his own, and lucklessly, ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... whisper: "There our cuckoo clock used to hang, and there our father's discharge from the army. And there the hanks of yarn that mother spun used to hang—she could spin even better than Black Marianne—Black Marianne has said so herself. She always got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—not a knot in it. And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling? It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there. If I had been old enough to know then, I would not have let them sell mother's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... open, full of a calm they could not understand, he looked and smiled, his wan face flushing again in that last time. Then, reaching suddenly out, his long white fingers tangled themselves feebly in the golden skein, and with a little loving uplift of the eyes he drew it to his breast. A few seconds he held it so, with an eagerness that told of some sweet and mighty relief come to his soul,—some illumination of grace that had seemed to be struck by the first sunrays ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... was there; he generally sat watching Diana, carrying on a spasmodic and interrupted conversation with Mrs. Starling about farm affairs, and seizing the opportunity of a dropped spool or an unwound skein of yarn to draw near Diana and venture some word to her. Poor Diana felt in those days so much like a person whose earthly ties are all broken, that it did not come into her head in what a different light she ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone steps ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... plain Hannah unrolled one heavy skein, threaded it through their own hoop, and lowered the two ends into the garden, where John stood at attention ready to throw them over the wall. Darsie and Lavender dropped their ends straight into the street, and then chased madly downstairs to join the boys ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale, The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways, As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers, The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots, The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child, The clean-hair'd Yankee girl works ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other, like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light of the fields we traverse—these fields intoxicated with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant landscape, unshaded by ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... thread of what we at present consider abnormal, through the whole skein of a single life, hoping thereby to encourage others ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... let us talk to her, Nils?" one of the lumbermen proposed. "It is a tangled skein, and I don't pretend to say that I can straighten it out. But two men have been killed and one crippled since the little chap was taken away. And in the three years he was with us no untoward thing happened. Now that speaks ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Something then, of very great size, in the form of a human being, jumped down from the trap-door, though the height might be above fourteen feet. This figure was gigantic, being upwards of seven feet high. In its left hand it held a torch, and in its right a skein of fine silk, which unwinding itself as it descended, remained unbroken, though it was easy to conceive it could not have afforded a creature so large any support in his descent from the roof. He alighted with perfect safety and activity upon his feet, and, as if ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... chance to work here," laughed his uncle. "There is variety enough to please you, too. We have throwing mills; a place where we dye silk in the skein; a winding and weaving plant; another plant for dyeing goods in the piece; and a big printing and finishing plant. If you do not find something to suit you by the time you have worked through all these it ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett |
